I BELONG TO THE BLANK GENERATION

Paul Anderson,  Tribune column, 23 March 2012

Sometimes, anniversaries come as a shock to the system. Yep, it’s 35 years this week that the Clash released their first single:

White riot – I wanna riot
White riot – a riot of my own
White riot – I wanna riot
White riot – a riot of my own

It wasn’t the first Brit punk 45 – that was the Damned’s “New Rose” in October 1976, which was followed by the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” and several others – but it was the decisive one, for me at least. I’d been ready for punk for some time: my record collection had expanded since 1975 from the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zep and the Who to include the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Dr Feelgood, Patti Smith and the Ramones. But it was “White Riot” that made me cut my hair and ditch the flares.

And it was a long, long time ago. Since then, I’ve been to university, worked, done sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, worked, done more sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, worked – and now I’m in my fifties. But I don’t think I’ve really grown up, at least in the way that my parents grew up.

Sure, I’m wiser than I was, or at least I hope I am. I’ve been married and divorced. I don’t live in a junkie squat or a squalid bedsit any more. I own a slowly increasing percentage of a bijou two-up, two-down in fashionable Ipswich with gas central heating. I’ve got lots of books and DVDs and CDs, and state-of-the-art computer kit on which I can produce a magazine or a website or a feature film in my own home. I’ve no kids. So far, the current wave of austerity hasn’t hit me, though I worry about the next six months.

A smug, middle-aged, middle-class git, you might justifiably think. In my own mind, however, I’m still pretty much where I was 35 years ago when I cut my hair and ditched the flares. The music will never die, for starters. I still despise going straight. And the politics of the era still resound, much more than you’d think.

Back then, I was a revolutionary leftist – an anarchist by 1977, though in the previous two years I’d been through Trotskyism and Maoism, as teenagers did back then. Today I’m not a revolutionary, and haven’t been for nearly 30 years. That, though, is more about facing reality than any big change of heart. Sometime after the 1983 general election I twigged that the British working class wasn’t going to start a revolution and that you couldn’t be taken seriously playing Citizen Smith for real.

But when I joined the Labour Party in the mid-1980s, it wasn’t as an entryist but because I'd come to believe that boring old social democracy was the only credible alternative to the privatising class-war lunacy of the Thatcher government. As Richard Neville almost put it, it might have been only a potential inch of difference, but it was an inch in which we might be able to live.

The thing is, I haven’t really moved on politically since then, and nor has most of my generation. I grudgingly accepted Neil Kinnock’s policy review after the 1987 general election, and even more grudgingly swallowed Labour’s rightward shift under John Smith and Tony Blair after 1992.

Since then, Labour has left me colder and colder. New Labour was a success as a marketing strategy but the 1997-2010 government did little that has lasted apart from devolution. I’m still a party member, mainly because Labour makes a difference in local government, but I don’t believe the bollocks that comes from the party leadership. I want a return to Kinnockism circa 1988. So do most other party members and a large number of supporters.

Now, however, the kids have taken over. Last week’s New Statesman carried a long essay by Alwyn W Turner – a byline I didn’t recognise, but that’s my fault – looking at the failure of my generation to make any impact on mainstream politics in Britain. The New Labour crew were all born 1945-55, the new Tory and Lib Dem boys in 1965-79 … and it’s New Labour’s sidekicks, the researchers and spin-doctors for Blair and Brown, all born 1965-79, who now lead Labour.

They’re too young for the Clash. They look to focus groups and nothing else. Their problem, and ours.

WHAT SCOTS WANT IS HOME INTERNATIONALS

Paul Anderson,  Tribune column, 24 February 2012

My dad was not a demonstrative man. A working-class Edinburgh boy, he became part of the white-collar middle class thanks to night school and second-world-war military service.

He kept the story of his war experiences in a notebook that no one saw until after he died – 20 years ago next week – and was shifty about having voted Liberal in elections in the 1970s. That was partly because my mum was Labour, but mainly because he was a Scottish nationalist. There was never an SNP candidate in Ipswich, and the Liberal was a miserable next-best option.

On one thing, though, he was vocal: porridge. He’d been eating it for breakfast all his life. He knew it was good for you. And when we were kids he made it made it every day, at least in winter.

But it wasn’t shop porridge, as he called it. He insisted that the porridge oats available at every supermarket and corner store weren’t the real thing. They were rolled oatmeal, and what you needed to make proper Scottish porridge was pinhead oats. They’re the oats in an early, pre-rolling, stage of processing, cut into bits by a mill – and they make porridge a lot crunchier and tastier than rolled oatmeal.

In Scotland in the 1970s, getting the proper oats might have been a matter of nipping down the corner store: I don’t know. In Suffolk, where we lived, it meant a 30-minute cycle ride down to Barnard’s, an old-fashioned miller’s retail shop, which I did once a fortnight. They specialised in birdseed -- but also supplied the yeast with which we made bread when the power went off during Ted Heath’s three-day week.

These days in Suffolk, you need to do your homework to get pinhead oats. The old independent retailers have gone – and the big supermarkets don’t carry pinhead oats, just as they don’t carry once-cheap cuts of meat (offal particularly) or any white fish apart from haddock and cod. As far as I know, the only shop that sells pinhead oats is a pricey semi-deli chi-chi greengrocer in the centre of town that is also the only obvious place to get herbs in volume or sweet potatoes.

My old man’s other injunction, of course, was that porridge should be eaten salted, possibly with milk or cream, but never contaminated with sugar or jam. The idea of adding fruit or yoghurt was in the future, but would have appalled him, I know. And as for deep-fried Mars Bars ...

Whatever, I shudder to think of what he would have made of the visit to Scotland last week by David Cameron to persuade the Scots that they should not vote for independence in the forthcoming referendum.

Cameron started his trip with a photo-opportunity at the PepsiCo factory in Cupar, Fife, where the giant American multinational produces variants of what my dad called shop porridge, most of it branded as Quaker or Scott’s, the latter recognisable to consumers all over the world for the strapping shot-putter in vest and kilt that adorns its packaging. PepsiCo has just announced a big expansion plan – and, declared the PM in front of a poster of the shot-putter, it wouldn’t have happened had Scotland been independent.

He developed the theme in a big speech later the same day – “the union makes us strong”, as one Scots wag put it to me – after an unfriendly and inconclusive meeting with Alex Salmond, the SNP first minister.

Cameron's performance was fake, big-time, and every Scot who watched it knew it, whatever their views on porridge. What the Scots haven't twigged yet, at least most of them, is that Salmond is as big a fraud as Cameron, if not a bigger one.

Yes, it's true that Scotland had an independent existence before the union.

Yes, it has a legal system of its own and a political culture that's different from England's, its own poets and novelists and all the rest.

Yes, the Scots want a more egalitarian society than they will ever get from a Tory-dominated England.

But the defining difference between England and Scotland is trivial: it's football. The Scots don't care about independence: they want the home championship back, and the chance for Law, Baxter and Dalglish to knock in a few goals against the old enemy. Salmond has nothing under his kilt but the flimsiest of tartan panties.

It has been a long time since we last saw a game. Instead, we've got months of arguments about Scottish independence before the big vote – competing with fractious debate about whether Harry Redknapp can make anything of the overpaid thickos in the England football team.

I'm not afraid of an independent Scotland. It could be great – social democracy, Rab C Nesbit, Billy Connolly, Neil Oliver – but it could be dire – Braveheart nationalism, Burns Night haggis suppers (White Heather Club style), tartan trinkets ad nauseam. But actually I don't think it matters that much whether Scotland is independent or not. As Rosa Luxemburg said, the class struggle transcends national boundaries. And Rosa knew a bit about porridge.

STEAMPUNK OPIUM WARS: MOST FUN IN AGES

Anna Chen has posted an extract from her Steam Punk Opium Wars show at the National Maritime Museum last week, in which I was privileged to appear. I'm wearing a top hat, stage left.

WHY WAS PRESS TV OK'D TO BEGIN WITH?

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 27 January 2012

So,farewell, then, Press TV, as Private Eye’s spoof poet E. J. Thribb would say. The Iranian state television station last week had its licence to broadcast in Britain revoked by the regulator, Ofcom, after repeatedly breaching the Ofcom code. The final straw was its refusal to guarantee that it was editorially controlled from London and not from Tehran. Last Friday it was removed from the BSkyB satellite.

An outrageous assault on freedom of expression? George Galloway, the former MP who has presented a regular show on Press TV, certainly thinks so. “Champions of liberty the British govt have now taken Press TV off Sky,” the gorgeous former admirer of Saddam Hussein tweeted in response to the decision.

But then he continued: “Follow us at www.presstv.ir and other platforms” – which rather undermines his point. Press TV hasn’t actually been suppressed, and it isn’t really farewell. Anyone who wants to can watch it online.

Not that I’m going to, I might add, or at least not very often. Press TV is an organ of Iranian government propaganda, a purveyor of anti-semitic conspiracy theory and anti-democratic bile, no more trustworthy than the Soviet Novosti Press Agency and its lackeys were in the bad old days. You only watch it to see what the Iranian government and its useful idiots in the west are saying.

Nevertheless, the case of Press TV is an important one because of what it says about the difficulties of regulating broadcasting in the digital age.

From the 1920s until very recently, Britain had a very tough regulatory regime for broadcasting. For more than 30 years, the BBC – a state-owned corporation from 1927 – had a monopoly of broadcasting, with strict rules prohibiting political partisanship and bias, and the same rules were applied to commercial broadcasters after the BBC monopoly was broken in 1955 with the creation of ITV.

In the years after the end of the BBC monopoly, commercial broadcasting grew massively in scope – commercial radio from the early 1970s, Channel Four from 1982, Sky and other channels on satellite from the late 1980s – but the tough rules on partisanship and bias remained in place.

They weren’t perfect: a self-satisfied establishment consensus ruled, views outside the mainstream were largely excluded from the airwaves, and governments of every political persuasion did their best, with varying degrees of success, to suppress awkward programmes and keep out awkward programme-makers.

But the regulatory regime spared and still spares British broadcasting the propagandist partisanship that has poisoned the political culture of other countries. Italy has Berlusconi TV in all its forms, the United States has Fox and dozens of radio stations that pour out populist right-wing propaganda for their corporate masters. We don’t.

The very fact that Press TV was given a licence in the first place shows, however, that the long-standing British regulatory regime has started to disintegrate – and the fact that its licence being revoked makes little difference to its accessibility is a harbinger of things to come. In the multi-channel, multi-platform, global-broadcaster digital age, content regulation is more difficult to justify – who nixes “We’re just an honest-to-goodness news channel run by an office in London with lots of ethnic-minority people (and George Galloway)”? – and almost impossible to enforce completely.

Some would say that this is a good thing, but I don’t agree. A free-for-all of the airwaves could well be in the offing. But it would advantage no one but the already advantaged – super-rich individuals, corporations and states – towards whom the rules are already heavily stacked. The British regulatory regime for broadcasting needs to be reinforced to limit propagandist channels' access, not relaxed. It might be a fighting retreat, but it's worth it.

Which is where Nick Cohen’s fiery new polemic about freedom of expression, You Can’t Read This Book, comes in. He recognises that we need regulation to preserve media freedom. The book’s big theme is that formal legal guarantees of freedom of expression are not enough to sustain its practice.

Fear – fear of being fired for stepping out of line by a corporation or government organisation that employs you, fear of the libel action that might come from a super-rich crook with a holiday home in London, fear of being assassinated for offending the religious sensibilities of some imam in Iran (who might well broadcast on Press TV) – is as potent a constraint on free expression as the censor of a totalitarian state, and a much larger and more present danger in western democracies than necessary tolerant democratic media regulation.

Cohen’s book is brilliant – add that to the cover blurb – but it doesn’t go far enough in exploring the informal system of controlling what is sayable and what is not in the contemporary media. He’s quite blasé about political and cultural exclusion by newspaper and broadcast editors (his line is that you can always find another outlet for your opinions, which might be true for him but isn’t for most of the rest of us) and he has nothing to say about the collusion between journalists and their sources that keeps so much that should be public private.

Ah, what the hell. I’m writing what I think for a democratic socialist newspaper. It will be published (I hope) more or less unchanged. We might be as marginal as it’s possible to be, but we’re still here, out and proud. That’s good, and long may it continue. The survival of Tribune is much more important than that of Press TV.

OBITUARY: DAVE HENDERSON

I’ve just received the very bad news that my old comrade in arms David Henderson has died in Turin after contracting pneumonia. I’m gutted.

Dave and I became friends as libertarian leftists at Oxford University in the late 1970s – he was in the Labour Party and I was an anarchist, but our points of view were pretty much in sympathy – and we kept up with each other after he moved to Turin in 1980, where he threw himself into the then-collapsing Italian extra-parliamentary left that had inspired us both in the previous five years.

I visited him in Italy for the first time in spring 1981, with Jo, a girl we both loved, just as the Italian state was suppressing the last remnants of the armed-struggle leftist groups that proliferated in the 1970s – which Dave never supported – and I’ll never forget it.

The first day, Jo made it clear that it was Dave and not me in whom she was interested. The second day, I witnessed for the first and last time in my life an armed demonstration – the stewards in certain sections had automatic pistols (“Comrade P38”) stuffed in their jackets. And the next day we turned up to an anarchist centre next to a fly-blown Turin housing project that turned out to have been smashed up by the cops in an anti-terrorist operation the previous night.

Their target had been Prima Linea, the armed-struggle group whose founders had been the far left of Lotta Continua, the quasi-Maoist, quasi-libertarian coalition that until 1976 had been the most important 1968-generation leftist organisation. Dave was a member of another ex-Lotta Continua faction, one that abjured terrorism but was militantly direct-actionist and had some support at Fiat, the giant motor company that was then, as now, the dominant employer in Turin. I had no idea then and have no idea now whether the Centro Eliseo Reclus was a terrorist base: for me they were the Turin contacts for the libertarian left group of which I was a member in the UK. Whatever, we turned up, saw the damage and thought: "Shit!" We then went to the bar across the road for a beer. The bar refused to serve us. But that night we drank the first Guinness poured in the first Irish pub in Turin.

Dave knew Italian politics backwards, and I used his expertise throughout the 1980s and 1990s: he covered Italy for END Journal, Tribune, the New Statesman, Red Pepper and New Times for me. He did so brilliantly, reporting before anyone else in Britain the dangers of Berlsuconi and the fragility of the official (communist and then disintegrating former-communist) centre-left.

But it was always as a side project to working on other serious editorial and translation work, which he continued until he was taken ill after Xmas. I was planning to visit him last autumn, but got waylaid and thought I’d make it in spring. Now it’s too late. A fantastically generous, intelligent and sociable man, he leaves his partner of many years, Paola, and a lot of devastated friends.

OBITUARY: JANEY BUCHAN

I’m sad to hear of the death of Janey Buchan, the Scottish left-wing activist and former MEP, at the age of 85. She was an extraordinary woman, a crazy world-class hater – she told everyone that her memoirs on which she was working were going to be titled Shits I Have Known – yet one of the most generous people I have met in politics.

No one was ruder about anyone than Janey, but she was a softie at heart. She and her husband Norman, the late Labour MP, put me up every time I went to Glasgow as a young, broke Tribune journalist, and she was a doughty supporter of dozens of other friends in small and big ways. A ferocious devourer of the media – and an accomplished writer -- she never lost her youthful Communist Party enthusiasm for campaigning (she left the party over Hungary in 1956), and she was very good at it until well into her seventies. But boy, was she batty as hell.

Her sense of humour was wicked. She placed a small ad in Tribune many moons ago that suggested that George Galloway, a Janey hate-figure, was not very good at his job. Galloway sued and settled out-of-court for £2,000 to be given to a charity. Janey coughed up and put the money in a Galloway libel account, where I think it’s sitting to this day.

I disagreed with her a lot and on occasion found her impossible, but we could do with a few more like her today.

• Michael White has a good obituary in the Guardian here.

TELL LIAM BYRNE TO GET LOST

According to Labour front-bencher Liam Byrne, apropos of benefits policy:

"something for something" means reward for those who are desperately trying to do the right thing, saving for the future and trying to build a stable, secure home. Right now, these families are offered too little reward and incentive – in social housing and long-term savings – for the kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society.

Well, I demur.

The “kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society” is a euphemism for conformist respectability. As is the implicit injunction to “do the right thing”. Who says what “the right thing” is or defines the "decent society"? Prissy focus-group Daily Mail readers? Labour politicians? The Church of England? The imam of the local mosque? It's none of his business. This is soundbite politics at its most cretinous, and the worst sort of communitarian populism.

HOW TO MAKE BRITAIN LESS CRAP

Five zero-net-cost measures that could be implemented at once:

• Increase vehicle tax to £500 a year and use the income to take rail fares down to Italian levels
• Integrate rail and bus service timetables
• Legislate to make the companies that own pubs allow their tenants and landlords to buy them at market rate as a right
• Legislate to allow private tenants the right to buy, with the same discounts allowed council tenants, paid for by a tax on landlords who provide substandard accommodation (which of course requires intrusive local authority inspection)
• Introduce a new zero-business-rates regime for bookshops, butchers, grocers, fishmongers, ironmongers and hobby shops in town and city centres paid for by increased business rates on out-of-town shopping complexes.

All right, none of it will happen, but ...

IF NOT PUBLIC SPENDING, WHAT?

The latest pamphlet from the Labour moderniser pressure group Policy Network, Cameron’s Trap, got the front page lead in the Guardian today and a piece on the comment page by its authors, the historians Ben Jackson and Gregg McClymont (the latter now not only an MP but a frontbencher, which I'd not registered), so I decided to download the whole thing and read it (here).

In some ways, it’s an interesting piece of work. The core of their argument is that the Tory prime minister that David Cameron most resembles is Stanley Baldwin, who held the office in 1923-24, 1924-29 and 1935-37 and was the real power in Ramsay MacDonald’s Tory-dominated National Government of 1931-35. Baldwin, they say, was an astute political player who used the ideology of austerity and the practice of coalition as a trump card to beat Labour – and unless Labour is smart, Cameron could do the same in 2015.

On all this I’d agree, at least up to a point. Baldwin didn’t look such a brilliant tactician in the 1920s, when he contrived to lose the 1923 and 1929 general elections and let in Labour minority governments – and his success from 1931 was as much down to the extraordinary implosion of MacDonald’s Labour government as it was to his own political savvy.

All the same, Jackson and McClymont are right that a mix of austerity and coalition might just prove a winning Tory formula in 2015: I thought that just after the 2010 election. What I’m least sure about is their prescription for Labour now to counter this, the two key points of which are:

• Refuse to be driven into a simple defence of the public sector and public spending and instead mount a patriotic appeal to the nation to improve growth and living standards.

• Put forward a more convincing strategy for private sector growth than the Conservatives. A key element of a credible growth strategy would need to be a widely-supported active industrial policy. In this way “Labour can evade the trap of the ‘tax and spend’ argument of 1992, by making the key measure of governing competence the creation of new and sustainable jobs that improve living standards. Labour is more comfortable than the Conservatives with the idea of an activist state: the Conservatives have reason to fear a political contest organised around which party can best promote growth rather than which party can best reduce spending.”

Surely “defence of the public sector and public spending” are essential components of any serious strategy for private sector growth, for the simple reason that, in the absence of private demand, public spending has to take up the slack to ensure private sector growth? And if the public sector doesn’t take up the slack, what does? Can you get an "activist state" without paying for it? I think we should be told.

ABSENT FRIEND

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 23 December 2011

The journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who died last week at the age of 62, was never associated with Tribune.

Indeed, in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist on the New Statesman and a member of the far-left International Socialists (the forerunner of today’s Socialist Workers Party), there was no love lost between him and this paper. He was with the competition – and his Trotskyist loathing of the compromises made by the traditional Labour left was reciprocated.

In 1978, after the New Statesman splashed a speech by Michael Foot from 10 years earlier on the front page, to contrast Foot’s critical attitude to the Wilson government of the 1960s with his supposedly shameless participation in the Callaghan government, Tribune’s parliamentary correspondent Hugh Macpherson wrote a column defending Foot’s achievements as a minister, warning against the left habit of treating any compromise as treason against socialism and attacking the Statesman for confusing the political circumstances of 1968 and 1978. In response came a blistering letter from Hitchens:

Many of us never thought of Michael Foot as a great socialist, and are therefore spared the pain of explaining his present conduct in those terms. But Macpherson's argument could be applied, without changing a word, as a defence of Denis Healey, Shirley Williams, David Owen or Roy Hattersley, all of whom deserve as much credit as Foot for the ‘achievements’ of this government.

Does Macpherson really think that the aftermath of Anthony Barber's chancellorship justifies support for, in no special order; the neutron bomb, the Shah of Iran, the Official Secrets Act, the 5 per cent pay limit, the savaging of social expenditure, the hoisting of unemployment figures, the deportation of dissidents and the burying of the Bingham Report? …

Like Foot's enthusiasm for Indira Gandhi's dictatorship, these are options, consciously and deliberately decided upon as matters of policy. Alternative strategies, to coin a phrase, were available in all cases and still are. If the mesmeric figure of Foot was not present among the ‘insiders’, this might be clearer to some people – which is why one assumes he is kept on …

Michael Foot's defenders seem entirely worthy of his political position – dishonest with an occasional whine from the left corner of the mouth.”

As far as I’m aware, this letter, published in Tribune on 24 November 1978, is the only thing Hitchens ever wrote for the paper. I remember it well – the Tribune-Statesman spat was a big talking point on the Oxford student left then  – and at the time I was on Hitchens’s side.

Hitchens remained a sworn enemy of Foot and a target for Tribune sniping until 1981, when Hitchens upped sticks and left the Statesman and Britain for the Nation and the United States. Relations warmed after Tribune ran approving reviews of Hitchens’s books in the late 1980s and early 1990s and took much the same position as him on the break-up of Yugoslavia, and I interviewed him for the paper in 1993. But we still never got a written word out of him.

Tribune and Hitchens were on opposite sides of the argument over the post 9/11 western military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq but never completely fell out. Mark Seddon invited Hitchens to put the case for military action to remove Saddam Hussein at the Tribune rally at the 2002 Labour conference, and Hitchens agreed. His speech was received in silence and politely applauded. In his memoir published last year, Hitch-22, Hitchens described the engagement as “my last appearance as a man of the left”.

I don’t think Hitchens ever completely ceased to be of the left, but that doesn’t matter. For all his faults and for everything that he got wrong (and there was plenty), his was a voice that was always worth taking seriously even when – particularly when – he was most at odds with the left consensus. He was the most accomplished literary-political journalist in the English language of the past 30 years, a brilliant stylist with an extraordinary range of interests and an unparalleled independence of spirit. He will be not be easily replaced.

***

With this issue Tribune celebrates its 75th birthday. The paper first appeared on 1 January 1937, and has been going ever since.

But it nearly didn’t make it. A couple of months ago it appeared to be on its death bed. Kevin McGrath, the businessman who had supported it financially since 2008, had announced that he was going to close it as a print publication and continue it as a website with an automated news feed. It was only after several weeks of negotiation that he agreed to sell it for a nominal sum to a new co-operative of staff and readers, the public launch of which will be announced in the new year.

It’s not going to be easy, but with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work I’m sure we can pull through. Here’s to the next 75 years.

OBITUARY: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

The death of Christopher Hitchens at the age of 62 is hardly a surprise but is sad all the same. He was a great writer and great company. I became a fan when I was a teenager and he was on the New Statesman – but I didn’t really appreciate his brilliance until the 1980s, after he’d given up on the Statesman and decamped to the United States.

It was then that he really spread his wings, publishing some quite extraordinary essays on a wide variety of political and literary themes in a wide variety of periodicals (the best of them collected in two collections, Prepared for the Worst and For the Sake of Argument). The 1980s was also when he wrote what I think is far-and-away his best book, Blood, Class and Nostalgia, a rumination on the relationship between Britain and America.

He kept up his output through the 1990s and into the new millenium: there were articles galore, books denouncing Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, dozens of broadcast appearances – but what turned him into an international intellectual superhero/supervillain was his response to 9/11.

He famously declared his support for George W Bush’s war on terror and backed military intervention to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein from Iraq, leading many of his one-time admirers to denounce him for capitulation to US imperialism. A lot of these ex-fans think that he did little worthwhile after 9/11, but even though I think he was wrong about Iraq, I disagree. His 2002 book on George Orwell, Orwell’s Victory, a pithy polemical defence of its subject, and his 2007 atheist manifesto, God Is Not Great, are both up there with his work in the 1980s and 1990s – and his occasional journalism continued to deserve attention right up to his death. He will be missed.

• My Tribune review of Blood, Class and Nostalgia from 1990 is here, my Tribune interview with Hitchens from 1993, just as he was getting into his anti-Clinton stride, here, and my Tribune review of The Trial of Henry Kissinger from 2001 here

EUROZONE MEMBERSHIP MEANS A BUSINESS SCHOOL CABINET

Ian Aitken, Tribune column, 9 December 2011

I was a bit taken aback when I opened my copy of the last issue of Tribune and found a piece by my old friend and colleague Paul Anderson in which he threatened to slag off his Eurosceptic chums for indulging in a little Schadenfreude over the present difficulties of the eurozone.

Mind you, he didn’t actually do it, saying that it was a subject for a later ­column. But his gentle warning set me thinking about how two lefties such as Paul and me could see the matter from such radically different angles, and how I came to be a sceptic rather than an ­enthusiast like him.

Looking back, I think I can trace my original distrust of the so-called European ideal to my old hero Aneurin Bevan. ­Although he was dead by the time the ­subject became a major political issue ­following Harold Macmillan’s original ­application to join the Common Market, I was in no doubt about his views. He saw the Treaty of Rome as a two-pronged ­effort first to entrench the ­capitalist system and the free market in a binding Europe-wide law, and then to ­­provide a solid ­economic foundation for Nato and the Cold War.

I can’t actually provide chapter and verse for this interpretation of Nye’s view. But that was the general view surrounding Tribune and the Bevanites at the time. We argued and debated about it often, ­although mainly in the context of the Cold War, and there was no question that Nye shared that view and gave it his endorsement. Moreover, I don’t think it would have changed if he had survived: by then, he had become Hugh Gaitskell’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, and Gaitskell was a ­passionate opponent of Macmillan’s ­attempt to take Britain into Europe. Their remarkable alliance could not have ­survived a disagreement over such a central issue.

By the time Macmillan made his doomed application, I was on the Daily Express, whose proprietor was passionately hostile to Europe. As I have mentioned in this column before, Lord Beaverbrook saw the chance to create an improbable electoral alliance between his newspapers and the Labour Party, and he chose me to be the channel of communication between him and Hugh Gaitskell. The only thing that ­prevented the Express from urging its ­readers to vote Labour was Charles de Gaulle’s sudden veto, which scuppered Macmillan’s ambitions just as they seemed about to be fulfilled.

Not long after this, with Bevan, Gaitskell and Beaverbrook all dead, I moved from the Express to the Guardian and found myself in a new phase of my ­European journey. Where the Daily ­Express had been passionately anti, the Guardian (or some of its staff) was passionately pro, and I learned something alarming about the Euro-enthusiasts: they were so desperate to get in that they were ready to accept almost any terms that would satisfy General de Gaulle. This ­attitude was typified by the then deputy editor of the Guardian, a nice man called Harford Thomas. Late one night in the ­office, I said to him that I often got the­ impression that real Euro-enthusiasts would be prepared to go into it with their trousers down and dragged backwards through a holly bush. “Yes”, he said, “I would be ­prepared to go in on those terms”.

I don’t actually believe that Macmillan’s application fell into quite the Harford Thomas category. His was a typically calculated move, and probably had a lot to do with the wishes of John F Kennedy and the US State Department. They were dead keen to get us in as a reliable proxy for the United States – which, of course, was ­exactly why de Gaulle wouldn’t have us. But Edward Heath, the Prime Minister who eventually took us in, was very definitely a holly bush man. The only constraint he felt in his ­negotiations was what he could get away with at home – which is why he did not allow a referendum in spite of his promise to seek the “full-hearted consent of the British people”, and then drove the treaty bill through the House of Commons on a series of three-line whips. If Roy Jenkins (another holly bush man) and his followers had obeyed the Labour whip, the bill would have been defeated.

Then came Harold Wilson’s referendum – a typically clever ruse to get round the fact that his party was split from top to bottom on Europe. If it had been a vote on whether to go in, it probably would have been lost. But this was a vote on whether to come out, a much more difficult ­proposition to sell. The “Yes” campaign was fought on the basis of some truly ­spectacular lies – among them the ­assertion that our membership involved no loss of sovereignty – and was financed by gigantic sums donated from the City. The man who organised the fundraising wrote a book afterwards about how the ­result was bought.

So that is how I came to be a sceptic, even if I am rather more ambivalent now. But looking at events across the Channel, it is hard to resist a hollow laugh even at the risk of offending dear old Paul ­Anderson. As for that little matter of ­sovereignty, we now know where we stand: if you want to be in the eurozone, you will have to appoint your cabinet from the London Business School and then ­submit your budget to Brussels for inspection and approval. Maybe that’s the way it’s got to be – as Paul seems to be suggesting. But if so, I want no part of it. I will stay at home and read old Agatha Christies.

LESSONS FROM THE NINETIES

Paul Anderson, review of A Walk-On Part: Diaries 1994-1999 by Chris Mullin (Profile, £20), Tribune, 9 December 2011

The third and final volume of diaries from Chris Mullin is actually a prequel to the first two, covering his life and times as a Labour MP from 1994, when John Smith died and Tony Blair was elected Labour leader, to 1999, when he joined Blair’s government as a junior minister.

A Walk-On Part shares the qualities of the volumes covering 1999 to 2010, The View From the Foothills (2008) and Decline and Fall (2010). Mullin writes clearly and candidly, with an eye for telling detail and amusing anecdotes, some of them about the most unlikely people. He pulls no punches in his assessments of colleagues, including supposed superiors (Gordon Brown is described as ““a workaholic who is burning himself up for no apparent purpose” and every MP's complaint about Peter Mandelson's machinations is recorded) and, despite writing in his preface that “much pessimism and agonising has ended up on the cutting-room floor”, he has done little to excise from the record opinions or predictions that might now seem embarrassing or naive.

“We're going to lose. Blair knows it too. I can see it in his eyes every time he appears on the TV news,” runs an entry just a week before Labour's spectacular landslide in the 1997 general election.

The diaries are not just a political record, moreover. There is a lot about his family and friends, some of it funny and some of it poignant.

All this makes A Walk-On Part immensely enjoyable. But it has a serious purpose too – or rather several serious purposes. It is, for a start, an extended meditation on the role of the backbench MP in modern British politics. Mullin represented Sunderland South as a backbencher from 1987, and he paints a vivid picture of what the job entailed: the surgeries with constituents (some of them utterly unreasonable), the endless meetings, the constant travel back and forth from London. Some MPs might be snout-in-trough, lazy careerists, but Mullin was clearly assiduous and selfless in representing his constituents’ interests.

Throughout the period covered by this volume, Mullin had an important role in parliamentary politics as a senior member of the House of Commons Home Affairs select committee (from 1997 to 1999 as its chair), and the book deals in some depth with its work – often unsung and dreary but utterly essential in holding the executive to account. Mullin is always sceptical about the effects of his and his committee’s efforts, but A Walk-On Part is in its subtle way as convincing an argument as I’ve read for massively increasing the power and independence of the select committees in order to improve parliamentary scrutiny of government.

Mullin also has plenty that is serious to say about Labour politics. The diaries encompass the birth and electoral triumph of New Labour and the first two years of the Blair government – a quite momentous period, or at least that is how it seemed to most observers and participants at the time.

Most of the left to which Mullin belonged – he had been a strong supporter of Tony Benn as editor of Tribune in the early 1980s and in 1994 was a member of the hard-left Campaign Group along with Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner and Ken Livingstone – saw Blair as a cuckoo in the nest and opposed his every move, with ever-decreasing effectiveness. Mullin did not.

His diary entries abhor the vacuity of New Labour’s marketing and slogans, are withering about the idiotically centralised regime of party management at the core of New Labour, and are unsparing in their criticisms of much New Labour policy – particularly Gordon Brown’s timidity on just about every aspect of economic policy and the craven approach to Rupert Murdoch adopted from 1995. But Mullin recognises early on that Blair, for all his faults, is Labour’s best hope of winning and holding on to power, and he has no time for the oppositionist stance of his erstwhile comrades, choosing his rebellions against the leadership with care. It’s clear from his account that the marginalisation of the old left by New Labour was aided and abetted by the old left itself.

The events with which this book deals took place a long time ago – before 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, before the internet became a mass phenomenon, before boom turned to bust. Many of the people who appear in its pages are dead – Michael Foot, Peter Shore, Jack Jones, Joan Maynard, Joan Lestor, Robin Cook, Mo Mowlam – or long retired.

It is nevertheless remarkable how strangely recent it all seems. In part, this is because so many of the key players in Labour politics in the 1990s were still there at the bitter end of the 1997-2010 Labour government (most notably Brown and Mandelson). But it is also because so many of the issues then central in Labour politics remain so today.

The Labour leadership spent the 1990s desperately seeking credibility on the economy and chasing the votes of affluent middle-class voters. Mullin despaired and still despairs of many of the means it used in the process – “control freakery, a soft spot for rich men, the obsession with spin” – but thought and still thinks that the broad strategy was right. In his preface, he writes of Blair: “He was surely right about the need to seize the middle ground and stay there. His decision to rewrite Clause Four of the Labour Party constitution … was in retrospect a master stroke, though it didn’t feel that way at the time. His strategy of promising little and delivering more, in contrast to the over-promising and under-delivering of previous governments, was also surely validated. Likewise his determination to tackle the huge benefit culture (ironically the new government’s most enduring legacy from the Thatcher decade) and to reform public services, education in particular.”

Whether such a strategy will work against the background of economic crisis and insecurity as well as it worked during a period of boom is, of course, the big question facing Ed Miliband right now. If he hasn’t read this book already, he could do worse than put it on his Xmas list.

WHY I SHALL VOTE LABOUR BY CHRISTOPHER LOGUE

The death of Christopher Logue brings to an end an extraordinary life as activist, satirist, translator and poet. Mark Espiner has an excellent obituary in the Guardian here. This is his best-known poem, as first published in Tribune.

Tribune, 25 March 1966

I shall vote Labour because I believe in God — and God votes Labour.
I shall vote Labour because they are tolerant of traitors like Ian Smith.
I shall vote Labour because upper-class hoorays annoy me in expensive restaurants.
I shall vote Labour because Ringo votes Labour.
I shall vote Labour because Kensington Borough Council made Portobello Road a one-way street.
I shall vote Labour because if I don't somebody else will.
I shall vote Labour because if one person does it everybody will be wanting to do it.
I shall vote Labour because I am obedient I shall vote Labour because I am a shareholder in Wincarnis.
I shall vote Labour because if I don't my balls will drop off.
I shall vote Labour because I would like to be violent but lack the strength.
I shall vote Labour because I would like to rape President Johnson.
I shall vote Labour because there are too few cars on the road.
I shall vote Labour because Mrs Wilson promised me £5 if I did.
I shall vote Labour because I love Look at Life films.
I shall vote Labour because I failed to become a dollar millionaire aged three.
I shall vote Labour because I do not want pot-smoking legalised (the prices will sky-rocket).
I shall vote Labour because I want to see Nureyev dance with Fonteyn in Swansea Community Centre.
I shall vote Labour because I want a shopping precinct with covered footways, stretching from Yeovil to Ballbearinggrad.
I shall vote Labour because, deep in my heart,
I am Conservative.

AND NOW FOR A REALLY STUPID SUGGESTION

A group of Labour opinion-poll wonks have put together a case for Labour to adopt a conservative fiscal policy, In the Black Labour, which has had some enthusiastic press.

The argument is simple: the voters don't like what they perceive as reckless borrowing. So stop talking Keynesian and get on with the cuts.

As Jenni Russell put it in the Evening Standard today:

Instead of expecting voters to understand Labour's thinking, and being bewildered when they don't, they suggest that Labour must move to where the voters are. That means embracing the need for austerity, balanced budgets and carefully targeted spending.

Sorry, but this is pernicious nonsense. The critical question now facing Labour, Britain, Europe is not how to woo Daily Mail readers to vote Labour in Britain but how to woo the Germans off the hard-line monetary and fiscal conservatism that has so far prevented them from doing the necessary to prevent meltdown of the euro -- and how to woo the French off their Gaullist high-horse posturing about how the nation-state is all that really matters. The priority is to make Keynesian thinking about the economy (in other words, spending to counter the effects of slump) part of the common sense of our age, even for Germans, and to counter nationalist and xenophobic thinking everywhere.

The Eurozone crisis demands that the Germans compromise on their balanced-budgets-uber-alles ideology, which is now utterly at odds with what the world needs, however honourable the reasons for which it was adopted. They need to OK Eurobonds.

But that's not all. The citizens of Europe need:

• France to abandon its Europe des patries stance, particularly on national sovereignty over the economy – that's what fiscal union means. Gaullism is dead. It would be good if the French Socialist Party could stop squawking opportunistically on this, because it knows the score even though there's an election coming up in which the far-right threatens ... Really, the French have to concede on democratising supranational EU institutions, which means giving the European Parliament control over the Commission and lots of what is currently done by the Council of Ministers.
  
• Germany to agree to an expansionist redistributive Keynesian regime for the new European fiscal union that it is currently proposing, and the whole show to be made democratically accountable to the European Parliament. A federal Europe, with a democratic federal government that is anything but fiscally conservative.

And, according to the best-placed commentators, we've got four days for the French and the Germans to reach a deal. Right now we need the ghosts of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden that haunt In the Black Labour like we need a small outbreak of the Black Death.

ARCHITECTS OF REVOLUTION

I share the enthusiasm of many for the high-modernist experimentation in the arts that was part of the early phase of the Russian revolution, but the current exhibition at the Royal Academy,"Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935" (until 22 January) is a disappointment. They've got a marvellous attempt to construct a scaled-down version of Vladimir Tatlin's never-built wiry "Monument to the Third International" in the courtyard outside, but that's the best bit (and free). Inside it's (very good) photos of decaying 1920s and 1930s Futurist and Constructivist buildings taken over the past 20 years -- have any been restored? -- and lots of architects' plans. The full catalogue that goes with the exhibition explains it all, but the casual viewer can get little of the context from what's on show or from the bare notes made available on the walls. I don't think you can make sense of the avant-grade of the first decade of Soviet power without reference to what was happening elsewhere in Europe and in the United States at the time: here we get the bare minimum, and a very confused account of how the disgusting spectacle of Lenin's mausoleum came about. A wasted opportunity to put the Soviet architectural modernists up where they belong with Gropius and Le Corbusier.

A LEFT TAKE ON THE EURO CRISIS

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 25 November 2011

Eurosceptics crowing about how they have been vindicated by the Eurozone crisis are beginning to drive me nuts. I don’t think they have been vindicated, but that’s for another column. What matters now is this:

1. Like it or not, a calm negotiated dissolution of the euro is not possible
It is true that currency unions have in the past been dismantled without catastrophic economic disruption. In recent years, Britain’s currency union with Ireland ended in 1979 when Ireland joined the European exchange rate mechanism; and Slovakia and the Czech Republic introduced separate currencies in 1993 after Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce”.

It is imaginable that at some time in the future the Eurozone could be broken up by mutual consent of its participants without precipitating disaster (whether that is a desirable outcome is another matter). This is, however, utterly implausible in the near future. The bond markets are in a state of panic and smell blood, and not even the smallest reduction in Eurozone membership – a Greek exit – could take place without triggering further panic that forced Italy, Portugal and Spain out too. The only plausible scenario for ending the euro as we know it in the foreseeable future is a chaotic collapse.

2. The collapse of the euro would be a disaster for Britain
Such a collapse would be ruinous for every country that was forced out. In the run-up to exit, they would experience catastrophic capital flight. Their banks would implode and credit would disappear. As businesses failed, unemployment would rocket – and people left in work would find their living standards and purchasing power slashed as a result of the devaluation that euro exit would inevitably bring.

The impact would be felt throughout the world. Germany and other countries still in the Eurozone would go into deep recession as their banks took the hit of defaults on loans to the leaver countries and as their exports to those countries slumped. Britain would take an economic hammering. The Eurozone is Britain’s biggest export market, responsible for nearly half of British export revenues, and British banks are massively exposed to Eurozone debt. The disintegration of the Eurozone, and the consequent wider economic downturn, would be a calamity for Britain.

3. The euro must be saved
It follows that it is in everyone’s interests, including Britain’s, for the euro to be rescued. The key question is how. This, of course, is what the European political class has been arguing about for months – without providing a credible answer, which in turn has exacerbated the crisis as the markets have factored in the possibility of meltdown.

The immediate priority is to end the bond market panic to allow the Eurozone debtors to borrow more at reasonable rates of interest. The problem is that this requires the Eurozone as a whole to underwrite their borrowing – which means Germany, as Europe’s biggest creditor nation, taking on responsibility for the debts of southern Europe, either directly or indirectly. Up to now, however, the Germans have refused to do so. The German economic policy establishment, horrified by the prospect of inflation above all else, considers that the priority is for the indebted countries to reduce their debts and has ruled out the European Central Bank acting as lender of last resort. German voters balk at their taxes bailing out what they see as profligate and lazy southern Europeans.

The most likely way out of this impasse is that a deal will be struck whereby the Germans relent on bankrolling the Eurozone, but only on condition that the debtor countries immediately implement draconian austerity budgets and accept tough, intrusive Eurozone-wide budget rules.

That would calm the bond markets, but at great cost:

• Austerity would almost certainly strangle what little growth there is in southern Europe, with knock-on effects for everyone else.

• Such a regime would place the burden of paying for the sovereign debt crisis – which, lest we forget, is the result of the global banking crisis of 2008 and the ensuing recession, not decades of state profligacy – almost entirely on the shoulders of the working class.

• Handing over responsibility for overall economic policy to the Eurozone would mean that the key decisions on taxation and spending would no longer be taken by democratically elected governments – a dramatic erosion of national sovereignty.

So what should democratic socialists do? First, argue for a recasting of the role of the European Central Bank to include pursuit of growth as well as stability. Second, press for a fairer sharing of the pain of austerity by ensuring that the rich pay more, starting with a Tobin tax. And third, demand a massive increase in the powers of the European Parliament, the only Europe-wide democratic institution, to maximise accountability of the new economic policy regime.

It’s hardly a panacea, but it’s a lot better than crowing.

• This paper from the Breugel think-tank is worth a look.

OBITUARY: FRANK PARKIN

The sociologist Frank Parkin, who has died at the age of 80, was my political sociology tutor at Oxford more than 30 years ago. I saw him for a couple of hours once a week for eight weeks in his room at Magdalen College and never got to know him socially, but he played a bigger role in shaping the way I think than any other teacher. He was a brilliant tutor: enthusiastic, sharp and above all extraordinarily rude about other sociologists. His Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (1981) is the funniest book of sociological theory I have ever read, a no-holds-barred polemic that opened a generation of students' eyes to the stupidities of academic Marxism. He followed it with two novels, Krippendorf's Tribe and The Mind and Body Shop, that are brilliant satires on academic life. Krishnan Kumar has an obituary in the Guardian here.

TRIBUNE LAUNCHES APPEAL FOR FUNDS

The following statement has just been published on the Tribune website:

Tribune fights on: co-op structure staves off closure

In a last-minute deal to stave off closure in its 75th year, staff, management and the National Union of Journalists have agreed a plan which switches ownership to a co-operative model from next week.

The move will allow continuity of publication and a different form of funding with more direct reader involvement. It follows talks in which owner Kevin McGrath agreed to release the title debt-free, granting Tribune a viability which had been threatened by the build up of historical debt, responsibility for the discharge of which has been accepted by Mr McGrath.

Terms for a transfer of ownership of the title were agreed during the tripartite talks after Tribune staff met with advisers on the creation and structure of co-operatives and agreed in principle this would be the best route to pursue, provided the right conditions applied to the transfer of ownership to the new company. Mr McGrath subsequently agreed to positively assist in giving the new venture a fresh start and successful future.

The change comes after a substantial cash injection failed to raise subscriptions and income to target levels and it was agreed by all parties that the title would stand a better chance under a co-operative model.

Final details of the model are being worked out in conjunction with Tribune’s advisers at Principle Six and Co-operatives UK but will involve readers as shareholders and democratic participants in future.

In the meantime, we are appealing for help with short-term funding to bridge the start- up gap until the new structure is up and running (cheques payable to Tribune at 218 Woodberry, Green Lanes, London N4 2HB). Donations will be registered as a formal interest under the new structure.

Mr McGrath said: “I am very pleased to be able to pass Tribune on to the staff in a workers co operative which I fully support and urge everyone in the labour and trade union movement to support the magazine under its new ownership. It has been an honour to have been involved in keeping Tribune going and I am delighted that the history and heritage of Tribune has been safeguarded in the digitising of the whole 75 year archive which is a proud achievement.

“Importantly, I would like to place on record my sincere thanks to the staff, our contributors and the readers for their continued and invaluable support over the past three years.”

The need for Tribune, with its mix of news, analysis, revelation and debate, has never been greater than under the present political climate. This is an exciting step, a co-operative is the right place for Tribune to be. It is a challenge, too, one which we hope you, the reader will join us in facing.

SURVIVAL PLAN AGREED FOR TRIBUNE

Tribune editor Chris McLaughlin has just sent me this:

Staff, management and the National Union of Journalists have agreed a last-minute plan to stave off closure of Tribune. At the end of talks ending Friday evening, it was agreed that the title should become a co-operative. Publisher Kevin McGrath has offered to take on historical debts and release the title "debt free" and told the meeting that he would do everything possible to help the success of the transfer to a co-operative. Terms are to be drafted in time for a full meeting of the Tribune staff, which has to approve the deal, on Monday.

This is good news, but it's going to take a serious recapitalisation of the paper, a great deal of work and a measure of luck to rescue it. Circulation is down to 1,200, which isn't a sustainable level. To get it back to 5,000, which is roughly what it needs to be to generate the sales and advertising income to employ journalists and production staff, it will have to spend a lot on promotion (and do it intelligently).

I don't buy the argument that a democratic left weekly that generates most of its income from selling printed copies is doomed to fail. Tribune's core political stance – socialist, egalitarian, democratic, libertarian – remains as relevant as ever, and it is less marginalised in Labour politics than at any time since the early 1990s. And if it concentrates its efforts on direct debit subscription sales rather than desperately trying to break into newsagents, it has at least a decent chance of re-establishing itself commercially. Subs-based print periodicals can thrive in the internet age, particularly those with a niche market – witness the London Review of Books and Prospect.

But it is going to need money. I've no idea what target for funds the paper will announce next week, but I think that something like £500,000 is what's required. That's rather more than I've got in my piggy bank, but it's not much more than the price of a semi in Neasden – and it's not beyond reach. If 200 people stump up £1,000 and 400 put in £500, there's £400,000 in the kitty, which would be quite enough to make a decent start on reviving the old lady.