Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 19 March 2010
Several people have asked me over the past few months when I’m going to outrage the readers of Tribune by publishing a list of the constituencies where Labour supporters should vote Liberal Democrat at the next general election to keep out a Tory. That’s what I did in 2001 and again in 2005 – and I’ve never found a better way of filling the letters page with indignation and bile.
I regret nothing, but this time it’s different. It’s not that I no longer believe tactical voting against the Tories. If I had a Lib Dem MP and the Tory was in second place last time with Labour way behind in third, I’d almost certainly vote Lib Dem on May 6 (or whenever it is). I’d probably vote Lib Dem if I lived somewhere with a Tory MP where the Lib Dem came second last time, too.
It’s just that I can’t be bothered to make a big thing of it, let alone spend hours putting together a list, because, well, it doesn’t really matter in the same way now. In 2001 and 2005, the general election results were never in doubt: everyone knew Labour was going to emerge with comfortable Commons majorities as long as it got the vote out. But in both elections anti-Tory tactical voting appeared to be a serious opportunity to do major damage to the Tories – and doing damage to the Tories has been the most honourable cause in British politics for three centuries.
In 2001, there was an outside but genuine chance that, with a good showing for the Lib Dems in parts of rural England where Labour trailed badly, the Tories could be reduced to the status of third party nationally. It didn’t happen, but there wasn’t a lot in it, and, boy, was it worth dreaming.
In 2005, the picture was different. But even in 2005 there were many Tories who appeared vulnerable to anti-Tory tactical voting, among them Michael Howard in Folkestone (if Labour supporters from 2001 voted Lib Dem) and, lest we forget, David Cameron in Witney (if Lib Dems from 2001 voted Labour).
All right, defenestration of the likes of Howard and Cameron was always wishful thinking. The point is that 2001 and 2005 were both elections in which anti-Tory tactical voting was a potentially destructive offensive weapon. This time it isn’t. The Tories are now on the march, and in nearly every part of the country the priority for Labour and for the Lib Dems is to hold on to as much as they can of what they’ve got. To complicate the picture, no one quite knows precisely who’s got what. There are significant boundary changes, and the number of retiring MPs is unprecedented, largely because of the Commons expenses scandal. Eighty-seven Labour MPs have announced they are quitting, and the whips expect another 10 to go before polling day.
Meanwhile, the Lib Dems have moved to the market-liberal right under Nick Clegg, and are markedly less open to social democratic ideas than they have been for more than 25 years. In local government, they have made opportunistic alliances with the Tories. The prospect of Clegg going into coalition with Cameron is plausible in a way that Charles Kennedy joining William Hague or Howard never was. The battlefield has changed.
This doesn’t mean abjuring anti-Tory tactical voting. The Lib Dems are still (just) of the centre-left, and many of their sitting MPs are much better than the Tories who would inevitably replace them if they lost. The same is true of the brave band of Labour MPs who have decided to fight again rather than walk away.
What of the new candidates, though? Well, they need some research. So far, the Sunday Times has managed a cretinous 1987-style red-scare piece claiming that Labour is selecting dangerous militants. “We found that 53 per cent either declare themselves to be a member of a trade union or have links to leftist groups in the party such as Compass, the Grass Roots Alliance or Save the Labour Party,” the paper declared last weekend. The same day, the Sunday Telegraph made a lot of the role of the Unite trade union in pushing its people into safe seats, though the author, Andrew Gilligan, couldn’t quite work out whether they were being granted a favour or being pensioned off.
The reality as I see it is more mundane: nearly all the Labour candidates so far selected are much what you’d expect in the circumstances – no porn-movie directors, no big-name media academics, lots of clean hands who have earned their chance through years of work in the unions, local government and NGOs, a few retreads. The Lib Dems, with the exception of the porn movie director, are the same: overwhelmingly local government and NGO worthies.
So – same old same old, but different. Tactical voting when you’re on the defensive doesn’t require lists, and the Lib Dems can look after themselves. Labour needs a concerted campaign in seats it holds, with a simple message: “Keep the Tories out: vote Labour”. Anything else is superfluous. It’s backs-against-the-wall time.
19 March 2010
12 March 2010
OBITUARY: MICHAEL FOOT
Paul Anderson, Chartist, May-June 2010
The death of Michael Foot at the age of 96 in early March has been marked by dozens of appreciative obituaries – and a few examples of shameless scandal-mongering – but so far few have had much to say about his long association with Tribune. Even the appreciations published by that paper mentioned it largely in passing, preferring to concentrate on his roles as a politician and as an author of pamphlets and books.
This is quite understandable in some respects. It is primarily as a key player in the 1974-79 Labour government and as Labour leader between 1980 and 1983 that he is remembered by anyone under 60 today, and very few people under the age of 70 have any but a childhood memory of Tribune even at the very end of his second spell as editor in 1960. Just as important, Foot’s lasting legacy is most likely to be his prodigious output between hard covers, in particular his 1957 book on Jonathan Swift, The Pen and the Sword, and his massive biography of Aneurin Bevan, which appeared in two volumes in 1962 and 1973.
But it is worth highlighting his Tribune connection, which lasted from the paper’s foundation in 1937 to his death (with a few gaps while he was otherwise engaged or at odds with an editor). He was hired as a junior journalist when the paper was launched by Sir Stafford Cripps as the organ of his Unity Campaign, a quixotic attempt to forge a united front against fascism and war among the Labour, Communist and Independent Labour parties; one of his colleagues was Barbara Betts (later Barbara Castle), who was having an affair with the paper’s first editor, William Mellor.
Foot resigned from Tribune after 18 months in sympathy with Mellor after Cripps fired the editor for refusing to take a political line much closer to the Communist Party’s than hitherto – and Foot went off to make a reputation in the journalistic mainstream, first as a writer on Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard and then from 1942 as its editor. He gave that up in 1945 after being selected as Labour candidate for Plymouth Devonport – which he won in Labour’s 1945 landslide. Soon after becoming an MP, he took over the political direction of Tribune (which had long since abandoned its sympathies for the CP) from Bevan, who had joined the cabinet, and in 1948 he formally became joint editor with Evelyn Anderson.
They stepped down in 1952, but Foot remained the dominant political voice in Tribune, and in 1955, after losing Devonport, he became sole editor – a post he relinquished in 1960 after being elected as MP for Ebbw Vale as successor to Bevan. He was a contributor (sometimes more than others) for the rest of his life.
It is no disrespect to anyone associated with Tribune since to argue that the Foot years marked the height of its influence in Labour politics in particular and British politics more generally. In the late 1940s, it played a critical role both in the Labour left’s attempt to forge a “third force” foreign policy in 1946-47 in opposition to Ernest Bevin’s Atlanticism and then in turning the left in favour of Bevin’s policy in 1948-49. In the 1950s, it was the organ of the Bevanite movement, one of the most outspoken critics of the Eden government on Suez and a major player in the creation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the cause on which Bevanism foundered. A lot of that was down to Foot. He wasn’t the only great British left-wing editor of the 20th century – but he was certainly one of the greatest.
The death of Michael Foot at the age of 96 in early March has been marked by dozens of appreciative obituaries – and a few examples of shameless scandal-mongering – but so far few have had much to say about his long association with Tribune. Even the appreciations published by that paper mentioned it largely in passing, preferring to concentrate on his roles as a politician and as an author of pamphlets and books.
This is quite understandable in some respects. It is primarily as a key player in the 1974-79 Labour government and as Labour leader between 1980 and 1983 that he is remembered by anyone under 60 today, and very few people under the age of 70 have any but a childhood memory of Tribune even at the very end of his second spell as editor in 1960. Just as important, Foot’s lasting legacy is most likely to be his prodigious output between hard covers, in particular his 1957 book on Jonathan Swift, The Pen and the Sword, and his massive biography of Aneurin Bevan, which appeared in two volumes in 1962 and 1973.
But it is worth highlighting his Tribune connection, which lasted from the paper’s foundation in 1937 to his death (with a few gaps while he was otherwise engaged or at odds with an editor). He was hired as a junior journalist when the paper was launched by Sir Stafford Cripps as the organ of his Unity Campaign, a quixotic attempt to forge a united front against fascism and war among the Labour, Communist and Independent Labour parties; one of his colleagues was Barbara Betts (later Barbara Castle), who was having an affair with the paper’s first editor, William Mellor.
Foot resigned from Tribune after 18 months in sympathy with Mellor after Cripps fired the editor for refusing to take a political line much closer to the Communist Party’s than hitherto – and Foot went off to make a reputation in the journalistic mainstream, first as a writer on Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard and then from 1942 as its editor. He gave that up in 1945 after being selected as Labour candidate for Plymouth Devonport – which he won in Labour’s 1945 landslide. Soon after becoming an MP, he took over the political direction of Tribune (which had long since abandoned its sympathies for the CP) from Bevan, who had joined the cabinet, and in 1948 he formally became joint editor with Evelyn Anderson.
They stepped down in 1952, but Foot remained the dominant political voice in Tribune, and in 1955, after losing Devonport, he became sole editor – a post he relinquished in 1960 after being elected as MP for Ebbw Vale as successor to Bevan. He was a contributor (sometimes more than others) for the rest of his life.
It is no disrespect to anyone associated with Tribune since to argue that the Foot years marked the height of its influence in Labour politics in particular and British politics more generally. In the late 1940s, it played a critical role both in the Labour left’s attempt to forge a “third force” foreign policy in 1946-47 in opposition to Ernest Bevin’s Atlanticism and then in turning the left in favour of Bevin’s policy in 1948-49. In the 1950s, it was the organ of the Bevanite movement, one of the most outspoken critics of the Eden government on Suez and a major player in the creation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the cause on which Bevanism foundered. A lot of that was down to Foot. He wasn’t the only great British left-wing editor of the 20th century – but he was certainly one of the greatest.
28 February 2010
OBITUARY: MERVYN JONES
The journalist and novelist Mervyn Jones, who has died at the age of 87, was one of the stalwarts of the British left intellectual scene for nearly half a century. The son of Sigmund Freud’s collaborator and biographer Ernest Jones, he was a member of the Communist Party as a young man but became a Bevanite Labour left-winger in the early 1950s, joining Tribune as a journalist in 1955 and playing a leading role in the paper’s supportive coverage of the first incarnation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He subsequently had a spell as deputy editor on the New Statesman. He continued to contribute to Tribune and the Statesman until well into his 70s.
His novels are little-read today – but in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s they were widely admired. In recent years he was probably best known for his 1989 autobiography Chances (one of the best left memoirs of the 1950s) and his sympathetic 1994 biography of his friend Michael Foot.
I first met him through European Nuclear Disarmament during the 1980s. He was a member of its publications committee, along with several other veterans of the first new left who, like him, had worked for E. P. Thompson on New Reasoner in the late 1950s. We got on well, and over the next decade he was one of my regular writers on Tribune and then the New Statesman (as well as a regular at Tribune and Statesman social events). He always wrote lucidly and was excellent company – and it’s very sad to see him go.
His novels are little-read today – but in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s they were widely admired. In recent years he was probably best known for his 1989 autobiography Chances (one of the best left memoirs of the 1950s) and his sympathetic 1994 biography of his friend Michael Foot.
I first met him through European Nuclear Disarmament during the 1980s. He was a member of its publications committee, along with several other veterans of the first new left who, like him, had worked for E. P. Thompson on New Reasoner in the late 1950s. We got on well, and over the next decade he was one of my regular writers on Tribune and then the New Statesman (as well as a regular at Tribune and Statesman social events). He always wrote lucidly and was excellent company – and it’s very sad to see him go.
17 February 2010
OBITUARY: COLIN WARD
I am sad to hear of the death last week at the age of 85 of the writer Colin Ward. He was Britain's most influential anarchist of the late 20th century, and the monthly journal Anarchy, which he founded and edited from 1961 to 1970, was one of the best political periodicals of its time. He was a prolific author, too: among his books are Anarchy in Action (1973), as eloquent an espousal of Kropotkinian anarchism as has ever been written, and several works on housing, transport and urban planning (his day job in the 1950s was as an architect and he later worked for the Town and Country Planning Association). I got to know him in the 1990s, when he wrote a weekly column for the New Statesman that never failed to surprise in its range of subject matter. He was a regular at Statesman lunches and a great conversationist, and everyone who knew him will miss him.
Update: Boyd Tonkin, with whom I worked on the New Statesman and who knew Colin much better than I did, has a warm appreciation here in the Independent.
Update: Boyd Tonkin, with whom I worked on the New Statesman and who knew Colin much better than I did, has a warm appreciation here in the Independent.
29 January 2010
UP TO A POINT, COMRADE
Paul Anderson, review of Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating by Frank Furedi
(Continuum, £14.99), Tribune, 29 January 2010
Frank Furedi is the leading light of that strange, strange group around the website spiked online and the Institute of Ideas that used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party way back in the 1980s and turned into LM magazine in the 1990s. Starting off as (fairly) orthodox Trotskyists, with a penchant for the Provisional IRA and anti-fascist street-fighting, they have transmogrified into a bunch of media-savvy contrarians whose place on the political spectrum is hard to define.
They’re still very much of the Leninist left in their visceral anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism – and at least to my knowledge they have never disavowed the crazily pro-Serb position they took in the 1990s that led them, notoriously, to claiming that entirely genuine pictures of Bosnian Muslims in a Serb prison camp that had appeared on TV and in newspapers throughout the world were faked. But on GM foods and climate change they’ve taken a line aggressively at odds with the left-environmentalist consensus – and they’ve been pretty-much libertarian on issues of censorship and free speech and on migration. On parenting and education, there’s a strong current of traditionalism in their ideas.
It’s a weird mix that few would swallow wholesale, but at least they’re not afraid to go against the grain – and for the most part they argue their case with some sophistication and verve. Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, is their most prolific writer and thinker and also the most stimulating, particularly on education. As well as writing weekly on spiked online and turning out a hefty book every year or so, he’s a regular in the pages of Times Higher Education, where he has been a trenchant critic of – among other things – the philistine managerialism now dominant in British universities and the dangers inherent in treating students as customers.
His new book, Wasted, had been widely trailed, and my expectation was that it would develop some of the themes he has pursued in THE and elsewhere. It does, up to a point, but it’s essentially about schools, not universities.
Furedi, ever the contrarian, argues that school education is failing because the whole political and educational establishment has lost sight of the primary function of education, which is to transfer humankind’s knowledge and wisdom from generation to generation. Instead of valuing education for its own sake, all the emphasis in contemporary schools is on equipping students for life after they leave school, whether as workers, consumers or citizens.
“Old-fashioned” and “useless” “subjects” are replaced in the curriculum by “relevant” and “useful” “themes”. The authority of the teacher is relentlessly reduced as his or her role becomes that of “child-centred” therapist and agent of socialisation rather than imparter of knowledge. Children’s respect for teachers is undermined, discipline breaks down, parents start panicking about the standard of schools, there’s more and more pressure to teach to the test … and so government comes up with fresh initiatives that unintentionally further dilute the intellectual rigour of schooling.
There is a lot of sense here, and anyone who teaches “traditional” subjects at A-level or lectures at a university will recognise the phenomenon of students who are exemplary in their work-related personal skills (punctual, polite, neat CV), conscientious in their environmentalism and tolerance of diversity, sensible in their eating, drinking and non-smoking – but also utterly uninterested in intellectual debate and incapable of seeing the point of simply knowing more. Furedi makes his case well, though the book lacks empirical back-up and is too long. Inside this volume is a thinner extended essay waiting to get out.
(Continuum, £14.99), Tribune, 29 January 2010
Frank Furedi is the leading light of that strange, strange group around the website spiked online and the Institute of Ideas that used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party way back in the 1980s and turned into LM magazine in the 1990s. Starting off as (fairly) orthodox Trotskyists, with a penchant for the Provisional IRA and anti-fascist street-fighting, they have transmogrified into a bunch of media-savvy contrarians whose place on the political spectrum is hard to define.
They’re still very much of the Leninist left in their visceral anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism – and at least to my knowledge they have never disavowed the crazily pro-Serb position they took in the 1990s that led them, notoriously, to claiming that entirely genuine pictures of Bosnian Muslims in a Serb prison camp that had appeared on TV and in newspapers throughout the world were faked. But on GM foods and climate change they’ve taken a line aggressively at odds with the left-environmentalist consensus – and they’ve been pretty-much libertarian on issues of censorship and free speech and on migration. On parenting and education, there’s a strong current of traditionalism in their ideas.
It’s a weird mix that few would swallow wholesale, but at least they’re not afraid to go against the grain – and for the most part they argue their case with some sophistication and verve. Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, is their most prolific writer and thinker and also the most stimulating, particularly on education. As well as writing weekly on spiked online and turning out a hefty book every year or so, he’s a regular in the pages of Times Higher Education, where he has been a trenchant critic of – among other things – the philistine managerialism now dominant in British universities and the dangers inherent in treating students as customers.
His new book, Wasted, had been widely trailed, and my expectation was that it would develop some of the themes he has pursued in THE and elsewhere. It does, up to a point, but it’s essentially about schools, not universities.
Furedi, ever the contrarian, argues that school education is failing because the whole political and educational establishment has lost sight of the primary function of education, which is to transfer humankind’s knowledge and wisdom from generation to generation. Instead of valuing education for its own sake, all the emphasis in contemporary schools is on equipping students for life after they leave school, whether as workers, consumers or citizens.
“Old-fashioned” and “useless” “subjects” are replaced in the curriculum by “relevant” and “useful” “themes”. The authority of the teacher is relentlessly reduced as his or her role becomes that of “child-centred” therapist and agent of socialisation rather than imparter of knowledge. Children’s respect for teachers is undermined, discipline breaks down, parents start panicking about the standard of schools, there’s more and more pressure to teach to the test … and so government comes up with fresh initiatives that unintentionally further dilute the intellectual rigour of schooling.
There is a lot of sense here, and anyone who teaches “traditional” subjects at A-level or lectures at a university will recognise the phenomenon of students who are exemplary in their work-related personal skills (punctual, polite, neat CV), conscientious in their environmentalism and tolerance of diversity, sensible in their eating, drinking and non-smoking – but also utterly uninterested in intellectual debate and incapable of seeing the point of simply knowing more. Furedi makes his case well, though the book lacks empirical back-up and is too long. Inside this volume is a thinner extended essay waiting to get out.
22 January 2010
IT’S TOO LATE FOR LABOUR TO GO FOR ELECTORAL REFORM
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 22 January 2010
Reforming the voting system is an anorak thing most of the time – but every now and again it breaks out of the closet, as it has in the past few months.
A year ago, electoral reform was barely on the agenda. Labour had won three elections in a row promising a referendum on the way we vote for MPs, and in government it had introduced different versions of proportional representation for elections to the European Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the London Assembly. Roy Jenkins had laboured mightily during Labour’s first term to produce a report recommending a more proportional system for electing the Commons, published in 1998. But the promised referendum on the Commons voting system had not happened – and since becoming prime minister Gordon Brown had given no indication of interest in it.
Then, however, came the MPs’ expenses scandal – and suddenly electoral reform once again lurched into view. There were letters in the papers and petitions demanding change. At last autumn’s Labour conference Brown promised a referendum on the voting system to allow voters to choose between the first-past-the-post status quo and the alternative vote (in which you have single member constituencies and mark your ballot paper “1, 2, 3, 4” in order of preference instead of “X”). And last month, Jack Straw, the justice secretary, said the government would legislate before the general election for such a referendum. Cue more letters in the papers and, of course, a backlash against the referendum among Labour MPs – apparently led by Ed Balls, the schools secretary – culminating in a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on Monday that seems to have come to no conclusion whatsoever.
I’ve been an anorak on electoral reform for getting on for 25 years, but I’m afraid I’ve found it a bit difficult to get worked up about it this time round.
On one hand, what’s most likely to be on offer (if anything) is deeply unattractive. A multi-choice referendum with the options of the status quo, the alternative vote and a proportional electoral system would be fine. But a choice between first-past-the-post and AV is not. AV is not a system of proportional representation – and it’s not a step towards PR. Indeed, in many respects it’s worse than first-past-the-post when it comes to reflecting the spread of opinion in the electorate: voting “1, 2, 3, 4” and redistributing preferences means that the least unpopular candidate wins in every constituency. Big deal!
On the other hand, it’s a bit late for Labour to be changing the voting system. Yes, it’s a matter of democratic principle, and yes, I’ve signed the petitions, but legislating for potential change now, with a general election imminent and Labour 10 points behind in the opinion polls, smacks of desperate opportunism.
What ought to have happened is easy enough to spell out. Labour should have agreed in 1994 or 1995 to propose a sweeping new constitutional settlement for the UK in its first term, with proportional representation for Westminster elections integrated with a democratic second chamber based on regional and national devolution – so that, when implemented, we’d have had something like the federal republic of Germany as our political system. Of course, that’s just a bit too neat: there are plenty of things in the German basic law that wouldn’t have worked for Britain, not least because we’ve got three stroppy Bavarias to contend with, hazy boundaries to regional identities in England and a monarchy (at least in stage one) ... but you get my drift.
The idea of a “big package” constitutional revolution was first given traction by Stuart Weir, Anthony Barnett and others who set up Charter 88 in the wake of the 1987 general election. They were dismissed at first by the Labour leadership – Neil Kinnock famously described them as a bunch of “whiners, whingers and wankers” – but Kinnock and others gradually came round. By 1993, a Labour Party commission headed by Raymond Plant had recommended an end to first-past-the-post Westminster elections – and with a democratic Lords and devolution to Scotland and Wales solid Labour policy under John Smith (and John Prescott winning the argument on regional government for England in Labour circles), it looked as if a Labour government just might do the business.
Instead, Smith died, and Tony Blair decided that constitutional questions were a diversion. The focus groups didn’t see them as a priority. Labour rowed back from electoral reform and promised referendums galore on devolution. Lords reform was watered down.
What was left by 1997 was worth having, particularly devolution to Scotland and Wales. But the government lost all momentum on the constitution by 2001– both on Lords reform, which was appallingly fudged and then put out for endless consultation, and on electoral reform, on which nothing happened after Jenkins produced his report. English regionalism breathed its last as a cause (at least for now) after a farcical referendum in the north-east voted no to a regional assembly in 2004.
It is a sorry story of opportunities missed – and it would be great if the government could make amends, just a little, in the next couple of months. But something tells me that this is going to be one for the Labour manifesto after next.
Reforming the voting system is an anorak thing most of the time – but every now and again it breaks out of the closet, as it has in the past few months.
A year ago, electoral reform was barely on the agenda. Labour had won three elections in a row promising a referendum on the way we vote for MPs, and in government it had introduced different versions of proportional representation for elections to the European Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the London Assembly. Roy Jenkins had laboured mightily during Labour’s first term to produce a report recommending a more proportional system for electing the Commons, published in 1998. But the promised referendum on the Commons voting system had not happened – and since becoming prime minister Gordon Brown had given no indication of interest in it.
Then, however, came the MPs’ expenses scandal – and suddenly electoral reform once again lurched into view. There were letters in the papers and petitions demanding change. At last autumn’s Labour conference Brown promised a referendum on the voting system to allow voters to choose between the first-past-the-post status quo and the alternative vote (in which you have single member constituencies and mark your ballot paper “1, 2, 3, 4” in order of preference instead of “X”). And last month, Jack Straw, the justice secretary, said the government would legislate before the general election for such a referendum. Cue more letters in the papers and, of course, a backlash against the referendum among Labour MPs – apparently led by Ed Balls, the schools secretary – culminating in a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on Monday that seems to have come to no conclusion whatsoever.
I’ve been an anorak on electoral reform for getting on for 25 years, but I’m afraid I’ve found it a bit difficult to get worked up about it this time round.
On one hand, what’s most likely to be on offer (if anything) is deeply unattractive. A multi-choice referendum with the options of the status quo, the alternative vote and a proportional electoral system would be fine. But a choice between first-past-the-post and AV is not. AV is not a system of proportional representation – and it’s not a step towards PR. Indeed, in many respects it’s worse than first-past-the-post when it comes to reflecting the spread of opinion in the electorate: voting “1, 2, 3, 4” and redistributing preferences means that the least unpopular candidate wins in every constituency. Big deal!
On the other hand, it’s a bit late for Labour to be changing the voting system. Yes, it’s a matter of democratic principle, and yes, I’ve signed the petitions, but legislating for potential change now, with a general election imminent and Labour 10 points behind in the opinion polls, smacks of desperate opportunism.
What ought to have happened is easy enough to spell out. Labour should have agreed in 1994 or 1995 to propose a sweeping new constitutional settlement for the UK in its first term, with proportional representation for Westminster elections integrated with a democratic second chamber based on regional and national devolution – so that, when implemented, we’d have had something like the federal republic of Germany as our political system. Of course, that’s just a bit too neat: there are plenty of things in the German basic law that wouldn’t have worked for Britain, not least because we’ve got three stroppy Bavarias to contend with, hazy boundaries to regional identities in England and a monarchy (at least in stage one) ... but you get my drift.
The idea of a “big package” constitutional revolution was first given traction by Stuart Weir, Anthony Barnett and others who set up Charter 88 in the wake of the 1987 general election. They were dismissed at first by the Labour leadership – Neil Kinnock famously described them as a bunch of “whiners, whingers and wankers” – but Kinnock and others gradually came round. By 1993, a Labour Party commission headed by Raymond Plant had recommended an end to first-past-the-post Westminster elections – and with a democratic Lords and devolution to Scotland and Wales solid Labour policy under John Smith (and John Prescott winning the argument on regional government for England in Labour circles), it looked as if a Labour government just might do the business.
Instead, Smith died, and Tony Blair decided that constitutional questions were a diversion. The focus groups didn’t see them as a priority. Labour rowed back from electoral reform and promised referendums galore on devolution. Lords reform was watered down.
What was left by 1997 was worth having, particularly devolution to Scotland and Wales. But the government lost all momentum on the constitution by 2001– both on Lords reform, which was appallingly fudged and then put out for endless consultation, and on electoral reform, on which nothing happened after Jenkins produced his report. English regionalism breathed its last as a cause (at least for now) after a farcical referendum in the north-east voted no to a regional assembly in 2004.
It is a sorry story of opportunities missed – and it would be great if the government could make amends, just a little, in the next couple of months. But something tells me that this is going to be one for the Labour manifesto after next.
16 January 2010
LEFT LUGGAGE
Paul Anderson, review of The Left at War by Michael Bérubé (New York University Press, £19.99), Tribune, 15 January 2010
“Whither the left?” books are an acquired taste, but once you’ve got it you can’t help yourself. My bookshelves are groaning with volumes, mostly deservedly long-forgotten, outlining how the left has got it wrong and what it must do next, the oldest of which go back to the French revolutionary era when the idea of a left-right divide in politics first took hold.
Whatever, the past year has not been a great one for the genre – at least in the Anglophone world. In the UK, the great debate, if that’s what it was, on the left’s response to 9/11 and the British government’s decision to join the US in invading Afghanistan and Iraq has become repetitive and boring. And it’s too early for polemical retrospectives on the New Labour years. (Who knows? They might not yet be over.) In the US, nearly all eyes are on Barack Obama, and it’s too soon to know what to think unless you made up your mind before he was elected.
Michael Bérubé, an academic who teaches literature and cultural studies at Penn State University and is that rare thing in the US, a self-confessed social democrat, hasn’t much to say about Obama except that he hopes for the best. But he does have a take on Afghanistan and Iraq (and on Bosnia and Kosova) that goes beyond trotting out the old arguments for and against.
His line is that different parts of the left had (and have) radically different philosophies when it comes to the US and its allies using military force against rogue regimes that oppress their people and harbour or promote terrorists. There’s a “Manichean left” that says all intervention is evil imperialism (Noam Chomsky, John Pilger et al); a “liberal hawk” left – or maybe ex-left – that in the end backs any intervention against such regimes (Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen et al); and a “democratic left” that bases its judgments on evidence and international law, sometimes backing intervention and sometimes not.
Like me, Bérubé supported intervention in the Balkans and in Afghanistan but not in Iraq, and he sees himself as a spokesman for the “democratic left”. But although I’m coming from pretty much the same starting point, I’m not entirely convinced. A lot of what Bérubé says is on the money. His chapter on the “Manichean left” is a competent demolition of Chomsky and of the Leninist and anarchist anti-imperialist hard left, though it is far from comprehensive. He is incisive on the worst excesses of the “liberal hawks”. And his idea that knee-jerk counter-culturalism is an endemic problem on the left is spot-on.
But … well, he doesn’t get any of it quite right and then goes off on a tangent. He over-eggs the case against the war to topple Saddam (without, however, deploying one of the most important anti-intervention arguments, that, if Iraq really did have weapons of mass destruction, it would have been irresponsibly risky taking on Saddam). Then he under-eggs the case for getting rid of Saddam, which was – yes, really – a lot stronger than he claims. And, after that, he brushes aside the argument, made by the anti-war signatories of the Euston Manifesto – remember that! – who said that once the invasion had happened it was stupid to continue wittering about whether it should have taken place in the first place. This isn’t an unprincipled position. In politics you always start from where you are.
The second half of the book is a let-down, all about how marvellous Stuart Hall, the guru of British cultural studies and of Marxism Today from the late 1970s until the 1990s, was and is, and how the left would be OK if only it re-read Hall’s work on Thatcherism and applied it to the present. I am a great admirer of Hall, and I think Bérubé is right to say (a) that there’s no point in fighting the last decade’s battles yet again and (b) that old-style hard leftism is the worst kind of dead-end.
But he could have put it better, and I have a horrible feeling that, in the UK at least, what he warns against is what’s going to be happening on the left for at least five years.
“Whither the left?” books are an acquired taste, but once you’ve got it you can’t help yourself. My bookshelves are groaning with volumes, mostly deservedly long-forgotten, outlining how the left has got it wrong and what it must do next, the oldest of which go back to the French revolutionary era when the idea of a left-right divide in politics first took hold.
Whatever, the past year has not been a great one for the genre – at least in the Anglophone world. In the UK, the great debate, if that’s what it was, on the left’s response to 9/11 and the British government’s decision to join the US in invading Afghanistan and Iraq has become repetitive and boring. And it’s too early for polemical retrospectives on the New Labour years. (Who knows? They might not yet be over.) In the US, nearly all eyes are on Barack Obama, and it’s too soon to know what to think unless you made up your mind before he was elected.
Michael Bérubé, an academic who teaches literature and cultural studies at Penn State University and is that rare thing in the US, a self-confessed social democrat, hasn’t much to say about Obama except that he hopes for the best. But he does have a take on Afghanistan and Iraq (and on Bosnia and Kosova) that goes beyond trotting out the old arguments for and against.
His line is that different parts of the left had (and have) radically different philosophies when it comes to the US and its allies using military force against rogue regimes that oppress their people and harbour or promote terrorists. There’s a “Manichean left” that says all intervention is evil imperialism (Noam Chomsky, John Pilger et al); a “liberal hawk” left – or maybe ex-left – that in the end backs any intervention against such regimes (Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen et al); and a “democratic left” that bases its judgments on evidence and international law, sometimes backing intervention and sometimes not.
Like me, Bérubé supported intervention in the Balkans and in Afghanistan but not in Iraq, and he sees himself as a spokesman for the “democratic left”. But although I’m coming from pretty much the same starting point, I’m not entirely convinced. A lot of what Bérubé says is on the money. His chapter on the “Manichean left” is a competent demolition of Chomsky and of the Leninist and anarchist anti-imperialist hard left, though it is far from comprehensive. He is incisive on the worst excesses of the “liberal hawks”. And his idea that knee-jerk counter-culturalism is an endemic problem on the left is spot-on.
But … well, he doesn’t get any of it quite right and then goes off on a tangent. He over-eggs the case against the war to topple Saddam (without, however, deploying one of the most important anti-intervention arguments, that, if Iraq really did have weapons of mass destruction, it would have been irresponsibly risky taking on Saddam). Then he under-eggs the case for getting rid of Saddam, which was – yes, really – a lot stronger than he claims. And, after that, he brushes aside the argument, made by the anti-war signatories of the Euston Manifesto – remember that! – who said that once the invasion had happened it was stupid to continue wittering about whether it should have taken place in the first place. This isn’t an unprincipled position. In politics you always start from where you are.
The second half of the book is a let-down, all about how marvellous Stuart Hall, the guru of British cultural studies and of Marxism Today from the late 1970s until the 1990s, was and is, and how the left would be OK if only it re-read Hall’s work on Thatcherism and applied it to the present. I am a great admirer of Hall, and I think Bérubé is right to say (a) that there’s no point in fighting the last decade’s battles yet again and (b) that old-style hard leftism is the worst kind of dead-end.
But he could have put it better, and I have a horrible feeling that, in the UK at least, what he warns against is what’s going to be happening on the left for at least five years.
11 January 2010
7 January 2010
HEADLESS CHICKENS SHOOTING THEMSELVES IN THE FOOT - 1,348
On two things, and they are important ones, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt are right. Labour would stand a better chance in the next election if Gordon Brown were not leader. And now – or rather some point in the next month – is realistically the last point at which he can be replaced.
But what a ridiculous way to go about trying to replace him. Because of the Labour leadership’s desire in the early 1990s to make it impossible for an incumbent Labour prime minister to be challenged by disaffected Labour MPs, when the rules for leadership elections were last changed only one means of challenging a leader in government was laid down: a vote in favour of an election by party conference. Even in opposition, the only other way for a leadership election to be triggered is for 20 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party – an extraordinarily high threshold given the leader’s powers of patronage – to nominate a particular candidate.
Of course, if a substantial number of Labour MPs voted no confidence in Brown he would be put in an impossible position and would be forced to resign, thereby creating a vacancy, under which other rules apply. (Essentially, an interim leader would be appointed by the National Executive Committee or the NEC would agree a timetable for a quick leadership contest as it did in 2007.) But six months or less before a general election, it was and is never going to happen, let alone on a secret ballot.
Like it or loath it, the only way that Gordon will go is if he decides to go of his own accord – and there has never been any sign that he has given it any thought. It might once have been possible to dream of persuading him to change his mind by gentle persuasion, but it certainly isn’t now. All Hoon and Hewitt have managed is to diminish Labour’s already vanishingly small electoral chances.
But what a ridiculous way to go about trying to replace him. Because of the Labour leadership’s desire in the early 1990s to make it impossible for an incumbent Labour prime minister to be challenged by disaffected Labour MPs, when the rules for leadership elections were last changed only one means of challenging a leader in government was laid down: a vote in favour of an election by party conference. Even in opposition, the only other way for a leadership election to be triggered is for 20 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party – an extraordinarily high threshold given the leader’s powers of patronage – to nominate a particular candidate.
Of course, if a substantial number of Labour MPs voted no confidence in Brown he would be put in an impossible position and would be forced to resign, thereby creating a vacancy, under which other rules apply. (Essentially, an interim leader would be appointed by the National Executive Committee or the NEC would agree a timetable for a quick leadership contest as it did in 2007.) But six months or less before a general election, it was and is never going to happen, let alone on a secret ballot.
Like it or loath it, the only way that Gordon will go is if he decides to go of his own accord – and there has never been any sign that he has given it any thought. It might once have been possible to dream of persuading him to change his mind by gentle persuasion, but it certainly isn’t now. All Hoon and Hewitt have managed is to diminish Labour’s already vanishingly small electoral chances.
- I missed this from the BBC's Paul Mason, which seems to me to sum up the politics of the moment quite well, though it is schematic.
26 November 2009
INTO THE HOME STRAIGHT
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 27 November 2009
So here we are, with just six months left. The party conferences and the Queen’s Speech have come and gone, and judgment day is looming. There doesn’t have to be a general election before 3 June next year, but just about everyone agrees that it will be on 6 May, the same date as the local elections.
I don’t demur on that – but when it comes to the consensus among the commentariat that the election is a done deal, with Labour set for a drubbing after 13 years in office, I’m not so sure.
Of course, Labour’s polling figures are dire, with only a handful of surveys in the past year suggesting anything less than a safe Tory majority. (That one of them was published last weekend, in the Observer, is not that significant: it could be a rogue.) Gordon Brown has been the least popular prime minister since Chamberlain, as David Cairns put it so memorably, for the best part of 18 months now.
And yet … believe it or not, I’m less pessimistic about the election than I have been for ages. The polls might not have moved towards Labour yet, but my hunch is that they will before very long. For the first time in more than six months – since the MPs’ expenses scandal broke, in fact – the government is beginning once more to look as if it knows what it is doing; and if the economy really is in recovery there seems to me to be at least a half-chance that Labour will begin to claw its way back into contention. The Tories are, with a couple of exceptions, an unattractive shower, and their slash-and-burn approach to public spending is seriously scary.
There was very little in last week’s Queen’s Speech that was particularly attention-grabbing, with the possible exception of the (apparently hastily improvised) promise of better care for old people. But the overall thrust of the government's legislative programme is clear and, if hardly radical, a sign that Labour has not yet run out of steam.
It’s true, as Daniel Finkelstein argued in a column in the Times last week, that the Queen’s Speech will have passed most voters by. But every little helps. Add decisive action on the MPs’ expenses scandal (which is unfortunately by no means guaranteed) and a pre-budget report that makes it clear why the government is right in its economic policy and the Tories are wrong, and it's by no means inconceivable that Labour will enter the new year trailing the Tories by six or seven percentage points in most of the polls.
That would still be hung-parliament territory, with the Tories as the largest party, but it would not be the prospect of impending disaster with which Labour has been living since spring 2008, and with four months to go before polling day there would be everything to play for. With a little bit of luck and an imaginative and radical manifesto – one promising investment in the railways and in energy, thousands of affordable homes, action to control the City, an elected Lords and proportional representation for the Commons – I really do think that Labour could pull off a spectacular comeback.
***
In the meantime, some potentially good news. The cause of libel reform has been around a long time. I remember banging on about it in Tribune in the early 1990s when the New Statesman came close to ruin (John Major had thrown the kitchen sink at it after it published an article saying there was no evidence for a rumour that he was having an affair) and Michael Foot was at it as long ago as the 1950s, when Tribune was almost forced out of business by a ludicrous libel action from Lord Kemsley, then proprietor of the Sunday Times and the Daily Sketch, that went all the way to the House of Lords. Long before that, reforming the libel laws was one of the mainstays of 18th and 19th century radicalism.
But the cause has been given new momentum by a spate of recent cases in which rich foreign nationals have used Britain’s notoriously plaintiff-friendly defamation legislation to silence legitimate criticism.
Earlier this month, the pro-free-speech pressure groups Index on Censorship and PEN published a report recommending major reform to curb “libel tourism” and cap libel damages – and last weekend Jack Straw told the Sunday Times that he agreed, and that he was going to draw up proposals to change the law.
That is a long way short of a rock-solid promise of action, but it is welcome none the less. As long as reformers keep up the pressure, there’s a better chance of decisively transforming our draconian and antiquated libel laws than at any time in living memory.
So here we are, with just six months left. The party conferences and the Queen’s Speech have come and gone, and judgment day is looming. There doesn’t have to be a general election before 3 June next year, but just about everyone agrees that it will be on 6 May, the same date as the local elections.
I don’t demur on that – but when it comes to the consensus among the commentariat that the election is a done deal, with Labour set for a drubbing after 13 years in office, I’m not so sure.
Of course, Labour’s polling figures are dire, with only a handful of surveys in the past year suggesting anything less than a safe Tory majority. (That one of them was published last weekend, in the Observer, is not that significant: it could be a rogue.) Gordon Brown has been the least popular prime minister since Chamberlain, as David Cairns put it so memorably, for the best part of 18 months now.
And yet … believe it or not, I’m less pessimistic about the election than I have been for ages. The polls might not have moved towards Labour yet, but my hunch is that they will before very long. For the first time in more than six months – since the MPs’ expenses scandal broke, in fact – the government is beginning once more to look as if it knows what it is doing; and if the economy really is in recovery there seems to me to be at least a half-chance that Labour will begin to claw its way back into contention. The Tories are, with a couple of exceptions, an unattractive shower, and their slash-and-burn approach to public spending is seriously scary.
There was very little in last week’s Queen’s Speech that was particularly attention-grabbing, with the possible exception of the (apparently hastily improvised) promise of better care for old people. But the overall thrust of the government's legislative programme is clear and, if hardly radical, a sign that Labour has not yet run out of steam.
It’s true, as Daniel Finkelstein argued in a column in the Times last week, that the Queen’s Speech will have passed most voters by. But every little helps. Add decisive action on the MPs’ expenses scandal (which is unfortunately by no means guaranteed) and a pre-budget report that makes it clear why the government is right in its economic policy and the Tories are wrong, and it's by no means inconceivable that Labour will enter the new year trailing the Tories by six or seven percentage points in most of the polls.
That would still be hung-parliament territory, with the Tories as the largest party, but it would not be the prospect of impending disaster with which Labour has been living since spring 2008, and with four months to go before polling day there would be everything to play for. With a little bit of luck and an imaginative and radical manifesto – one promising investment in the railways and in energy, thousands of affordable homes, action to control the City, an elected Lords and proportional representation for the Commons – I really do think that Labour could pull off a spectacular comeback.
***
In the meantime, some potentially good news. The cause of libel reform has been around a long time. I remember banging on about it in Tribune in the early 1990s when the New Statesman came close to ruin (John Major had thrown the kitchen sink at it after it published an article saying there was no evidence for a rumour that he was having an affair) and Michael Foot was at it as long ago as the 1950s, when Tribune was almost forced out of business by a ludicrous libel action from Lord Kemsley, then proprietor of the Sunday Times and the Daily Sketch, that went all the way to the House of Lords. Long before that, reforming the libel laws was one of the mainstays of 18th and 19th century radicalism.
But the cause has been given new momentum by a spate of recent cases in which rich foreign nationals have used Britain’s notoriously plaintiff-friendly defamation legislation to silence legitimate criticism.
Earlier this month, the pro-free-speech pressure groups Index on Censorship and PEN published a report recommending major reform to curb “libel tourism” and cap libel damages – and last weekend Jack Straw told the Sunday Times that he agreed, and that he was going to draw up proposals to change the law.
That is a long way short of a rock-solid promise of action, but it is welcome none the less. As long as reformers keep up the pressure, there’s a better chance of decisively transforming our draconian and antiquated libel laws than at any time in living memory.
31 October 2009
THE SURVEILLANCE STATE IS NOTHING NEW
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 30 October 2009
I meant to write about Christopher Andrew’s authorised centenary history of the security service, MI5, The Defence of the Realm, in my last column – but my copy of the book turned up late because of the postal strikes. And because I’m a busy man and it’s more than 1,000 pages (and that’s not counting the index), I’ve only now finished reading it.
Whatever, it’s still worth a column, because there’s a lot more to it than the first news stories and reviews suggested.
Which is not to knock David Leigh, who made it clear, in a cutting review in the Guardian, that Andrew’s denial of MI5’s plot against Harold Wilson as prime minister is radically at odds with the evidence Andrew himself supplies in the book that senior figures in the security service, most importantly Peter Wright, really did think Wilson was a Soviet stooge and acted to undermine him.
Nor is it to dismiss the critics of The Defence of the Realm who have said that it shamelessly traduces several people who conveniently cannot answer back – notably the late Jack Jones, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union from 1968 to 1976, whom Andrew claims to have been a Soviet agent, largely on the basis of the dubious testimony of the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky.
Andrew’s is an official history – he even joined MI5 in order to write it – and he never misses an opportunity to portray the security service in the most favourable light. He has an unerring eye for headline-inducing allegations, and he reproduces them even when the evidence for their truth is anecdotal.
Nevertheless, The Defence of the Realm is an important and in many ways impressive piece of work, and it would be a mistake to write it off. Andrew has had unprecedented access to the security service archives, and there is a lot he has turned up that is fascinating.
What struck me most forcefully as I read the book was the sheer scale of MI5’s surveillance of what it called “domestic subversion” – otherwise known as the Communist Party of Great Britain and the various revolutionary groups, mainly Trotskyist, to its left.
For more than 40 years after 1945, keeping tabs on the far left was what the security service spent most of its time and energy upon. Although it was originally set up in 1909 as a small secret agency to identify and root out German spies in Britain – revolutionaries were the preserve of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch – during the 1920s the security service found itself increasingly involved in monitoring the activities of members of the Communist Party. The reason was simple: the CP was from its foundation in 1920 loyal to the Soviet regime in Russia and engaged in espionage (or at least some of its members were), and from the mid-1920s the CP was the organisation that most of Britain’s small band of revolutionaries joined.
By the early 1930s, MI5 had taken over Special Branch’s lead role in revolutionary-watching. It built up a comprehensive card index of all CP members and bugged the CP’s headquarters in Covent Garden. The rise of Hitler and then the second world war diverted the service’s attention from this crucial activity – but with the onset of the cold war in the 1940s “domestic subversion” once again became its primary focus. MI5 kept files on all communists, suspected communists and, increasingly from the late 1960s, members of Trotskyist groups: the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers’ Party), the Socialist Labour League (later the Workers’ Revolutionary Party), the Militant Tendency. It infiltrated agents into the CP and the Trotskyist parties, bugged their offices, tapped their phones and intercepted their mail. Most controversially, it monitored organisations in which it believed “subversives” were active – the trade unions, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Labour Party. In the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of people were under MI5 surveillance at any time. It was only with the end of the cold war in 1989-91 that MI5 ceased to plough most of its energies into “domestic subversion” and concentrate instead on its other roles in counter-espionage and counter-terrorism.
Of course, we knew quite a lot of this before, thanks to whistle-blowers (Cathy Massiter, David Shayler) and, in recent years, selective releases of once-secret documents to the National Archives. No one who was active in left-wing politics during the cold war will be surprised that MI5 took a keen interest in “subversives”. All the same, the scope of the intelligence-gathering described by Andrew is really quite breathtaking. The surveillance society is nothing new.
I meant to write about Christopher Andrew’s authorised centenary history of the security service, MI5, The Defence of the Realm, in my last column – but my copy of the book turned up late because of the postal strikes. And because I’m a busy man and it’s more than 1,000 pages (and that’s not counting the index), I’ve only now finished reading it.
Whatever, it’s still worth a column, because there’s a lot more to it than the first news stories and reviews suggested.
Which is not to knock David Leigh, who made it clear, in a cutting review in the Guardian, that Andrew’s denial of MI5’s plot against Harold Wilson as prime minister is radically at odds with the evidence Andrew himself supplies in the book that senior figures in the security service, most importantly Peter Wright, really did think Wilson was a Soviet stooge and acted to undermine him.
Nor is it to dismiss the critics of The Defence of the Realm who have said that it shamelessly traduces several people who conveniently cannot answer back – notably the late Jack Jones, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union from 1968 to 1976, whom Andrew claims to have been a Soviet agent, largely on the basis of the dubious testimony of the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky.
Andrew’s is an official history – he even joined MI5 in order to write it – and he never misses an opportunity to portray the security service in the most favourable light. He has an unerring eye for headline-inducing allegations, and he reproduces them even when the evidence for their truth is anecdotal.
Nevertheless, The Defence of the Realm is an important and in many ways impressive piece of work, and it would be a mistake to write it off. Andrew has had unprecedented access to the security service archives, and there is a lot he has turned up that is fascinating.
What struck me most forcefully as I read the book was the sheer scale of MI5’s surveillance of what it called “domestic subversion” – otherwise known as the Communist Party of Great Britain and the various revolutionary groups, mainly Trotskyist, to its left.
For more than 40 years after 1945, keeping tabs on the far left was what the security service spent most of its time and energy upon. Although it was originally set up in 1909 as a small secret agency to identify and root out German spies in Britain – revolutionaries were the preserve of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch – during the 1920s the security service found itself increasingly involved in monitoring the activities of members of the Communist Party. The reason was simple: the CP was from its foundation in 1920 loyal to the Soviet regime in Russia and engaged in espionage (or at least some of its members were), and from the mid-1920s the CP was the organisation that most of Britain’s small band of revolutionaries joined.
By the early 1930s, MI5 had taken over Special Branch’s lead role in revolutionary-watching. It built up a comprehensive card index of all CP members and bugged the CP’s headquarters in Covent Garden. The rise of Hitler and then the second world war diverted the service’s attention from this crucial activity – but with the onset of the cold war in the 1940s “domestic subversion” once again became its primary focus. MI5 kept files on all communists, suspected communists and, increasingly from the late 1960s, members of Trotskyist groups: the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers’ Party), the Socialist Labour League (later the Workers’ Revolutionary Party), the Militant Tendency. It infiltrated agents into the CP and the Trotskyist parties, bugged their offices, tapped their phones and intercepted their mail. Most controversially, it monitored organisations in which it believed “subversives” were active – the trade unions, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Labour Party. In the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of people were under MI5 surveillance at any time. It was only with the end of the cold war in 1989-91 that MI5 ceased to plough most of its energies into “domestic subversion” and concentrate instead on its other roles in counter-espionage and counter-terrorism.
Of course, we knew quite a lot of this before, thanks to whistle-blowers (Cathy Massiter, David Shayler) and, in recent years, selective releases of once-secret documents to the National Archives. No one who was active in left-wing politics during the cold war will be surprised that MI5 took a keen interest in “subversives”. All the same, the scope of the intelligence-gathering described by Andrew is really quite breathtaking. The surveillance society is nothing new.
4 October 2009
SOMETHING MIGHT JUST TURN UP
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 2 October 2009
Every ambitious young journalist has a dream job or five, and in my early 20s, my top target was editor of the New Statesman. I didn’t get there de jure but did de facto, because, after three years as deputy editor of the magazine, I took the chair for six issues in the interregnum between Steve Platt and Ian Hargreaves when the oleaginous Geoffrey Robinson became proprietor in 1996. And before that I edited Tribune, which was dream job number two, after a long stint as Tribune reviews editor, which was third on my list.
So I’ve not got a lot of complaints, really. I’ve reached the age of 50 and have done the jobs that used to be done by George Orwell, Michael Foot, Dick Crossman and – OK, I’m pushing it – Kingsley Martin. I might have been useless in all of those roles, I might be a washed-up has-been. But I’m not, at least in my own mind, a never-was. I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody, as Marlon Brando put it in On the Waterfront, even if I’m now a bum.
Enough, though, of me, me, me and my birthday-induced sense of angst. This column was supposed to be about the New Statesman, which has a new – or newish – editor, Jason Cowley, and which relaunched last week with a redesign and a raft of new contributors.
The design is clean and smart, a cross between the Berliner Guardian and Time Out in the early 1980s. I don’t much like slab serif fonts myself, but they seem to be all the rage again, and at least they’ve not gone for Rockwell Bold.
The content is a different matter. The Statesman is, like Tribune, primarily a political weekly of the left, whatever it might do with its back end. And the current issue is not short of must-read material for politicos: Steve Richards is as insightful as usual on the Labour Party and there’s a big, though typically unrevealing, interview with Gordon Brown.
But something isn’t quite right. I’m sorry, but no one who publishes Neil Clark, an apologist for Slobodan Milosevic, can be taken seriously; and announcing that Phillip Blond, the “red Tory” policy-wonk, will be a regular columnist is not – how shall I put it? – a turn-on.
Getting 20 worthy pressure-group types to say what they want from the Labour manifesto was not an inspired idea – and nor was making the cover story for the relaunch issue a list of the 50 most important people in the world. Hey, surprise, surprise, Barack Obama is number one. No one at an editorial conference appears to have made the obvious point that not a single reader gives a damn how New Statesman staffers rank the importance of, er, important people.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. I know from experience that it’s very easy not to get relaunch issues quite right. And the Statesman is hardly alone on the British left in appearing confused about what it is there for and hopelessly lacking in self-confidence – as anyone who was at Labour conference in Brighton this week will tell you.
I’m writing this on Tuesday before Gordon Brown’s keynote speech – the downside of Tribune’s glossy full-colour transformation is that the deadlines are earlier – and by the time you read this, his efforts might have transformed everything, but so far this has been the most surreal Labour conference since the 1970s.
In public, nearly everyone apart from the (utterly marginal) hard left has been on message. I never thought I’d witness delegates giving Peter Mandelson a standing ovation, but on Monday I did, after he delivered quite the weirdest speech I’ve heard from a conference platform since the heyday of Margaret Thatcher.
In private, however, there are very few in Brighton who think that Labour’s “fightback” will work. Even a year ago, there was a hard core of Labour optimists who really believed that the party had a decent chance of winning the next general election. Now, although everyone is still talking the talk about the election being up for grabs, most of last year’s optimists admit that it will take a miracle for Labour to win.
All the same, the mood has been a lot less downbeat than I expected, particularly after that Mandelson speech. There’s no sense that we might as well throw in the towel: if Labour goes down next spring it will do so fighting, not quitting. And who knows? Something might just turn up.
Every ambitious young journalist has a dream job or five, and in my early 20s, my top target was editor of the New Statesman. I didn’t get there de jure but did de facto, because, after three years as deputy editor of the magazine, I took the chair for six issues in the interregnum between Steve Platt and Ian Hargreaves when the oleaginous Geoffrey Robinson became proprietor in 1996. And before that I edited Tribune, which was dream job number two, after a long stint as Tribune reviews editor, which was third on my list.
So I’ve not got a lot of complaints, really. I’ve reached the age of 50 and have done the jobs that used to be done by George Orwell, Michael Foot, Dick Crossman and – OK, I’m pushing it – Kingsley Martin. I might have been useless in all of those roles, I might be a washed-up has-been. But I’m not, at least in my own mind, a never-was. I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody, as Marlon Brando put it in On the Waterfront, even if I’m now a bum.
Enough, though, of me, me, me and my birthday-induced sense of angst. This column was supposed to be about the New Statesman, which has a new – or newish – editor, Jason Cowley, and which relaunched last week with a redesign and a raft of new contributors.
The design is clean and smart, a cross between the Berliner Guardian and Time Out in the early 1980s. I don’t much like slab serif fonts myself, but they seem to be all the rage again, and at least they’ve not gone for Rockwell Bold.
The content is a different matter. The Statesman is, like Tribune, primarily a political weekly of the left, whatever it might do with its back end. And the current issue is not short of must-read material for politicos: Steve Richards is as insightful as usual on the Labour Party and there’s a big, though typically unrevealing, interview with Gordon Brown.
But something isn’t quite right. I’m sorry, but no one who publishes Neil Clark, an apologist for Slobodan Milosevic, can be taken seriously; and announcing that Phillip Blond, the “red Tory” policy-wonk, will be a regular columnist is not – how shall I put it? – a turn-on.
Getting 20 worthy pressure-group types to say what they want from the Labour manifesto was not an inspired idea – and nor was making the cover story for the relaunch issue a list of the 50 most important people in the world. Hey, surprise, surprise, Barack Obama is number one. No one at an editorial conference appears to have made the obvious point that not a single reader gives a damn how New Statesman staffers rank the importance of, er, important people.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. I know from experience that it’s very easy not to get relaunch issues quite right. And the Statesman is hardly alone on the British left in appearing confused about what it is there for and hopelessly lacking in self-confidence – as anyone who was at Labour conference in Brighton this week will tell you.
I’m writing this on Tuesday before Gordon Brown’s keynote speech – the downside of Tribune’s glossy full-colour transformation is that the deadlines are earlier – and by the time you read this, his efforts might have transformed everything, but so far this has been the most surreal Labour conference since the 1970s.
In public, nearly everyone apart from the (utterly marginal) hard left has been on message. I never thought I’d witness delegates giving Peter Mandelson a standing ovation, but on Monday I did, after he delivered quite the weirdest speech I’ve heard from a conference platform since the heyday of Margaret Thatcher.
In private, however, there are very few in Brighton who think that Labour’s “fightback” will work. Even a year ago, there was a hard core of Labour optimists who really believed that the party had a decent chance of winning the next general election. Now, although everyone is still talking the talk about the election being up for grabs, most of last year’s optimists admit that it will take a miracle for Labour to win.
All the same, the mood has been a lot less downbeat than I expected, particularly after that Mandelson speech. There’s no sense that we might as well throw in the towel: if Labour goes down next spring it will do so fighting, not quitting. And who knows? Something might just turn up.
15 September 2009
SIGNS OF LIFE
I wouldn't claim that either Peter Mandelson's speech at the LSE on Monday or Gordon Brown's strangely halting oration at the TUC on Tuesday mark the end of Labour's woes, but they are at least an intellectual el-Alamein. There's rather more fight left than I thought in what had appeared over the summer to be the lifeless corpse of New Labour -- and I'm beginning to think I was wrong to be quite so pessimistic in my last post on Labour's prospects.
There is a clear theme in the Brown-Mandelson offensive, which is all about how the government's actions in the past year have staved off -- or at least helped stave off -- an extraordinary economic disaster, and how it is the height of stupidity to advocate, as the Tories have done, axeing public spending at once when only public spending is keeping the economy afloat. What we need to do, according to Mandelson-Brown, is keep the state stimulus to demand going until we're out of the woods.
The Tory press – and the BBC, with notable exceptions – have made the story Labour's acceptance of "cuts", and of course the cretino-left has joined in, claiming that there's no difference except in degree between Tory austerity and Labour austerity.
But there is a very big difference. Both Brown and Mandelson made it clear that, over time, the money borrowed to shore up the banks and to keep demand alive in the world economy will have to be paid back. The thing is that it's over time. They made it equally clear that doing it at once, before vigorous growth has resumed, would be disastrous, and that the crucial task after the pay-back starts is to make sure that what will inevitably be austerity is also egalitarian.
Stafford Cripps 1947 or what? I'm impressed and not a little surprised that they've taken this line and done so with conviction. Now we need to make it the common sense of 2010: it's time for punitive taxes on incomes over £100,000, a new green pre-fab scheme for housing, nationalisation of public transport ... Ah, we can dream.
There is a clear theme in the Brown-Mandelson offensive, which is all about how the government's actions in the past year have staved off -- or at least helped stave off -- an extraordinary economic disaster, and how it is the height of stupidity to advocate, as the Tories have done, axeing public spending at once when only public spending is keeping the economy afloat. What we need to do, according to Mandelson-Brown, is keep the state stimulus to demand going until we're out of the woods.
The Tory press – and the BBC, with notable exceptions – have made the story Labour's acceptance of "cuts", and of course the cretino-left has joined in, claiming that there's no difference except in degree between Tory austerity and Labour austerity.
But there is a very big difference. Both Brown and Mandelson made it clear that, over time, the money borrowed to shore up the banks and to keep demand alive in the world economy will have to be paid back. The thing is that it's over time. They made it equally clear that doing it at once, before vigorous growth has resumed, would be disastrous, and that the crucial task after the pay-back starts is to make sure that what will inevitably be austerity is also egalitarian.
Stafford Cripps 1947 or what? I'm impressed and not a little surprised that they've taken this line and done so with conviction. Now we need to make it the common sense of 2010: it's time for punitive taxes on incomes over £100,000, a new green pre-fab scheme for housing, nationalisation of public transport ... Ah, we can dream.
10 September 2009
SEVENTY YEARS ON - 2
7 September 2009
SEVENTY YEARS ON - 1
There's an excellent piece by Ian Aitken in Tribune here on the outbreak of the second world war.
6 September 2009
OUT AND ABOUT
I spent this afternoon in a field in south Norfolk with some friends at the annual Burston school strike rally. It's a commemoration of an heroic struggle for working-class education: two socialist teachers were fired in 1914 by the local school board (dominated by farmers) for objecting to their pupils being taken out of school to work -- so they set up an independent school with the support of the labour movement and kept it going for 25 years.
The rally has been the big leftie East Anglian event for as long as I can remember, and there have been plenty worse than today's: at least it didn't rain. But there was something quite sad about it today. The overwhelming majority of adults there were 50 or over, and the theme, solidarity with the Cuban revolution after 50 years, was entirely uninspiring. Tony Benn didn't turn up because he was ill, so instead (or maybe not) we were treated to an interminably dull speech by Richard Howitt, Labour's East Anglian MEP.
Meanwhile, the paper sellers from the Leninist sects worked the 200-strong crowd: Morning Star, Socialist Worker, Socialist, Socialist Appeal. They all had stalls underneath B&Q gazebos, as did the Socialist Party of Great Britain -- whose grizzled militants had forgotten the box of Socialist Standards they were supposed to bring and so were selling only pamphlets written in 1910 -- and what was once the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), which was flogging the autobiography of the late Reg Birch and old Chinese editions of J V Stalin on the national question.
But they didn't do too well. Most of the people at the bash were sell-out reformists from the Labour Party in Ipswich and Norwich who just wanted a day out in the sun drinking beer, and paper sales were thin on the ground. The Maoists were first out, taking down their gazebo at 4pm to head for their red base in Stockwell; by 4.30pm the Socialist Workers' stall was reduced to inhaling helium from Unison's balloons to make them talk squeaky.
I drank some beer, ate some lunch, said hello to some good comrades I've not seen for some time, played with some kids. Altogether, an excellent afternoon. But it showed the old left is dead.
The rally has been the big leftie East Anglian event for as long as I can remember, and there have been plenty worse than today's: at least it didn't rain. But there was something quite sad about it today. The overwhelming majority of adults there were 50 or over, and the theme, solidarity with the Cuban revolution after 50 years, was entirely uninspiring. Tony Benn didn't turn up because he was ill, so instead (or maybe not) we were treated to an interminably dull speech by Richard Howitt, Labour's East Anglian MEP.
Meanwhile, the paper sellers from the Leninist sects worked the 200-strong crowd: Morning Star, Socialist Worker, Socialist, Socialist Appeal. They all had stalls underneath B&Q gazebos, as did the Socialist Party of Great Britain -- whose grizzled militants had forgotten the box of Socialist Standards they were supposed to bring and so were selling only pamphlets written in 1910 -- and what was once the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), which was flogging the autobiography of the late Reg Birch and old Chinese editions of J V Stalin on the national question.
But they didn't do too well. Most of the people at the bash were sell-out reformists from the Labour Party in Ipswich and Norwich who just wanted a day out in the sun drinking beer, and paper sales were thin on the ground. The Maoists were first out, taking down their gazebo at 4pm to head for their red base in Stockwell; by 4.30pm the Socialist Workers' stall was reduced to inhaling helium from Unison's balloons to make them talk squeaky.
I drank some beer, ate some lunch, said hello to some good comrades I've not seen for some time, played with some kids. Altogether, an excellent afternoon. But it showed the old left is dead.
3 September 2009
ADMIT IT: IT COULD BE AS BAD AS 1979
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 4 September 2009
And so – we’re into the final straight. This autumn’s political conferences mark the beginning of a very long election campaign that looks likely to end with Labour being defeated next spring. All right, it’s not over until it’s over, you never know what might turn up, and all that.
But the Tory lead in the opinion polls is so consistent and so large that it would take a minor miracle for Labour to win even though the Tories need a very big swing to win a Commons majority.
Which is extremely depressing – and not just because the Tories are such third-rate incompetent reactionaries (though of course they are), but also because Labour seems in such poor shape to bounce back after a defeat.
Labour’s problems start at the top. Let’s assume that Gordon Brown remains Labour leader and PM right up to the election – I’m still hoping he doesn’t, but that’s by-the-way – and that not too many of the current cabinet lose their seats. Brown might do a Jim Callaghan and hang on as party leader for a while, but hunch says that he won’t and that the contest to succeed him will be open – the first Labour leadership election since 1983 in which one candidate is not a shoo-in. My guess is that the main contenders will be Ed Balls and David Miliband, but I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few others have a go: Alan Johnson, Harriet Harman, Jon Cruddas (as long as they’re still MPs), maybe Peter Mandelson (if he can find a way of returning as an MP), perhaps two or three others. OK, it’s not quite a barren field – but none of them exactly gets the juices flowing. There isn’t a Blair or even a Kinnock.
And that, if you like, is the end of the not-so-bad news, because everything else looks dire for Labour. Outside its upper echelons, the parliamentary Labour Party has never been shorter of talent – and that is before the departure of 100 or more retiring MPs and goodness knows how many others who will lose their seats at the general election. Labour MPs’ morale is by all accounts still at rock bottom after the expenses scandal. At the grass roots, Labour is in a terrible state, its membership dwindling and disillusioned and its local government representation weaker than for 30 years. The trade unions are worse led and shorter of cash and activists than at any time in living memory. There is little sign of intelligent life among the left-leaning think-tanks (with the partial exception of Compass) or in most of the left press (present company excepted, of course).
It’s true that there is also no evidence of the deep-rooted ideological disagreements and personal back-biting that did Labour so much damage the last time it was turfed out of government, in 1979. It’s difficult to envisage Labour conference in 2011 embracing withdrawal from Europe, unilateral nuclear disarmament and widespread nationalisation – and I certainly can’t picture four former members of the government defecting from Labour to set up a rival centrist party in January 2012.
But just because it’s not the same as 1979 doesn’t mean that it might not be just as bad. The 1980s were dreadful for Labour, and no one in his or her right mind wants to relive the miners’ strike, Militant, rate-capping and Red Wedge. It was nevertheless when Labour began the long process of rebuilding that culminated in its victory in 1997. The Bennite insurgency of the early 1980s might have been destructive, deluded and transitory, but it brought a whole new generation into Labour politics – and the election defeats of 1979, 1983 and 1987 (along with the defeats of the miners’ and Wapping strikes) forced Labour to rethink and renew its whole programme, for the most part for the better.
In other words, there was sufficient energy and enthusiasm about Labour after 1979 for the party to emerge fitter and stronger from what appeared for several years to be a life-threatening crisis. What’s worrying today is that the never-say-die spirit is so notable by its absence. At every level, Labour seems tired, resigned and confused, and there’s no new generation of activists waiting in the wings.
Maybe that will all change before the election: I hope it does, and that Labour runs a dynamic campaign and wins. Perhaps if Labour loses it will be only by a small margin and it will recover quickly, with a fresh leader and the Tories’ popularity evaporating as they axe public services. But I have a horrible feeling in my bones that we could be in for a long and thankless exile wandering in the wilderness.
And so – we’re into the final straight. This autumn’s political conferences mark the beginning of a very long election campaign that looks likely to end with Labour being defeated next spring. All right, it’s not over until it’s over, you never know what might turn up, and all that.
But the Tory lead in the opinion polls is so consistent and so large that it would take a minor miracle for Labour to win even though the Tories need a very big swing to win a Commons majority.
Which is extremely depressing – and not just because the Tories are such third-rate incompetent reactionaries (though of course they are), but also because Labour seems in such poor shape to bounce back after a defeat.
Labour’s problems start at the top. Let’s assume that Gordon Brown remains Labour leader and PM right up to the election – I’m still hoping he doesn’t, but that’s by-the-way – and that not too many of the current cabinet lose their seats. Brown might do a Jim Callaghan and hang on as party leader for a while, but hunch says that he won’t and that the contest to succeed him will be open – the first Labour leadership election since 1983 in which one candidate is not a shoo-in. My guess is that the main contenders will be Ed Balls and David Miliband, but I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few others have a go: Alan Johnson, Harriet Harman, Jon Cruddas (as long as they’re still MPs), maybe Peter Mandelson (if he can find a way of returning as an MP), perhaps two or three others. OK, it’s not quite a barren field – but none of them exactly gets the juices flowing. There isn’t a Blair or even a Kinnock.
And that, if you like, is the end of the not-so-bad news, because everything else looks dire for Labour. Outside its upper echelons, the parliamentary Labour Party has never been shorter of talent – and that is before the departure of 100 or more retiring MPs and goodness knows how many others who will lose their seats at the general election. Labour MPs’ morale is by all accounts still at rock bottom after the expenses scandal. At the grass roots, Labour is in a terrible state, its membership dwindling and disillusioned and its local government representation weaker than for 30 years. The trade unions are worse led and shorter of cash and activists than at any time in living memory. There is little sign of intelligent life among the left-leaning think-tanks (with the partial exception of Compass) or in most of the left press (present company excepted, of course).
It’s true that there is also no evidence of the deep-rooted ideological disagreements and personal back-biting that did Labour so much damage the last time it was turfed out of government, in 1979. It’s difficult to envisage Labour conference in 2011 embracing withdrawal from Europe, unilateral nuclear disarmament and widespread nationalisation – and I certainly can’t picture four former members of the government defecting from Labour to set up a rival centrist party in January 2012.
But just because it’s not the same as 1979 doesn’t mean that it might not be just as bad. The 1980s were dreadful for Labour, and no one in his or her right mind wants to relive the miners’ strike, Militant, rate-capping and Red Wedge. It was nevertheless when Labour began the long process of rebuilding that culminated in its victory in 1997. The Bennite insurgency of the early 1980s might have been destructive, deluded and transitory, but it brought a whole new generation into Labour politics – and the election defeats of 1979, 1983 and 1987 (along with the defeats of the miners’ and Wapping strikes) forced Labour to rethink and renew its whole programme, for the most part for the better.
In other words, there was sufficient energy and enthusiasm about Labour after 1979 for the party to emerge fitter and stronger from what appeared for several years to be a life-threatening crisis. What’s worrying today is that the never-say-die spirit is so notable by its absence. At every level, Labour seems tired, resigned and confused, and there’s no new generation of activists waiting in the wings.
Maybe that will all change before the election: I hope it does, and that Labour runs a dynamic campaign and wins. Perhaps if Labour loses it will be only by a small margin and it will recover quickly, with a fresh leader and the Tories’ popularity evaporating as they axe public services. But I have a horrible feeling in my bones that we could be in for a long and thankless exile wandering in the wilderness.
9 August 2009
STUDENTS ARE MORE THAN CUSTOMERS
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 9 August 2009
On the face of it, higher education should count as one of this government’s success stories. Something like 45 per cent of young Brits now go to university – more than double the proportion in the early 1990s – and British universities attract more students from abroad than ever before. Over the past few years there has been serious investment in the infrastructure of higher education. Just about every university has impressive new buildings and revamped lecture theatres and offices.
But all is not rosy in the college quad. The government’s long-standing target of 50 per cent participation in HE among 18-30-year-olds by 2010 is certain to be missed, and, after more than a decade of expanding budgets, universities now face a period of painful belt-tightening. Just as worrying, there are persistent concerns, most recently expressed by Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility and by a House of Commons select committee report published last weekend, that (a) the expansion of higher education has not really opened it up to working-class students; and (b) a lot of students are not getting a good deal.
I have to declare an interest here: for the past nine years I have been a journalism lecturer at City University in London, and for the past five I have been course director and admissions tutor on its biggest journalism undergraduate programme. If City isn’t doing its bit to widen participation and is letting down the young people we recruit, I’m probably at least part of the problem.
Not, I hasten to add, that I think City or I are doing badly on either score. Like any other admissions tutor, I select students on merit – but that’s not just a matter of A-level grades. Anyone predicted to get three As is a shoo-in as long as his or her personal statement is good. But I also jump at the chance of taking on people who have been running football and music fanzines online since they were 14, and I am always open to applications from people who for whatever reason missed out on A-levels in their teens. My students are an extraordinary social and ethnic mix.
And if the students turn up to classes and do the work, they acquire all the skills they need to work as journalists in the real world – the same skills they would get by doing a postgraduate journalism course – along with a solid academic grounding in politics and history (at very least). True, we had a few years when the kit we were using was not quite up to scratch, but that’s all in the past. And OK, I accept that sometimes work is returned a bit late. But on the whole I think we do a decent job.
Of course, this is just me blowing my own trumpet. Where, you might legitimately ask, is the evidence? And that is where the problems start, because there isn’t a great deal beyond the real-life stories of former students with successful careers.
Sure, there has been a lot of research on class and university admissions showing that working-class applicants are less likely to get in than middle-class ones – but none of it is more specific than university by university.
As for the quality of the “student experience”, as we now call it, all anyone has is extraordinarily unreliable. Over the past few years, the annual National Student Survey, an online tick-box-and-comment questionnaire, has become the touchstone of the universities’ “quality assurance” regime. Undergraduates in their final year are encouraged to pass judgment on their years at university – and university managers, my own included, take the results very seriously.
The fatal flaw of the NSS is that it treats students as mere consumers when in fact they are much more than that. Yes, they pay a lot of money to go to university, and they have a right not to be fobbed off with poor teaching, inadequate libraries and overcrowded classrooms. But no one has an automatic right to a good 2.1: you have to work for it. The NSS ignores this rather crucial fact, allowing the lazy and disappointed full scope for anonymous whingeing and blame-shifting. One side-effect is that some universities – not my own – have opted for the quiet life, allowing the numbers of students getting top grades to creep up year by year.
So what’s the answer? The Commons select committee calls for an intrusive inspection regime for universities along the lines of Ofsted, but it’s difficult to see how it could work, simply because most university courses are too specialist to be judged by a generalist inspector. A far better option would be to beef up the role of the traditional external examiner. It might be at odds with the notion of the student as consumer, but in the end the best possible judge of the quality of an academic programme is someone who teaches something similar elsewhere.
On the face of it, higher education should count as one of this government’s success stories. Something like 45 per cent of young Brits now go to university – more than double the proportion in the early 1990s – and British universities attract more students from abroad than ever before. Over the past few years there has been serious investment in the infrastructure of higher education. Just about every university has impressive new buildings and revamped lecture theatres and offices.
But all is not rosy in the college quad. The government’s long-standing target of 50 per cent participation in HE among 18-30-year-olds by 2010 is certain to be missed, and, after more than a decade of expanding budgets, universities now face a period of painful belt-tightening. Just as worrying, there are persistent concerns, most recently expressed by Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility and by a House of Commons select committee report published last weekend, that (a) the expansion of higher education has not really opened it up to working-class students; and (b) a lot of students are not getting a good deal.
I have to declare an interest here: for the past nine years I have been a journalism lecturer at City University in London, and for the past five I have been course director and admissions tutor on its biggest journalism undergraduate programme. If City isn’t doing its bit to widen participation and is letting down the young people we recruit, I’m probably at least part of the problem.
Not, I hasten to add, that I think City or I are doing badly on either score. Like any other admissions tutor, I select students on merit – but that’s not just a matter of A-level grades. Anyone predicted to get three As is a shoo-in as long as his or her personal statement is good. But I also jump at the chance of taking on people who have been running football and music fanzines online since they were 14, and I am always open to applications from people who for whatever reason missed out on A-levels in their teens. My students are an extraordinary social and ethnic mix.
And if the students turn up to classes and do the work, they acquire all the skills they need to work as journalists in the real world – the same skills they would get by doing a postgraduate journalism course – along with a solid academic grounding in politics and history (at very least). True, we had a few years when the kit we were using was not quite up to scratch, but that’s all in the past. And OK, I accept that sometimes work is returned a bit late. But on the whole I think we do a decent job.
Of course, this is just me blowing my own trumpet. Where, you might legitimately ask, is the evidence? And that is where the problems start, because there isn’t a great deal beyond the real-life stories of former students with successful careers.
Sure, there has been a lot of research on class and university admissions showing that working-class applicants are less likely to get in than middle-class ones – but none of it is more specific than university by university.
As for the quality of the “student experience”, as we now call it, all anyone has is extraordinarily unreliable. Over the past few years, the annual National Student Survey, an online tick-box-and-comment questionnaire, has become the touchstone of the universities’ “quality assurance” regime. Undergraduates in their final year are encouraged to pass judgment on their years at university – and university managers, my own included, take the results very seriously.
The fatal flaw of the NSS is that it treats students as mere consumers when in fact they are much more than that. Yes, they pay a lot of money to go to university, and they have a right not to be fobbed off with poor teaching, inadequate libraries and overcrowded classrooms. But no one has an automatic right to a good 2.1: you have to work for it. The NSS ignores this rather crucial fact, allowing the lazy and disappointed full scope for anonymous whingeing and blame-shifting. One side-effect is that some universities – not my own – have opted for the quiet life, allowing the numbers of students getting top grades to creep up year by year.
So what’s the answer? The Commons select committee calls for an intrusive inspection regime for universities along the lines of Ofsted, but it’s difficult to see how it could work, simply because most university courses are too specialist to be judged by a generalist inspector. A far better option would be to beef up the role of the traditional external examiner. It might be at odds with the notion of the student as consumer, but in the end the best possible judge of the quality of an academic programme is someone who teaches something similar elsewhere.
31 July 2009
BOBBY ROBSON'S BLUE-AND-WHITE ARMY
I'm too young to remember Ipswich winning the league under Alf Ramsey — but Bobby Robson's teams winning the FA and UEFA cups were defining moments of my youth. We've been useless since. RIP.
19 July 2009
A KEY TEST FOR LABOUR
Paul Anderson, Tribune column 10 July 2009
“Hi,” said the American woman on the other end of the phone. “Are you Mr Anderson?” “Yes,” I said, expecting an offer of car insurance or the threat of a writ.
I was wrong. “Hi,” she went on. “I’m Myleen and I’m calling from Labour Party headquarters. Are you available to assist in the Norwich North campaign?”
At which point I fell off my chair. Well, not really – but I was surprised. It wasn’t just that the voice was American: I’ve been used to Westminster interns from across the pond for more than 25 years, and some of my best friends are from New York. Rather it was that I’ve not heard a squeak from Walworth Road since it actually was Walworth Road rather than a call-centre in Gateshead with a front-office in Victoria Street or whatever it is now. And the last time was to ask for money, not for me.
Don’t get me wrong. My local party in Ipswich is well organised and active, and I’m regularly bombarded with pleas for help by our brilliant and hard-working agent, John Cook. He has an uncanny knack of timing his arrival at your door with a giant pile of leaflets the only evening you’re at home in a week. But I expect my local party to stay in touch. Contact from HQ – and from a real human being (even an American) – is a bit special.
Perhaps, though, I should not have been surprised. Norwich North is not far from home, it is a very important byelection, and Labour needs all hands on deck. On 23 July – less than a fortnight hence – the voters there will decide who replaces Ian Gibson, who represented them as a Labour MP for 12 years before resigning the seat last month.
It is crucial for several reasons. Norwich North is one of the marginal seats that Labour must retain at the next general election if it is to have a chance of avoiding national defeat: Gibson’s 2005 majority was a little over 5,000. It is the party’s first electoral test since the debacle of the European and local elections last month, its first since Gordon Brown survived the cack-handed attempt-to-oust-him-that-wasn’t – and, most important, its first since the MPs’ expenses scandal left the front pages.
Gibson walked because he felt he had been treated unfairly by the Labour National Executive Committee panel charged with disciplining miscreants in the expenses scandal – and it’s hard not to sympathise with him (as his constituency Labour Party did). The records, as revealed by the Daily Telegraph, show that that he sold his daughter his London flat (on which he had claimed mortgage-interest payments from the taxpayer while she lived there rent-free) for less than its market value.
“Off with his head!” screeched the media, and Labour’s “star chamber” duly doled out the summary punishment, prohibiting Gibson from standing as a Labour candidate at the next general election. You don’t have to be a great admirer of Gibson’s hard-left politics to wonder why he was done over for not raking in gains from the property bubble when nearly everyone who did so has got off scot-free.
Whatever, the byelection will give the voters in Norwich North the chance to pass judgment on the quality of Labour justice. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the early money was on them giving Labour the thumbs down – and if they do the government will face a torrid summer. If they don’t, however, it might just act as the fillip Gordon Brown so desperately needs, a sign that all is not yet lost, that the corner has been turned, that the fat lady has yet to sing. And my friends in Norwich say they have a hunch that Labour can win. There’s no sign of popular enthusiasm for the Tories, they say, and people are beginning to get over the rage that motivated or demotivated them at the European and local elections.
Both the major parties know the stakes are high, and both have been campaigning vigorously in the constituency. Although both have been publicly playing down the significance of the contest, both are treating it as a dry run for the next general election. Labour’s message is simple, that the Tories will slash public services if they win power. The Tories counter that the government is lying about the state of the public finances.
As for me, I’m making no predictions, but I am going to catch the train to Norwich this weekend and do a spot of whatever the comrades need done, despite my reservations about the way Gibson was treated. I’ll be keeping quiet, of course, about where I’m from. Americans go down fine in Norwich. Tractor boys do not.
I've not yet made it up to Norwich North for reasons too boring to mention but will do so before it's too late. I hope.
“Hi,” said the American woman on the other end of the phone. “Are you Mr Anderson?” “Yes,” I said, expecting an offer of car insurance or the threat of a writ.
I was wrong. “Hi,” she went on. “I’m Myleen and I’m calling from Labour Party headquarters. Are you available to assist in the Norwich North campaign?”
At which point I fell off my chair. Well, not really – but I was surprised. It wasn’t just that the voice was American: I’ve been used to Westminster interns from across the pond for more than 25 years, and some of my best friends are from New York. Rather it was that I’ve not heard a squeak from Walworth Road since it actually was Walworth Road rather than a call-centre in Gateshead with a front-office in Victoria Street or whatever it is now. And the last time was to ask for money, not for me.
Don’t get me wrong. My local party in Ipswich is well organised and active, and I’m regularly bombarded with pleas for help by our brilliant and hard-working agent, John Cook. He has an uncanny knack of timing his arrival at your door with a giant pile of leaflets the only evening you’re at home in a week. But I expect my local party to stay in touch. Contact from HQ – and from a real human being (even an American) – is a bit special.
Perhaps, though, I should not have been surprised. Norwich North is not far from home, it is a very important byelection, and Labour needs all hands on deck. On 23 July – less than a fortnight hence – the voters there will decide who replaces Ian Gibson, who represented them as a Labour MP for 12 years before resigning the seat last month.
It is crucial for several reasons. Norwich North is one of the marginal seats that Labour must retain at the next general election if it is to have a chance of avoiding national defeat: Gibson’s 2005 majority was a little over 5,000. It is the party’s first electoral test since the debacle of the European and local elections last month, its first since Gordon Brown survived the cack-handed attempt-to-oust-him-that-wasn’t – and, most important, its first since the MPs’ expenses scandal left the front pages.
Gibson walked because he felt he had been treated unfairly by the Labour National Executive Committee panel charged with disciplining miscreants in the expenses scandal – and it’s hard not to sympathise with him (as his constituency Labour Party did). The records, as revealed by the Daily Telegraph, show that that he sold his daughter his London flat (on which he had claimed mortgage-interest payments from the taxpayer while she lived there rent-free) for less than its market value.
“Off with his head!” screeched the media, and Labour’s “star chamber” duly doled out the summary punishment, prohibiting Gibson from standing as a Labour candidate at the next general election. You don’t have to be a great admirer of Gibson’s hard-left politics to wonder why he was done over for not raking in gains from the property bubble when nearly everyone who did so has got off scot-free.
Whatever, the byelection will give the voters in Norwich North the chance to pass judgment on the quality of Labour justice. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the early money was on them giving Labour the thumbs down – and if they do the government will face a torrid summer. If they don’t, however, it might just act as the fillip Gordon Brown so desperately needs, a sign that all is not yet lost, that the corner has been turned, that the fat lady has yet to sing. And my friends in Norwich say they have a hunch that Labour can win. There’s no sign of popular enthusiasm for the Tories, they say, and people are beginning to get over the rage that motivated or demotivated them at the European and local elections.
Both the major parties know the stakes are high, and both have been campaigning vigorously in the constituency. Although both have been publicly playing down the significance of the contest, both are treating it as a dry run for the next general election. Labour’s message is simple, that the Tories will slash public services if they win power. The Tories counter that the government is lying about the state of the public finances.
As for me, I’m making no predictions, but I am going to catch the train to Norwich this weekend and do a spot of whatever the comrades need done, despite my reservations about the way Gibson was treated. I’ll be keeping quiet, of course, about where I’m from. Americans go down fine in Norwich. Tractor boys do not.
I've not yet made it up to Norwich North for reasons too boring to mention but will do so before it's too late. I hope.
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