Labour has just about entered the internet age with its leadership election but the elections for its National Executive Committee are opaque to put it mildly. If you Google "Labour NEC candidates" you get a load of whingeing blogposts about who messed up the left slate, and unless I've missed something there is nothing obvious on the party's official website where you can read candidates' manifestos (let alone any discussion). I'm only saying cos I was trying to put together a Gauche slate and only had 10 minutes ...
Update I've voted David Miliband 1, Ed Balls 2, Ed Miliband 3 in the Labour leadership election and cast my NEC votes for Luke Akehurst, Ann Black, Deborah Gardiner, Oona King, Peter Wheeler and Pete Willsman. A balanced ticket, n'est ce pas?
31 August 2010
18 August 2010
OBITUARY: ANDREW ROTH
The death last week of Andrew Roth at the age of 91 marks the end of several eras. After Michael Foot died earlier this year, Roth was the last surviving author of the Left Book Club (his Dilemma in Japan came out in 1946, two years before the demise of the club); and he had for several years been the sole survivor of the small band of American leftists who sought refuge in the UK from the red scare of the early post-war years that is now generally known as “McCarthyism”.
In Britain he established himself as a journalist in an unprecedented role, setting himself up freelance (after spells on various newspapers) as compiler and editor of Parliamentary Profiles, a more-or-less-regularly updated précis of his increasingly exhaustive files on every single MP in the country, published in multiple volumes as and when funds permitted, that became a bible for every political journalist in Westminster. Without his efforts, there would be none of the scrutiny of our representatives that we now take for granted.
I worked with Andy on the New Statesman in the 1990s and fed him material for Profiles – and he reciprocated by allowing me to use his archive for free. That would have been a decent deal in itself, but he added value with his conversation. He had been a Communist Party member (or at least a fellow traveller) in the late 1930s at City College in New York, and he retained a sharp eye for minute but telling ideological differences on the left well into his 80s.
He couldn’t really avoid the communist connection: as a US intelligence officer in 1945 he had been arrested for leaking state department material that appeared in an obscure communist-sympathetic magazine, Amerasia, and the case rolled on high-profile for five years before he upped and left America. The red-scare line was that he was a Soviet spook. He said, and I believe it, that he was just a popular-frontist with an area of expertise who worked with fellow free spirits and a few useful idiots. But he could never have been a Trotskyist, he insisted, and the Mensheviks were just irrelevant…
He was very good company and very rude about his enemies. Raise a glass.
In Britain he established himself as a journalist in an unprecedented role, setting himself up freelance (after spells on various newspapers) as compiler and editor of Parliamentary Profiles, a more-or-less-regularly updated précis of his increasingly exhaustive files on every single MP in the country, published in multiple volumes as and when funds permitted, that became a bible for every political journalist in Westminster. Without his efforts, there would be none of the scrutiny of our representatives that we now take for granted.
I worked with Andy on the New Statesman in the 1990s and fed him material for Profiles – and he reciprocated by allowing me to use his archive for free. That would have been a decent deal in itself, but he added value with his conversation. He had been a Communist Party member (or at least a fellow traveller) in the late 1930s at City College in New York, and he retained a sharp eye for minute but telling ideological differences on the left well into his 80s.
He couldn’t really avoid the communist connection: as a US intelligence officer in 1945 he had been arrested for leaking state department material that appeared in an obscure communist-sympathetic magazine, Amerasia, and the case rolled on high-profile for five years before he upped and left America. The red-scare line was that he was a Soviet spook. He said, and I believe it, that he was just a popular-frontist with an area of expertise who worked with fellow free spirits and a few useful idiots. But he could never have been a Trotskyist, he insisted, and the Mensheviks were just irrelevant…
He was very good company and very rude about his enemies. Raise a glass.
- Ian Aitken has an obituary here.
11 August 2010
FELLOW TRAVELLERS – 942
An excellent John Sweeney BBC World Service two-parter on intellectuals and politicians who played (or play) the role of "useful idiots" to dictatorial regimes abroad here. George Galloway refused to be interviewed in the second part, apparently because he was scared of Sweeney's temper, but is still made to look foolish. Tony Benn does appear, and it's car-crash radio.
5 August 2010
IF THE COALITION IS NOT OVER BY XMAS, LABOUR HAS A PROBLEM
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 6 August 2010
Whoopee! It’s the holidays. School’s out, parliament’s risen, the interminable Labour leadership hustings are over – and it’s raining. Just what you need to wash away the blues …
And, boy, do I need cheering up. A sense of gloom about British politics has been gnawing at me for rather a long time now. I’m not sure exactly when it started, fitfully at first – some time around the 2005 general election, I guess – but it has been pretty much relentless for nearly three years. I had a brief surge of optimism about Labour’s prospects after Gordon Brown became PM. Perhaps, just perhaps, he could rescue a government that had squandered the potential of 1997 in caution, bickering, kow-towing to big business and ill-thought-out military adventures? Well, he couldn’t, though he did a good job of handling the 2008 banking crisis. The polls dipped again, the bickering resumed, the MPs’ expenses scandal broke, and from then on it was a matter of clutching at straws as election day approached.
The election itself was bad enough – a comically incompetent national campaign followed by a near-wipeout for Labour in the south and east of England outside London. But since then it’s just got more and more depressing for anyone on the left. Despite the coalition’s kamikaze economics and breakneck-pace schemes for “reforming” the welfare state while cutting it to the bone, it has enjoyed a remarkably good honeymoon press. And so far Labour has done little to sketch out an alternative. The leadership election has involved an immense expenditure of effort to generate a minimum of light.
All right, that’s pretty much what I expected, it’s early days yet, everyone needs a break, and the battle against the coalition resumes on 25 September when the Labour leadership election result is announced. Looking on the bright side, at least there’s little sign of Labour descending into a self-destructive ideological battle as it did between 1979 and 1983. And the coalition does look vulnerable: there are an awful of lot of on-diary banana-skins coming up in autumn, not least the Lib Dems and Tories’ separate party conferences, that could make for some good political slapstick.
If we assume, however, that the coalition is not all over by Xmas, Labour has got a problem. It can of course continue relentlessly to oppose the cuts – and indeed it should – but that will not be enough to regain the credibility it has lost as a governing party over the past decade unless it also manages to popularise the practices of Keynesian demand management in the short term and redistributive taxation and a big state in the longer term.
Lest we forget, this was something it failed to achieve either in government in 2008-10, when it was actually doing big-state redistributive demand management, or in opposition in the 1980s, when a Keynesianism of sorts was still the orthodoxy among most economists and Labour still thought it could sell tax increases to the electorate. Perhaps an explicit “invest, borrow and tax for security and jobs” line would fare better in 2015 than the watered-down versions did in 2010 or 1992 if it were closely argued and costed. I’d certainly like to think so. But it’s a big risk, and I’m not convinced that Labour has the intellectual confidence or coherence to take it.
Beyond that, what? There’s certainly room for Labour to unlearn some of its more idiotic mangerialist and authoritarian-populist traits of the 1990s and 2000s. Everyone has their own bugbears – my own are the pub smoking ban and the ever-more-intrusive (but utterly useless) “quality assurance” regimes imposed on education and other public services; others care much more about ID cards or ASBOs or detention of terrorism suspects without trial or ringfencing of local authority budgets in key areas. But reining-in the over-centralised nanny state and embracing civil liberties are what the coalition says it wants to do, and it will be difficult for Labour to seize the initiative even though many coalition plans are fraudulent – most importantly GP commissioning and school “independence” – simply because of its enthusiasm in office for stultifying bureaucracy.
In foreign and defence policy, there is similarly limited space for manoeuvre: getting out of Afghanistan ASAP is coalition policy (and not a good one, though popular); and even the Trident replacement programme looks vulnerable to the squeeze on military spending. Worse, there doesn’t yet appear to be a great deal of wriggle room on constitutional reform – unless Labour comes out straight for proportional representation, which would be a real act of daring – or on the environment or on benefits reform. (The last of these is also a potential minefield for any Labour leader, but that’s another story.)
Oh well, at least it has stopped raining. Time to get out the rucksack and the walking boots and the pile of books I’ve not read in the past six months, and do some serious thinking. See you in September.
Whoopee! It’s the holidays. School’s out, parliament’s risen, the interminable Labour leadership hustings are over – and it’s raining. Just what you need to wash away the blues …
And, boy, do I need cheering up. A sense of gloom about British politics has been gnawing at me for rather a long time now. I’m not sure exactly when it started, fitfully at first – some time around the 2005 general election, I guess – but it has been pretty much relentless for nearly three years. I had a brief surge of optimism about Labour’s prospects after Gordon Brown became PM. Perhaps, just perhaps, he could rescue a government that had squandered the potential of 1997 in caution, bickering, kow-towing to big business and ill-thought-out military adventures? Well, he couldn’t, though he did a good job of handling the 2008 banking crisis. The polls dipped again, the bickering resumed, the MPs’ expenses scandal broke, and from then on it was a matter of clutching at straws as election day approached.
The election itself was bad enough – a comically incompetent national campaign followed by a near-wipeout for Labour in the south and east of England outside London. But since then it’s just got more and more depressing for anyone on the left. Despite the coalition’s kamikaze economics and breakneck-pace schemes for “reforming” the welfare state while cutting it to the bone, it has enjoyed a remarkably good honeymoon press. And so far Labour has done little to sketch out an alternative. The leadership election has involved an immense expenditure of effort to generate a minimum of light.
All right, that’s pretty much what I expected, it’s early days yet, everyone needs a break, and the battle against the coalition resumes on 25 September when the Labour leadership election result is announced. Looking on the bright side, at least there’s little sign of Labour descending into a self-destructive ideological battle as it did between 1979 and 1983. And the coalition does look vulnerable: there are an awful of lot of on-diary banana-skins coming up in autumn, not least the Lib Dems and Tories’ separate party conferences, that could make for some good political slapstick.
If we assume, however, that the coalition is not all over by Xmas, Labour has got a problem. It can of course continue relentlessly to oppose the cuts – and indeed it should – but that will not be enough to regain the credibility it has lost as a governing party over the past decade unless it also manages to popularise the practices of Keynesian demand management in the short term and redistributive taxation and a big state in the longer term.
Lest we forget, this was something it failed to achieve either in government in 2008-10, when it was actually doing big-state redistributive demand management, or in opposition in the 1980s, when a Keynesianism of sorts was still the orthodoxy among most economists and Labour still thought it could sell tax increases to the electorate. Perhaps an explicit “invest, borrow and tax for security and jobs” line would fare better in 2015 than the watered-down versions did in 2010 or 1992 if it were closely argued and costed. I’d certainly like to think so. But it’s a big risk, and I’m not convinced that Labour has the intellectual confidence or coherence to take it.
Beyond that, what? There’s certainly room for Labour to unlearn some of its more idiotic mangerialist and authoritarian-populist traits of the 1990s and 2000s. Everyone has their own bugbears – my own are the pub smoking ban and the ever-more-intrusive (but utterly useless) “quality assurance” regimes imposed on education and other public services; others care much more about ID cards or ASBOs or detention of terrorism suspects without trial or ringfencing of local authority budgets in key areas. But reining-in the over-centralised nanny state and embracing civil liberties are what the coalition says it wants to do, and it will be difficult for Labour to seize the initiative even though many coalition plans are fraudulent – most importantly GP commissioning and school “independence” – simply because of its enthusiasm in office for stultifying bureaucracy.
In foreign and defence policy, there is similarly limited space for manoeuvre: getting out of Afghanistan ASAP is coalition policy (and not a good one, though popular); and even the Trident replacement programme looks vulnerable to the squeeze on military spending. Worse, there doesn’t yet appear to be a great deal of wriggle room on constitutional reform – unless Labour comes out straight for proportional representation, which would be a real act of daring – or on the environment or on benefits reform. (The last of these is also a potential minefield for any Labour leader, but that’s another story.)
Oh well, at least it has stopped raining. Time to get out the rucksack and the walking boots and the pile of books I’ve not read in the past six months, and do some serious thinking. See you in September.
2 August 2010
JUST SAY NO!
Paul Anderson, review of More Work! Less Pay! Rebellion and Repression in Italy 1972-77 by Phil Edwards (Manchester University Press, 2009), Red Pepper, August 2010
Unlike anywhere else in Europe, Italy experienced a “second 1968” during the mid-1970s – an extraordinary wave of student occupations and innovative mass wildcat direct action in its major cities, reaching a climax in 1976-77 and involving hundreds of thousands of people, that included rent and fare strikes, large-scale squatting, organised shoplifting and a widespread “refusal of work” by young people.
The movement was chaotic and diverse, embracing unreconstructed Leninists and stoner anarchist pranksters, radical feminists and macho leather-jacketed street-fighting men, university lecturers and ex-cons. It was also riven with differences on political tactics, particularly on the use of violence. Some participants were pacifists, others out-and-out enthusiasts for armed struggle. Most were somewhere in between.
These differences ultimately proved to be the movement’s nemesis. Faced with the unrelenting hostility of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the main party of the left, which at the time was attempting to effect an “historical compromise” with the centre-right Christian Democrats, a small but significant minority of activists opted for armed struggle to the exclusion of all else. After that the state came down hard on anyone publicly associated with the “area of autonomy” (regardless of what they had actually done), arresting and incarcerating hundreds from 1978 onwards.
Phil Edwards first caught wind of what was happening in Italy as a teenager reading the British anarchist press, and his book is the product of many years’ research. It is very much a hybrid – in part narrative history, in part a contribution to the political sociology of social movements. He argues convincingly that it is wrong to look at the mid-1970s rebellion merely as an aftershock of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” in 1969, when a wave of worker and student militancy rocked Italian society – by the mid-1970s, a new generation was involved – and he makes telling points about the short-sightedness of the PCI’s anathematisation of the new movement. In its single-minded pursuit of the “historical compromise”, he argues, it lost the chance to renew itself by taking on at least some of the movement’s demands.
This is a serious piece of work that deserves a much wider readership than it is likely to get retailing at £60. Steal this book!
Unlike anywhere else in Europe, Italy experienced a “second 1968” during the mid-1970s – an extraordinary wave of student occupations and innovative mass wildcat direct action in its major cities, reaching a climax in 1976-77 and involving hundreds of thousands of people, that included rent and fare strikes, large-scale squatting, organised shoplifting and a widespread “refusal of work” by young people.
The movement was chaotic and diverse, embracing unreconstructed Leninists and stoner anarchist pranksters, radical feminists and macho leather-jacketed street-fighting men, university lecturers and ex-cons. It was also riven with differences on political tactics, particularly on the use of violence. Some participants were pacifists, others out-and-out enthusiasts for armed struggle. Most were somewhere in between.
These differences ultimately proved to be the movement’s nemesis. Faced with the unrelenting hostility of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the main party of the left, which at the time was attempting to effect an “historical compromise” with the centre-right Christian Democrats, a small but significant minority of activists opted for armed struggle to the exclusion of all else. After that the state came down hard on anyone publicly associated with the “area of autonomy” (regardless of what they had actually done), arresting and incarcerating hundreds from 1978 onwards.
Phil Edwards first caught wind of what was happening in Italy as a teenager reading the British anarchist press, and his book is the product of many years’ research. It is very much a hybrid – in part narrative history, in part a contribution to the political sociology of social movements. He argues convincingly that it is wrong to look at the mid-1970s rebellion merely as an aftershock of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” in 1969, when a wave of worker and student militancy rocked Italian society – by the mid-1970s, a new generation was involved – and he makes telling points about the short-sightedness of the PCI’s anathematisation of the new movement. In its single-minded pursuit of the “historical compromise”, he argues, it lost the chance to renew itself by taking on at least some of the movement’s demands.
This is a serious piece of work that deserves a much wider readership than it is likely to get retailing at £60. Steal this book!
1 August 2010
POISON ADMINISTERED BY A PRO
Joe Haines, Harold Wilson's spin doctor and later Mirror hack, has a go at Peter Mandelson in Tribune:
The Third Man is a continuous justification of a serial offender with no convictions, unable to understand why he, one of the “three founding fathers of New Labour,” was badly treated by the other two (Blair and Gordon Brown). Everything was the “three of us” who began the “reforming crusade”, with Alastair Campbell blanked out of this adventure.
He knew Gordon best, he says, and worked closest with him, and Tony couldn’t do without him. He approvingly quotes a Guardian article which described Blair and Brown as “star pupils of the Peter Mandelson finishing school” in media presentation. Personally, if Brown were one of my star pupils, I’d have kept quiet about it, but this book abounds with embarrassing false modesty and insensitive boasting. He has the conceit of Caligula, not the wisdom of Machiavelli.
He doesn’t understand that he was never the equal of the other two.
23 July 2010
DON'T SPOIL IT
The government's proposed question for the referendum on the voting system has been released:
Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the 'alternative vote' system instead of the current 'first past the post' system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?Put that way, I'll withdraw my plea for supporters of proportional representation to spoil their votes. Just vote no.
- Trevor Fisher has a good post on this on the Chartist blog here.
21 July 2010
THOUGHTS ON THE CURRENT CONJUNCTURE
1. It is increasingly clear that the people who will pay for Britain’s economic crisis are those least able to do so and that the Con-Lib coalition’s cuts will do serious damage both to economic recovery and to the fabric of British society.
2. It is just as clear that a vast number of people whose primary source of income is selling their labour power – the proletariat in Marxist jargon, though the category has long extended way beyond manual industrial workers into what most think of as the middle class – are happy with this. They're the ones in work that aren't in the public sector. They didn’t vote Labour.
3. Most of this group has nothing but disdain for the work-shy or, paradoxically, for over-eager immigrants who undercut wage rates. (This disdain is spread much more widely, but that's another question.)
4. They feel, with reason, that they have a stake to lose – their job, their nice house, their top-notch motor, their credit rating, their regular holidays – and want to minimise their taxes because they want to keep what they’ve got in tough times.
5. They see the economy as an extension of household budgeting – so if you’ve maxed-out on your credit card as a nation you have to rein in pretty soon. Keynes doesn’t get a look-in.
6. They don’t give a damn about the Third Way, the Big Society or electoral reform.
7. So someone has got to work out a means of dragging suburbia back to the social democratic project. It ain't going to be easy.
All right, I know it’s an amalgam of J K Galbraith 20 years ago and contemporary cynicism, but take it as a starting point...
2. It is just as clear that a vast number of people whose primary source of income is selling their labour power – the proletariat in Marxist jargon, though the category has long extended way beyond manual industrial workers into what most think of as the middle class – are happy with this. They're the ones in work that aren't in the public sector. They didn’t vote Labour.
3. Most of this group has nothing but disdain for the work-shy or, paradoxically, for over-eager immigrants who undercut wage rates. (This disdain is spread much more widely, but that's another question.)
4. They feel, with reason, that they have a stake to lose – their job, their nice house, their top-notch motor, their credit rating, their regular holidays – and want to minimise their taxes because they want to keep what they’ve got in tough times.
5. They see the economy as an extension of household budgeting – so if you’ve maxed-out on your credit card as a nation you have to rein in pretty soon. Keynes doesn’t get a look-in.
6. They don’t give a damn about the Third Way, the Big Society or electoral reform.
7. So someone has got to work out a means of dragging suburbia back to the social democratic project. It ain't going to be easy.
All right, I know it’s an amalgam of J K Galbraith 20 years ago and contemporary cynicism, but take it as a starting point...
13 July 2010
THAT'S QUITE ENOUGH BITCHING FOR NOW
Gary Younge has an excellent column in the Guardian today about how petty the Gordon-Tony-Peter stuff all is here.
10 July 2010
AT LAST, EVIDENCE OF LIFE
David Miliband's lecture to the comrades in the valleys is worth a look here:
I agreed completely with Gordon Brown, when he became prime minister in 2007, that we needed renewal. I supported and voted for him. I agreed that we needed greater moral seriousness and less indifference to the excesses of a celebrity drenched culture. I agreed with him when he said that we needed greater coherence as a government, particularly in relation to child poverty and equality. I agreed with him on the importance of party reform and a meaningful internationalism that would be part of a unified government strategy. I agreed that we needed a civic morality to champion civility when confronting a widespread indifference to others.
But it didn’t happen.
It was not just more of the same. Far from correcting them, failings – tactics, spin, high-handedness – intensified; and we lost many of our strengths – optimism born of clear strategy, bold plans for change and reform, a compelling articulation of aspiration and hope. We did not succeed in renewing ourselves in office; and the roots of that failure were deep not recent, about procedure and openness, or lack of it, as much as policy.
8 July 2010
IF IT'S JUST AV ON OFFER, SPOIL YOUR BALLOT
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 9 July 2010
It is easy enough to see why Nick Clegg supports introduction of the alternative vote for elections to the House of Commons. All the indications are that it would make it much easier for the Lib Dems to retain the parliamentary seats they currently hold – and they could well need all the help they can get after jumping into bed with a Tory party that seems intent on crashing the economy just as it did in the 1980s.
Why anyone apart from Clegg and his party should want AV is, however, something of a mystery. AV would do nothing to address the major flaws in the first-past-the-post system we currently use for Westminster elections, which are its gross disproportionality and its concomitant tendency to turn general election campaigns into battles for the votes of a few hundred thousand wavering voters in a hundred of so marginal seats. And AV might make these flaws worse.
AV is not, repeat not, proportional representation. It is not even a step towards it. It is the electoral system used in Australia for the House of Representatives, in which voters in single-member constituencies rank candidates on the ballot paper in order of preference (1, 2, 3, 4 etc) rather than putting a single “X” next to their first choice as we do in first-past-the-post elections in the UK. If no candidate wins more than 50 per cent of first preferences, the second preferences of the candidate with the lowest number of first preferences are redistributed. The process is then repeated until one candidate reaches 50 per cent plus one of votes cast.
AV has two superficial attractions over FPTP. Every winning candidate under AV can claim to have the support (however grudgingly faute de mieux) of a majority of his or her constituents; and AV makes the practice of tactical voting much less of a guessing game for voters. A UKIP supporter in a Tory-Labour marginal who prefers the Tories to Labour, for example, would be able under AV to vote “UKIP 1, Conservative 2” with a reasonable level of confidence that the second preference would count rather than, as now, having to decide whether or not to put an “X” next to the Tory candidate’s name for fear of letting Labour in by “wasting” a vote on UKIP.
But there are downsides even to these attractions. Is a candidate in a three-way AV contest who wins by 51 per cent to 49 per cent with the help of second preferences, having trailed 46-29 on first preferences, more democratically legitimate than someone who wins a three-way FPTP contest 46-29-25? Why should your second choice have the same weight as my first choice?
AV encourages the worst kind of lowest-denominator politics – every marginal contest is a sordid scurry to be everyone’s second choice – and, partly because of this, it delivers more ludicrous landslides than FTPT whenever one political party is no one’s second choice despite having a solid core of first choices. Labour was massacred in 1983 under FPTP: it would have been worse under AV. Ditto the Tories in 1997.
Sorry, but this is a farce. FPTP is crap – but so is AV. We are going to be asked to choose between the two, if the government has its way, in a referendum next May. The choice is an insult. If the referendum bill cannot be amended to include a genuinely proportional third option, reformers should spoil their ballots in the referendum by scrawling “AV is not PR” across their papers.
* * *
On a different matter entirely, I was sorry to read last week of the death of Ken Coates at the age of 79.
I first met him in the early 1980s through European Nuclear Disarmament, when he was chair of the co-ordinating committee that organised annual anti-nukes conventions for thousands of activists from across the continent. He had recently fallen out with most of the rest of END in the UK over who ran the organisation’s magazine – Edward Thompson referred to him as “the renegade Coatesky” (if you don’t get the joke, don’t worry) and I was in the Thompson camp – but he struck me as a strangely impressive figure.
A veteran not only of the implosion of the Communist Party after 1956 but also the first wave of CND, the early-1960s revival of Trotskyism, the anti-Vietnam war campaign and the early-1970s movement for workers’ control, he was extraordinarily well connected and well read … and a faction-fighter of the old school. He became a Labour MEP in 1989 and worked impressively to persuade the world of the benefits of a co-ordinated European full-employment policy before falling out irrevocably with Tony Blair as Labour leader, being expelled by Labour and fighting the 1999 European election as an independent.
I disagreed with him a lot, but he was personable and kind and a Tribune regular for more than 40 years. RIP.
It is easy enough to see why Nick Clegg supports introduction of the alternative vote for elections to the House of Commons. All the indications are that it would make it much easier for the Lib Dems to retain the parliamentary seats they currently hold – and they could well need all the help they can get after jumping into bed with a Tory party that seems intent on crashing the economy just as it did in the 1980s.
Why anyone apart from Clegg and his party should want AV is, however, something of a mystery. AV would do nothing to address the major flaws in the first-past-the-post system we currently use for Westminster elections, which are its gross disproportionality and its concomitant tendency to turn general election campaigns into battles for the votes of a few hundred thousand wavering voters in a hundred of so marginal seats. And AV might make these flaws worse.
AV is not, repeat not, proportional representation. It is not even a step towards it. It is the electoral system used in Australia for the House of Representatives, in which voters in single-member constituencies rank candidates on the ballot paper in order of preference (1, 2, 3, 4 etc) rather than putting a single “X” next to their first choice as we do in first-past-the-post elections in the UK. If no candidate wins more than 50 per cent of first preferences, the second preferences of the candidate with the lowest number of first preferences are redistributed. The process is then repeated until one candidate reaches 50 per cent plus one of votes cast.
AV has two superficial attractions over FPTP. Every winning candidate under AV can claim to have the support (however grudgingly faute de mieux) of a majority of his or her constituents; and AV makes the practice of tactical voting much less of a guessing game for voters. A UKIP supporter in a Tory-Labour marginal who prefers the Tories to Labour, for example, would be able under AV to vote “UKIP 1, Conservative 2” with a reasonable level of confidence that the second preference would count rather than, as now, having to decide whether or not to put an “X” next to the Tory candidate’s name for fear of letting Labour in by “wasting” a vote on UKIP.
But there are downsides even to these attractions. Is a candidate in a three-way AV contest who wins by 51 per cent to 49 per cent with the help of second preferences, having trailed 46-29 on first preferences, more democratically legitimate than someone who wins a three-way FPTP contest 46-29-25? Why should your second choice have the same weight as my first choice?
AV encourages the worst kind of lowest-denominator politics – every marginal contest is a sordid scurry to be everyone’s second choice – and, partly because of this, it delivers more ludicrous landslides than FTPT whenever one political party is no one’s second choice despite having a solid core of first choices. Labour was massacred in 1983 under FPTP: it would have been worse under AV. Ditto the Tories in 1997.
Sorry, but this is a farce. FPTP is crap – but so is AV. We are going to be asked to choose between the two, if the government has its way, in a referendum next May. The choice is an insult. If the referendum bill cannot be amended to include a genuinely proportional third option, reformers should spoil their ballots in the referendum by scrawling “AV is not PR” across their papers.
* * *
On a different matter entirely, I was sorry to read last week of the death of Ken Coates at the age of 79.
I first met him in the early 1980s through European Nuclear Disarmament, when he was chair of the co-ordinating committee that organised annual anti-nukes conventions for thousands of activists from across the continent. He had recently fallen out with most of the rest of END in the UK over who ran the organisation’s magazine – Edward Thompson referred to him as “the renegade Coatesky” (if you don’t get the joke, don’t worry) and I was in the Thompson camp – but he struck me as a strangely impressive figure.
A veteran not only of the implosion of the Communist Party after 1956 but also the first wave of CND, the early-1960s revival of Trotskyism, the anti-Vietnam war campaign and the early-1970s movement for workers’ control, he was extraordinarily well connected and well read … and a faction-fighter of the old school. He became a Labour MEP in 1989 and worked impressively to persuade the world of the benefits of a co-ordinated European full-employment policy before falling out irrevocably with Tony Blair as Labour leader, being expelled by Labour and fighting the 1999 European election as an independent.
I disagreed with him a lot, but he was personable and kind and a Tribune regular for more than 40 years. RIP.
CITY UNIVERSITY ISLAMISTS BELATED LATEST
I meant to post a link to Rosie Waterhouse's piece in the Independent last week here but forgot. So here it is.
6 July 2010
TROTS INTO CAPITALISTS - 84
An excellent piece on the former-RCP spiked crew by Jenny Turner in the London Review of Books here.
10 June 2010
LABOUR'S INTERNAL CULTURE IS THE LEAST OF ITS PROBLEMS
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 11 June 2010
So, as the Clash put it so memorably in one of the stand-out tracks of their London Calling album in 1979: “What are we gonna do now?”
Well, to judge by the rhetoric of the contenders in Labour’s so-far somnambulant leadership election campaign, not a lot different from what we did between 1994 and 2010, but without Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.
Not one of the credible contenders to become leader of the opposition – Miliband, Miliband, Balls, Burnham – has deviated more than 0.5 degrees from New Labour magnetic north. One of them is not quite sure about Iraq, another thinks the former government made a bit of a hash of getting across its immigration policy, another believes a slightly more Eurosceptic line would have made sense, another hints that clamping down more vigorously on anti-social behaviour might have made a difference. All of them are keen on warm words about reconnecting with Labour’s grass roots.
In some ways, this is hardly surprising. I have written before about how party leadership elections are rarely the occasion for fundamental debate about the overall political direction a party should take, and it looks as if Labour’s 2010 contest will not be an exception to the rule.
It is too soon after the general election defeat for a serious rethink of Labour’s fundamental strategy, and all the young-ish men who made it on to the ballot paper were cabinet ministers in the last government and implicated in its controversial decisions. On the biggest issue of the day, the Con-Dem coalition government’s policy of slashing public spending even as we search for the green shoots of recovery, there is a real prospect of Labour making hay – and the coalition looks (in some lights at least) a fragile jerry-built construction that might be easy to demolish. In opposition, in any case, what a party leader can do in the short term is rather limited: change the party constitution a bit, come up with vague policy initiatives that suggest modernity and change.
So everyone plays it safe, which is fair enough – except that Labour needs a Plan B if the coalition does not implode. Everyone knows that “reconnecting with Labour’s roots in the unions”, “selecting more women and ethnic-minority candidates” and “making sure that party members’ voices are heard in its upper echelons” are Good Things, particularly if you are standing for Labour Party office. Labour has to re-engage its members and recruit a lot more of them. But changing the internal organisation and culture of the Labour Party will not solve its problems, which are more fundamental.
In large swathes of England, lower middle-class and skilled working-class voters have abandoned Labour in droves. Their reasons for doing so are many and varied – and so far yet to be researched in detail – but on the basis of anecdotal evidence they do not suggest that there is an easy way for Labour to win these voters back. They stopped voting Labour because they were worried about their house prices going down, worried about their jobs disappearing abroad or being taken by immigrants, worried about their pensions. They didn’t like Gordon Brown, they didn’t like MPs who made small fortunes on property speculation at the public’s expense. They had ceased thinking Labour was fair or economically competent or interested in them. They had had enough of spin and endlessly repeated soundbites.
However attractive most readers of Tribune might find the supposed policy panaceas of the traditional Labour left – ditch Trident, leave Afghanistan, build more social housing, extend trade union rights – none of them apart from housing addresses the core concerns of those who didn’t “come home” to Labour on 6 May. And the prescriptions of the Labour right – tougher on crime and immigration and, er, that’s it – are the policies on which Labour lost the election. Meanwhile, constitutional reform and environmentalism have been appropriated by the coalition. I never thought I’d write this, but to get an elected Lords, Labour in opposition will have to support a Tory-dominated government. The same goes for green energy policies.
Maybe I am being overly pessimistic, but my hunch is that Labour faces a bigger challenge in reinventing itself now than it did after it lost power in 1979. At very least it needs a leader who – as well as exploiting the weaknesses of the coalition day-to-day – is prepared once elected to think through the options for British and European social democracy as thoroughly as any Labour leader has ever done. I believe the best choice for this task (by a small margin) is David Miliband. He is bright, sophisticated, personable, experienced and telegenic. But the clincher for me is that he used to play cricket for Tribune.
So, as the Clash put it so memorably in one of the stand-out tracks of their London Calling album in 1979: “What are we gonna do now?”
Well, to judge by the rhetoric of the contenders in Labour’s so-far somnambulant leadership election campaign, not a lot different from what we did between 1994 and 2010, but without Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.
Not one of the credible contenders to become leader of the opposition – Miliband, Miliband, Balls, Burnham – has deviated more than 0.5 degrees from New Labour magnetic north. One of them is not quite sure about Iraq, another thinks the former government made a bit of a hash of getting across its immigration policy, another believes a slightly more Eurosceptic line would have made sense, another hints that clamping down more vigorously on anti-social behaviour might have made a difference. All of them are keen on warm words about reconnecting with Labour’s grass roots.
In some ways, this is hardly surprising. I have written before about how party leadership elections are rarely the occasion for fundamental debate about the overall political direction a party should take, and it looks as if Labour’s 2010 contest will not be an exception to the rule.
It is too soon after the general election defeat for a serious rethink of Labour’s fundamental strategy, and all the young-ish men who made it on to the ballot paper were cabinet ministers in the last government and implicated in its controversial decisions. On the biggest issue of the day, the Con-Dem coalition government’s policy of slashing public spending even as we search for the green shoots of recovery, there is a real prospect of Labour making hay – and the coalition looks (in some lights at least) a fragile jerry-built construction that might be easy to demolish. In opposition, in any case, what a party leader can do in the short term is rather limited: change the party constitution a bit, come up with vague policy initiatives that suggest modernity and change.
So everyone plays it safe, which is fair enough – except that Labour needs a Plan B if the coalition does not implode. Everyone knows that “reconnecting with Labour’s roots in the unions”, “selecting more women and ethnic-minority candidates” and “making sure that party members’ voices are heard in its upper echelons” are Good Things, particularly if you are standing for Labour Party office. Labour has to re-engage its members and recruit a lot more of them. But changing the internal organisation and culture of the Labour Party will not solve its problems, which are more fundamental.
In large swathes of England, lower middle-class and skilled working-class voters have abandoned Labour in droves. Their reasons for doing so are many and varied – and so far yet to be researched in detail – but on the basis of anecdotal evidence they do not suggest that there is an easy way for Labour to win these voters back. They stopped voting Labour because they were worried about their house prices going down, worried about their jobs disappearing abroad or being taken by immigrants, worried about their pensions. They didn’t like Gordon Brown, they didn’t like MPs who made small fortunes on property speculation at the public’s expense. They had ceased thinking Labour was fair or economically competent or interested in them. They had had enough of spin and endlessly repeated soundbites.
However attractive most readers of Tribune might find the supposed policy panaceas of the traditional Labour left – ditch Trident, leave Afghanistan, build more social housing, extend trade union rights – none of them apart from housing addresses the core concerns of those who didn’t “come home” to Labour on 6 May. And the prescriptions of the Labour right – tougher on crime and immigration and, er, that’s it – are the policies on which Labour lost the election. Meanwhile, constitutional reform and environmentalism have been appropriated by the coalition. I never thought I’d write this, but to get an elected Lords, Labour in opposition will have to support a Tory-dominated government. The same goes for green energy policies.
Maybe I am being overly pessimistic, but my hunch is that Labour faces a bigger challenge in reinventing itself now than it did after it lost power in 1979. At very least it needs a leader who – as well as exploiting the weaknesses of the coalition day-to-day – is prepared once elected to think through the options for British and European social democracy as thoroughly as any Labour leader has ever done. I believe the best choice for this task (by a small margin) is David Miliband. He is bright, sophisticated, personable, experienced and telegenic. But the clincher for me is that he used to play cricket for Tribune.
6 June 2010
MY KIND OF COLUMNIST
David Taylor in today's Independent on Sunday here:
There must be a decent percentage of the population whose ideal Culture Secretary would be a man (or woman) who revealed that he never watched commercial television, demanded to know why BBC4 was so negligibly funded, declared that tabloid newspapers were vulgar, and wondered why BBC2 had to waste so much public money on gardening programmes and property makeovers when it could be commissioning quality drama.
13 May 2010
IT'S DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 14 May 2010
Quite understandably, most political commentary on the general election has focused on the extraordinary aftermath – Gordon Brown’s decision to stay in Number 10 Downing Street, David Cameron negotiating terms for coalition with Nick Clegg, Brown’s resignation – but I’m not going to deal with any of that here. I'm filing before it has all been sorted out.
Instead, I want to concentrate on the results and what they mean for Labour. Like every other Labour supporter, I went into election night in a nervous mood. Labour’s election campaign had been very variable in quality and energy. Brown ended on a high, but before that plumbed the depths of campaigning incompetence, and anecdotal evidence suggested that Labour’s local efforts were far from uniformly vigorous even in marginal seats.
The polls forecast a hung parliament with the Tories as the largest party, but the figures were so tight that anything seemed possible from a safe Tory majority to Labour emerging as largest party despite coming third in share of the vote – and who could tell whether the polls were right?
As became clear in the course of the night, all the polls apart from the exit poll had got it significantly wrong, underestimating Labour’s share of the vote and overestimating the Liberal Democrats’. And although the exit poll got overall national shares of the vote right and forecast the seats each party would win astonishingly accurately on the assumption of uniform national swing, there were actually wild variations in swing among different regions and among constituencies in the same region.
There are nevertheless some general conclusions that can be drawn. First, Labour did a lot better overall than pessimists had feared, performing very well in Scotland and London and to a lesser extent in Wales and its northern English heartlands. Second, however, it did very badly (with notable exceptions) in East Anglia and southern England, and almost as badly (outside the major conurbations) in the Midlands.
Labour now holds only two seats in the East Anglia region – Luton North and Luton South. It lost 11 out of 13 seats won in 2005, including all of them in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk.
In the south-east region, the party lost 13 of its 17 seats: its representation is reduced to Oxford East, Slough and two seats in Southampton. There are no Labour MPs any more in Kent or Sussex. In the south-west, Labour lost eight out of 12 seats it held, in the East Midlands 12 out of 26 (but with one gain), in the West Midlands 14 out of 38.
Of course, history never quite repeats itself – but I have a horrible sense of déjà vu. For Labour, it’s 1987 all over again, with the major difference that the Lib Dems did a lot better this year than the Liberal-SDP Alliance in 1987 and the Tories under Cameron did a lot worse than under Margaret Thatcher. Labour is back to where it was not just before New Labour, but before Neil Kinnock’s policy review.
The first analyses of voting by class appear to show that Labour’s 2010 problem is much the same as its 1987 problem. Relatively affluent lower-middle-class and skilled working-class voters in the south, the east and the midlands, the C1s and C2s who voted in their droves for Labour in 1997 and mostly stayed on board in 2001 and 2005, feel that the party has nothing to offer them.
So what to do? The extraordinary circumstances of the moment mean that very few Labour minds are focused on what the party needs to do to revive its electoral fortunes in the medium term. But under any possible scenario – including the very unlikely one of the next general election taking place under proportional representation – the thinking is going to have to start soon. Whatever happens, Labour is going to have to work out how to change to attract the C1 and C2 voters it has lost, in terms both of programme and of personnel.
It will not be easy. Recycling the old New Labour riffs about being tough on crime and immigration – which were at the core of the party’s message during this campaign – cannot cut the mustard. Nor can the Blairite mantra of public service reform. “Economic competence” is a busted flush, and there are few votes in constitutional reform or environmentalism. The obvious left alternative, a return to an early-1980s “fight the cuts” agenda, is a recipe for disaster.
Brown is going, but to be replaced by whom? It has to be someone fresh yet credible both with the party and with the voters. I’d go for David Miliband myself – but will the party as a whole?
This looks like being a tough time for Labour. At least, however, there is no sign of a hard-left revolt against the party establishment as happened 30 years ago. We might be all at sea, but no one yet is insisting that we steer bravely for the rocks.
Quite understandably, most political commentary on the general election has focused on the extraordinary aftermath – Gordon Brown’s decision to stay in Number 10 Downing Street, David Cameron negotiating terms for coalition with Nick Clegg, Brown’s resignation – but I’m not going to deal with any of that here. I'm filing before it has all been sorted out.
Instead, I want to concentrate on the results and what they mean for Labour. Like every other Labour supporter, I went into election night in a nervous mood. Labour’s election campaign had been very variable in quality and energy. Brown ended on a high, but before that plumbed the depths of campaigning incompetence, and anecdotal evidence suggested that Labour’s local efforts were far from uniformly vigorous even in marginal seats.
The polls forecast a hung parliament with the Tories as the largest party, but the figures were so tight that anything seemed possible from a safe Tory majority to Labour emerging as largest party despite coming third in share of the vote – and who could tell whether the polls were right?
As became clear in the course of the night, all the polls apart from the exit poll had got it significantly wrong, underestimating Labour’s share of the vote and overestimating the Liberal Democrats’. And although the exit poll got overall national shares of the vote right and forecast the seats each party would win astonishingly accurately on the assumption of uniform national swing, there were actually wild variations in swing among different regions and among constituencies in the same region.
There are nevertheless some general conclusions that can be drawn. First, Labour did a lot better overall than pessimists had feared, performing very well in Scotland and London and to a lesser extent in Wales and its northern English heartlands. Second, however, it did very badly (with notable exceptions) in East Anglia and southern England, and almost as badly (outside the major conurbations) in the Midlands.
Labour now holds only two seats in the East Anglia region – Luton North and Luton South. It lost 11 out of 13 seats won in 2005, including all of them in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk.
In the south-east region, the party lost 13 of its 17 seats: its representation is reduced to Oxford East, Slough and two seats in Southampton. There are no Labour MPs any more in Kent or Sussex. In the south-west, Labour lost eight out of 12 seats it held, in the East Midlands 12 out of 26 (but with one gain), in the West Midlands 14 out of 38.
Of course, history never quite repeats itself – but I have a horrible sense of déjà vu. For Labour, it’s 1987 all over again, with the major difference that the Lib Dems did a lot better this year than the Liberal-SDP Alliance in 1987 and the Tories under Cameron did a lot worse than under Margaret Thatcher. Labour is back to where it was not just before New Labour, but before Neil Kinnock’s policy review.
The first analyses of voting by class appear to show that Labour’s 2010 problem is much the same as its 1987 problem. Relatively affluent lower-middle-class and skilled working-class voters in the south, the east and the midlands, the C1s and C2s who voted in their droves for Labour in 1997 and mostly stayed on board in 2001 and 2005, feel that the party has nothing to offer them.
So what to do? The extraordinary circumstances of the moment mean that very few Labour minds are focused on what the party needs to do to revive its electoral fortunes in the medium term. But under any possible scenario – including the very unlikely one of the next general election taking place under proportional representation – the thinking is going to have to start soon. Whatever happens, Labour is going to have to work out how to change to attract the C1 and C2 voters it has lost, in terms both of programme and of personnel.
It will not be easy. Recycling the old New Labour riffs about being tough on crime and immigration – which were at the core of the party’s message during this campaign – cannot cut the mustard. Nor can the Blairite mantra of public service reform. “Economic competence” is a busted flush, and there are few votes in constitutional reform or environmentalism. The obvious left alternative, a return to an early-1980s “fight the cuts” agenda, is a recipe for disaster.
Brown is going, but to be replaced by whom? It has to be someone fresh yet credible both with the party and with the voters. I’d go for David Miliband myself – but will the party as a whole?
This looks like being a tough time for Labour. At least, however, there is no sign of a hard-left revolt against the party establishment as happened 30 years ago. We might be all at sea, but no one yet is insisting that we steer bravely for the rocks.
- Written before David Cameron and Nick Clegg signed up for coalition
10 May 2010
'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?
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.
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.
29 April 2010
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):
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.
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.
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