'UNELECTED PRIME MINISTERS'

I've had enough of idiotic Tories and BBC hacks talking bollocks about "unelected prime ministers". We've got a parliamentary system. Some basic facts about British prime ministers:

Balfour 1902, Asquith 1908, Lloyd George 1916, Bonar Law 1922, Baldwin 1923 and 1935, Chamberlain 1937, Churchill 1940, Eden 1955, Macmillan 1957, Douglas Home 1963, Callaghan 1976, Major 1990, Brown 2007 ... all took office without leading a winning party in a previous general election.

And 10 of 14 of these PMs (counting second "unelected" appointments) were Tories. Were they all entirely illegitimate?

WELL, I NEVER

Well, there's something of the cool dude about Gordon Brown after all. I thought he'd do something like this after watching the statement he made on Friday about staying in office and ensuring a stable transition - but the timing is exquisite. Just as the Tories and Lib Dems reach stalemate in their negotiations (or have they?) he announces that he's going in due course and that a deal is potentially on with the Lib Dems. I remain sceptical about the outcome (it's not even clear that the Lib-Con negotiations have broken down) but it's at least worth a go. Keeping the Tories out is an honourable goal. For what it's worth, I'm for David Miliband as Labour leader.

SORRY, ELECTORAL REFORM IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN

Despite my aversion to prediction, I’d be prepared to put money on the next general election taking place under the first-past-the-post electoral system. The obstacles in the way of even the introduction of the alternative vote – which is in no sense a system of proportional representation – look too great under just about any scenario for the resolution of Britain’s post-election stalemate.

The main reason is simple: there is almost certainly a Commons majority against even holding a referendum on electoral reform, comprising the overwhelming majority of Tories and a substantial minority of Labour MPs. The absolute maximum David Cameron is prepared to concede to the Lib Dems on electoral reform (at least as far as anyone is aware) is a free vote in the House of Commons on whether or not there should be a referendum. And the best that Labour can offer the Lib Dems is a promise to whip its MPs to back a referendum – a promise that would be difficult to keep despite a referendum being pledged in Labour’s manifesto. (A bill introducing AV without a referendum is in my view not a realistic option, in part because, as a constitutional bill, it would have to be subject to a free vote, in part because it would appear to be shameless gerrymandering. But we shall see ...)

Precisely what the numbers are no one knows. The third of MPs elected for the first time are obviously an unknown quantity, and there are no reliable records of views on electoral reform even among the returnees. Plenty of people, among them Gordon Brown, have changed their minds.

Nevertheless, having followed this story for getting on for 20 years, my best guesses are (a) that at least 20 Labour MPs are died-in-the-wool supporters of the FPTP status quo whose opposition even to a referendum is such that they would defy the whip to stop one; and (b) that no more than a half-a-dozen Tories would vote for a referendum in a free vote (and most of them would toe the party line in a whipped vote on a referendum that would be a de facto vote of confidence in a Labour-Lib Dem government or Labour government with Lib Dem support).

I could of course be wrong – but even if I am, and a referendum bill were to be passed, what would happen next? Hunch tells me that a referendum would be most likely to take place the same day as the next election, which would be held under FPTP. (There are reasons for the hunch that I'll explain anon if anyone's interested.) But even if there were a referendum before the next election, how would it pan out? With the Tories and the press lined up against “destabilising” change, the chances are that reform would be rejected.

I’m sorry if this seems unduly pessimistic, but the time for electoral reform was in Labour’s first term a decade ago. It’s one of those big changes that can only be introduced as a matter of principle by a popular government with a stonking majority. I suppose Brown and Clegg might just bet the bank on "instant AV", and it might just carry in parliament ... but I really can't see it.

• Update 1 Well, it really is desperation stakes ... The Tories are now offering a referendum on AV (Hague goes "the extra mile") and Labour, with Brown on the way out, appears to be touting instant AV. I might be wrong here, but I'm sticking to my guns about what transpires.
  
• Update 2 I must say that the Lib Dems' negotiating strategy has been brilliant ... they've got offers much better than they could have hoped. Still sceptical on electoral reform, however.

RESPONSE TO CITY UNIVERSITY ISLAMIC SOCIETY

I was thinking of not bothering to reply to the City University Islamic Society’s riposte to me and Rosie Waterhouse (see below) because I thought I’d already made all the substantive points I wanted to make about the ISoc – and its diatribe was beyond parody.
Private Eye’s Dave Spart couldn’t have managed a more contorted statement of evidence-free denunciation than this (mangled spelling, grammar and punctuation retained):

Despite Ms Waterhouse and Mr Andersons political opportunism, their ideological contradictions expose their conscious ignorance, and some may say, out right hatred for the Islamic way of life and all Muslims that adhere to the principles of their religion.

You what? What “political opportunism”? What on earth is “conscious ignorance”? What’s the evidence for our “out right hatred” (sic) for Islam or for Muslims? How did someone who spells, writes and argues as badly as this get a place at university?

But now the ISoc has posted pictures of Waterhouse and me on its website’s home page with links to the diatribe and is claiming – via a post for a blog promoted by the Independent here – that the university has somehow contrived to prevent members of the ISoc talking to the police about a street fight (or rather two fights) that took place outside the university’s Muslim prayer room last November. Reluctantly, I’ve decided that I’ve got to respond.

First, the ISoc’s diatribe against Waterhouse and me. It’s poisonous and stupid, but there is a trace of rational argument to it, which, put simply, is that we are hypocrites, arguing for suppression of freedom of expression in the name of freedom of expression.

I take that charge seriously. Leave aside the fact that it takes some chutzpah to make it if you believe that individual freedoms are based on a “false premise” and if you refuse to allow journalists to ask the questions they want at a press conference or to record the proceedings. (For the record, I did not use “foul language” at the ISoc press conference last month, nor did I “storm out”: I simply said that a press conference without open questioning was a farce and a mark of cowardice, then left perfectly calmly.)

The important point is that the charge is entirely without foundation. I am, as it happens, an atheist, and if anyone wants a civilised discussion about the existence of a deity or deities I’m more than happy to oblige. But I’m above all a secularist. I think that a person’s religion (or lack of it) should be a private matter, given due respect by law and by custom but with no formal role in public or working life – which includes academia.

Everyone has the right to believe what they want and to engage in whatever religious practices they choose (as long as they are not abusive of others’ rights). Everyone has the right to proselytise.

There is, however, a time and a place for everything. There are rules at the heart of a liberal democratic polity and academic culture, both explicit and implicit, about what one should do, where and when.

I don’t worry much about dress codes – though there are limits, and they are legitimate subjects for debate. Some people think it’s outrageous that I’ve always turned up to work in jeans; some consider that overt displays of religious belief through clothing are beyond the pale. I’m relaxed about what people wear, but even I don’t think it would be acceptable for someone to attend university wearing nothing but a g-string or sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Put the Musulman to the sword”.

The crucial question is where you draw the line – and it’s in no sense Islamophobic to draw it below the full-face veil (even though I wouldn’t do so myself). Most of my Muslim women friends are hostile to it. And even those who aren’t particularly bothered believe that most young women who adopt it in the UK do so primarily as a provocation, an “up yours” political fashion statement.

I’m not provoked, but I do care a great deal about preserving certain norms of liberal university life and of the liberal public sphere more generally. The most important is that of free debate, which to me means that all speaker meetings held on university premises should allow participation by all members of the university unconstrained except by the laws and university rules that prohibit hate-speech and incitement to violence.

Just as a Conservative Club – if we had one at City – would be required to allow members of a Labour Club – ditto – to make vigorously critical contributions from the floor, so the Islamic Society should be required at its speaker meetings to allow any member of the university – male, female, gay, straight, atheist, Jewish, Shia Muslim, Christian, Hindu, whatever – directly to contradict its speakers, to argue that its vision of Islam is narrow and small-minded, to question its apparent enthusiasm for some of the most extreme jihadists on the circuit.

This requires gender desegregation of ISoc meetings, so that male and female participants are treated equally, and an end to meetings set up as propagandist rallies at which no one critical of the demagogue on stage (or on video link) is allowed to speak.

As for facilities for worship, it is entirely reasonable for the university to provide rooms that are shared by different faith groups and timetabled so that all can use them whenever different religious observance rules apply. No faith group should be given privileged treatment, and the university should do nothing to encourage religious separatism.

Finally, there’s the bizarre business of the ISoc claiming that the university somehow conspired to prevent a proper police investigation into the incidents last November outside what was then the Muslim prayer room. According to the ISoc at the time, on two occasions Muslim students were subjected to brutal and unprovoked assaults by local youths after leaving the building. The ISoc said that the assaults, in the second of which four people were reported to have been stabbed, were Islamophobic, and the police said immediately afterwards that they were treating the incidents as racially aggravated crimes. The university promptly provided alternative worship rooms with better security.

Three local youths were arrested – but early this year the police announced that they were not going to prosecute. The reason was simple: they didn’t have sufficient evidence because two of the victims of the alleged assaults and several witnesses had not made statements to them. This had nothing to do with any actions (or inaction) of the university and everything to do with the unwillingness of the alleged victims and other witnesses to co-operate with the police – which in turn had everything to do with the ideology of the ISoc’s leaders. No evidence whatsoever has been produced by anyone that the university or the police behaved in anything but an exemplary manner in investigating the incidents or introducing measures to ensure the safety of students.

No one is discriminating against Muslim students at City University, and the ISoc’s claims to the contrary are a cynical attempt to polarise opinion and recruit the unwary to its leaders’ paranoid separatist current of political Islamism. It is not in any sense “Islamophobic” to say so.

LET'S GET IT WRONG

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 16 April 2010

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in nearly 30 years of writing about politics, it’s that it’s very easy to make a fool of yourself by predicting what’s going to happen next.

I haven’t done it – I think – since 1989, when I rashly announced in these pages that we were unlikely to see German unification in our lifetimes, or something like that (the embarrassing article is missing from my file of cuts for some strange reason, and I don’t have the time or the inclination to look it up in the Tribune archive). I’m certainly not going to risk whatever residual reputation I might have by forecasting the result of next month’s general election.

Actually, I twigged the danger of predicting general elections some time before that faux pas, because I’d already managed to get all three elections of my adult life – 1979, 1983 and 1987 – quite spectacularly wrong.

In 1979, I’d expected a close result: what actually happened was a thumping Tory victory. In 1983, I thought that Labour would recover lost ground and that the SDP-Liberal Alliance might be in a position to act as kingmakers in a hung parliament: the Tories won by an even bigger margin. And in 1987, I really believed that Labour had a good chance of winning or at least becoming the largest party in the Commons: it didn’t turn out that way, as the Tories were returned with a safe majority.

OK, there’s not much on the record that shows how wrong I was – a piece in Solidarity, a small libertarian socialist magazine in 1981 (pre-Falklands, all right?) suggesting that the unpopularity of Margaret Thatcher’s government was such that some sort of Labour-Alliance coalition and a return to Keynesian corporatism was pretty much in the bag; and one for New Socialist in 1986 (when the polls showed a slender Labour lead, believe me) chewing over the possibilities for centre-left collaboration when Labour became the largest party, as it surely would.

Still, by the end of election night 1987 I had resolved never again to go public with my incisive predictions of general election results – and I never have. Which is just as well, really, because I got 1992 wrong (I really thought Labour would scrape in, even after the awful Sheffield rally) and I misjudged 1997 (the scale of the Labour victory was much greater than I expected). I was right to think that 2001 would be a big Labour victory, but in 2005 I fretted until the very last about the Tories making sufficient gains to deny Labour an overall majority.

Does all this make me a particularly inept political journalist? You can be the judge of that, but I don’t think so. There were plenty of other people who were surprised by the scale of Thatcher’s victory in 1979, and in 1983 and 1987 there was real uncertainty right up to the last minute about what would happen on election day because the opinion polls were erratic and no one knew how well the Alliance would perform. In 1992, there was the inglorious farce of the BBC’s exit poll suggesting a Labour victory, which prompted premature champagne-cork popping among Labour supporters throughout the country – which was followed as the results came in by the gradual half-cut realisation that the poll had got it wrong.

Since then, Labour has had three victories in a row, with the pollsters getting the victor right each time. But don’t forget that in 1997 nearly all the polls had Labour down for an even bigger victory than the one that transpired, and that 2005 looked likely for much of the campaign to be a much closer-run thing than it turned out to be. Had the Tories not been led by Michael Howard it might have been very different.

So what about May 6 2010? I’m sticking to my policy: no predictions. The polls suggest a Tory lead of between four and 10 percentage points, probably enough to make them the biggest party but possibly not enough to give them a majority. But you can’t trust the polls. No one has a clue whether the pollsters’ sampling techniques are sound, how the parties are getting on in the key marginal seats or what the impact will be of the MPs’ expenses scandal. No one knows how the small parties will fare or what turnout will be. There are three weeks to go before we actually vote, and at the time of writing we’ve witnessed only the preliminary skirmishes of the campaign. The Tories looked slick at the start, but last weekend Labour started punching its weight, and the Labour campaign launch on Monday was impressive. There is everything still to play for.

Get out there on the stump to support your Labour candidate. Keep the Tories out. We can win this. Ooops! I did it again!

AND NOW IT'S SERIOUS

Labour's campaign launch today was very impressive. Gordon Brown was on the ball, and they all seemed to be enjoying themselves. One question. Is Nick Robinson employed by Conservative Central Office?

THANK THE LORD, I'VE BEEN DENOUNCED

In a first step towards open engagement with its critics (see previous post), the City University Islamic Society has published this diatribe against me and my colleague Rosie Waterhouse. I have reproduced it in full as the ISoc wishes and shall respond in my own time. The original is here.

Secularism is not Islamophobia, but secularists are Islamophobic

On Thursday the 18th of March 2010, Rosie Waterhouse, a senior lecturer and course director at City University announced that she and some of her colleagues believed the niqab (face veil worn by modest Muslim women) was incongruous with British values. She said “I was particularly disturbed by the sight of Muslim female students wearing the niqab, a dress statement I find offensive and threatening. Don’t they value the rights and freedoms they enjoy in Britain?”[1]

A few weeks later, on Friday the 2nd of April, Paul Anderson, a programme director at City University stated that the banning of the niqab was “a stance that is routinely adopted by secularists in France and Turkey, but is less commonly taken in Britain.”[2] Although somewhat surprisingly claiming he is “not a niqab-banner,” Mr Anderson then proceeded to say “the leaders of City ISoc (Islamic Society) have relentlessly pushed a separatist and intolerant version of Islam, repeatedly promoting apologists for terrorist violence and the most reactionary social attitudes. They have consistently and insidiously played the role of victimised innocents in order to gain sympathy, without any solid evidence, to further their cause.”

Despite Ms Waterhouse and Mr Andersons political opportunism, their ideological contradictions expose their conscious ignorance, and some may say, out right hatred for the Islamic way of life and all Muslims that adhere to the principles of their religion. Both Ms Waterhouse and Mr Anderson are people who advocate and propagate liberal secularism who have forgotten their intellectual heritage. Liberal secularism rests upon the premise of individualism, in other words, viewing the self – the human being – as an abstract entity divorced from social attachments. Two key values are built from this premise, individual freedom and individual rights. According to individual freedom, also explained as freedom of choice, the niqab and the orthodox classical principle based interpretation of Islam the ISoc follow shouldn’t be a problem and should always be tolerated under British liberal values. So why the contradiction?

You see, Ms Waterhouse and Mr Anderson are liberal secular ideologues who do not want to understand or discuss the Islamic way of life. The Islamic way of life is not based upon the false premise of individualism, rather it views the human being as an entity with social links and obligations. This correct view on mankind develops and builds sublime values, which in Ms Waterhouses case, includes honouring and protecting women far greater than what Western values can ever offer. How else can we explain all four British-born Muslim girls referred to by Ms Waterhouse in her article, who said they began to wear the niqab only after coming to City and joining the Islamic Society say they found it “liberating?” Or male and female Muslim students at City University segregating themselves even when forced to sit in the same room? Islam teaches sublime values that penetrates hearts and souls, making Muslims feel content, comfortable, at ease and “liberated.”

With regards to Mr Andersons claim mentioned above, then surely by being a programme director of journalism he should know better than anyone that citizens of the United Kingdom are given liberties that allow them the freedom of action and freedom of choice, whereby a person is not obliged to pledge allegiance to anybody except the Crown and it may be argued that there are none above it. In this manner, they enjoy a certain quantity of freedom of thought, academic emancipation, and self-expression. After all, it was Franklin D Roosevelt, the 32nd President of America, who in 1941 stated his vision, “A world founded upon four essential freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world.“[3]

City ISoc are perfectly within their rights of freedom of thought and self expression to follow whatever version of Islam they want to. Let them and another 1.6 billion people around the world worship and remember God in their own way, let them believe and practise what they wish. This is their freedom of action and their freedom of choice and thus it is from common decency for Mr Anderson not to draw upon their religious practises attempting to make them “seem” intolerable and to be working against the progression of society, when in reality he has no knowledge of the aims, goals and objectives of such acts of worship. Indeed it is time Mr Anderson takes a really good look at himself and sincerely contemplates why he possesses so much hate to a society that proudly adheres to principles sent by Allaah and His Messenger. Surely, there must be more to it than what the eye can see.

Finally, it should be noted that freedom of speech does not give one the right to cause disputes, and argue for the sake of quarrelling, but it does however give one the right to a debate and this would only be constructive if done so in a thoughtful and intellectual manner; understanding that a certain level of respect and decency must be maintained at all times. A person has his or her right to freedom of speech, but a certain level of decency and appropriateness needs to be maintained at all times. On the 18th of March, the ISoc organised a press conference to explain its stance and its decisions throughout the past several years. It invited the journalism department to listen and pose as many questions as possible, all be it written on paper and without external recording. Student journalists, the press office and newspapers attended in their numbers, displaying perfect manners and characteristics, benefiting greatly after hearing the ISocs explanation. However, Mr Anderson, as the programme director felt the urge to storm out the room using foul language, making a big scene for himself instead of sitting and debating in a rational and logical manner like some of his students. Surely it is this attitude that is “intolerable,” provocative, backward and works against social integration and cohesion. All too often has the ISoc and Muslims at City University witnessed senior staff members like Mr Anderson who have a tendency of making “a mountain of a mole hill,” attempting to dupe their students and readers into firstly acknowledging, and then accepting their side of the story, which yet again, is merely a snippet of the whole situation at hand. But the ISoc will no longer remain silent and take a back seat whilst innocent students and readers are manipulated into blindly following what some may say are Islamophobic secularists. No, it is time the ISoc stands up, defends itself and fights back against the likes of Ms Waterhouse and Mr Anderson; two confused secularists that promote significantly preposterous views. So where do we go from here? Well, a new vice-chancellor is due to take over in August, indeed it will be a brave vice-chancellor who confronts this issue. But at least we have started a debate at City.

And all praise and thanks are due to Allaah.

AND THEY'RE OFF

This election is more of a no-brainer than any in the past 30 years. The Tories have a recipe for crashing the economy. Do not trust them. Vote Labour!

SECULARISM IS NOT ISLAMOPHOBIA

Last week I did what no university lecturer should ever do. I lost my temper in front of a group of students and shouted at them. I might also have used some bad language.

What’s worse, it wasn’t anything they’d done that caused my anger. They were putting together the excellent independent City University London student paper, the Inquirer, and had asked my advice on how to handle a controversial news story.

The week before last, my good friend and City colleague Rosie Waterhouse had a piece published in the Independent in which she argued that Islamist extremism on university campuses is a growing and under-acknowledged threat to liberal academic values. Contentiously, the article called for a ban on campus on the wearing of the niqab, the full-face veil that fundamentalist Muslims believe should be compulsory for women.

This is a stance that is routinely adopted by secularists in France and Turkey, but is less commonly taken in Britain. Whatever, the piece had been vigorously denounced online and several students at City had expressed their disagreement with the call for a campus niqab ban – which made it a perfectly legitimate story on an ongoing row.

The problem was that the key quote the Inquirer team had for their story, from the president of the student Islamic Society at City, Saleh Patel, was blatantly abusive and libellous – both about Waterhouse and about me. He accused us of running a concerted Islamophobic campaign at the university (including inculcating our students into an anti-Muslim conspiracy) and implied that the university’s journalism department should sack us because of our unprofessional conduct.

It’s when I read his comments that I lost it. Both Waterhouse and I have made it clear time and again that we’ve got issues with the City ISoc. We agree that its brand of reactionary Islamism is obnoxious, though we disagree on what should be done about it (I am not a niqab-banner, for what it’s worth). But we have never discriminated against Muslim students in any way, nor would we ever think of doing so. And the only thing we inculcate into our students is the importance of truth and balance in their writing. How dare anyone suggest otherwise?

OK, I shouldn’t have let the red mist descend. The Inquirer team made it clear to me that they weren't going to use the quote – they're a very sussed crew. But it really was the last straw.

For some time now, the leaders of City ISoc have relentlessly pushed a separatist and intolerant version of Islam, repeatedly promoting apologists for terrorist violence and the most reactionary social attitudes. They have consistently and insidiously played the role of victimised innocents in order to gain sympathy, without any solid evidence, to further their cause.

This time last year, the main treat advertised for the ISoc’s annual fundraising dinner was a video link-up with none other than Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-Yemeni preacher who was spiritual mentor to three of the 9/11 suicide-murderers (and a contact of the December 2009 pants bomber to boot).

The university authorities objected and al-Awlaki’s virtual appearance never happened. But was the ISoc deterred? No way. Next up was an ISoc meeting in autumn 2009 addressed by two other reactionary Islamist preachers, Abu Usamah, who is on record stating that gays should be killed, and Murthadah Khan, who is on record describing Jews and Christians as “filthy”. The university Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Society and the campaigner Peter Tatchell objected, saying that the ISoc was whipping up hatred, but the meeting went ahead. At the end of last year, after it was reported that al-Awlaki had been killed by a Yemeni air attack on a meeting of al-Qaida leaders, the ISoc website praised him and the “staunch al-Qaida fighters” targeted by the raid.

After the Inquirer reported all this, entirely factually, various City ISoc supporters posted none-too-veiled threats on the internet against the students working on the paper. The paper’s editor was assailed (anonymously) for being an Islamophobic Sikh, on the basis of her surname – she’s actually an atheist – and was told that she deserved severe and violent divine retribution for her sins.

In the meantime, the ISoc complained that the university’s Muslim prayer room was not safe. In November last year there was a street fight outside it, in the course of which some Muslim students were badly hurt by local youths, though it remains unclear what the fracas was about. (The building where the prayer room was is on to a dimly lit back street and is rarely used by other students in the evening.)

The university’s acting vice-chancellor, Julius Weinberg, responded, entirely reasonably, by setting up new multi-faith prayer and reflection rooms in the main university block where there is 24-hour security and no exit that can be identified as being used only by Muslims.

Some weeks later, after another controversy over an ISoc speaker meeting at which another gay-hating preacher was billed as the star attraction, Weinberg told the ISoc that its speaker meetings – as opposed to prayer meetings – could not continue to be segregated between men and women and would have to be open debates if they were to take place on university premises.

The ISoc’s next step was to assume the role of aggrieved victim. How could anyone have the temerity to suggest that Muslims should share a space (even if use of it were carefully timetabled) with others? Such arrangements are, of course, the norm in most further and higher education institutions – but the ISoc declared that the new set-up was an outrage against the tenets of Islam and started holding Friday prayers outside the university’s main entrance as a protest, to which it invited supporters from every Islamist group in London to boost numbers. (It also held a press conference at which – laughably – no one was permitted to record its representatives’ statements and no unscripted questions from the floor were allowed. I walked out after announcing that I had problems with these restrictions.)

There is no evidence that the Islamic Society at City has been recruiting for terrorist organisations, or that former members have gone on to commit terrorist acts (although the same cannot be said of other student Islamic societies in the UK of a similar ideological bent). But its insistent pleading for special treatment, its consistent policy of inviting the most inflammatory separatist preachers, its repeated smearing of critics and its refusal to discuss its views in an open and civilised fashion are all intolerable in a university.

The university authorities are quite right to insist that the university is a secular institution in which no faith group has privileged status, and quite right to emphasise that events held on its premises must be both genuinely open to all and free of hate-speech. Those are the rules of the game, they’re not open to negotiation – and it is in no sense “Islamophobic” to say so.

I’m still arguing with the Inquirer team about how they handled the story, incidentally. If they’re anybody’s stooges, they’re certainly not mine – which is just as it should be.

ALL THE FUN HAS GONE OUT OF TACTICAL VOTING

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

THIS IS FUN!

Just download the image here and start playing ...

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.

• 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.

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.

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.