WILKO PRAISES AAAARGH! PRESS TITLE

Anna Chen went to see the great Wilko Johnson this week -- and this is what he said about her book of poems (click on ad on the right to buy it!).

BRITISH LENINISM IS DEAD

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 25 January 2013

The economy is in free-fall, the government is stumbling from crisis to crisis, Labour is somnambulant … but what has the British left been talking about this past month? Online transsexuals bullying the feminist journalist Suzanne Moore about an article in the New Statesman – and an extraordinary bust-up in the Socialist Workers Party over an allegation of rape against a senior male member.

The storm over the ugly threats to Moore has had more media coverage – in part because Julie Burchill responded to them by accepting a commission to write an incendiary piece for the Observer lampooning what she called “a bunch of dicks in chicks’ clothing”. Her article, which is very funny, was removed from the paper’s website by its editor, John Mulholland, after readers (and his editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger) complained – a quite astonishing failure of editorial nerve. I’m with Suzanne and Julie on this one: however misunderstood and oppressed you are, you don’t Tweet rape threats to the birds.

But the SWP sexual assault scandal has wider ramifications. The story is simple. Some years ago, a woman member of the party complained of sexual harassment by a party bigwig – and last year she accused him of rape. The party referred the case to its disputes committee, the members of which were friends of the accused; and the committee conducted a slapdash inquiry and found the accusation not proven. It then reported its verdict to a closed session of the party’s conference in early January – which voted to accept it, but only by the narrowest of margins.

Then the shit hit the fan. A transcript of the conference debate on the disputes committee report was sent to the Socialist Unity website by a party member disgusted by the leadership’s lack of openness on the case. This in turn was the cue for several resignations and a spate of polemics from suddenly dissident SWPers – prominent among them the writers Richard Seymour and China Miéville – loudly denouncing the party leadership they had supported unswervingly for years. The hypocrisy is breath-taking, but never mind. The SWP is now in what looks like a terminal crisis.

So what, you might think. But although the SWP doesn’t matter much, it does matter. Until this latest scandal, it was the sole survivor of the Leninist far left in Britain that could claim to be more than a website or a network of old comrades in their fifties with salaried positions in the labour movement, academia, the media and various pressure groups (though of course it was that too). Since the early 1990s the SWP has been the biggest faction on the far left in Britain (which isn't saying much: its membership is almost certainly less than 2,000).

It was a beneficiary of the implosion of its competitors. The Communist Party of Great Britain split during the 1980s. The Eurocommunist majority abandoned Leninism to create Democratic Left (which dwindled to nothing, changed its name twice and handed over what remained of the Moscow gold to a constitutional reform pressure group). The CPGB’s Stalinist minority regrouped in the tiny Communist Party of Britain, most of whose members are now pensioners. A little later, the SWP’s main rival on the Trotskyist left, the Militant Tendency, went into catastrophic decline after it was expelled from the Labour Party (except briefly in Scotland, where it was the core of the Scottish Socialist Party until its charismatic leader Tommy Sheridan fell from grace, though that’s another story).

During the 1990s, the SWP recruited a swathe of leftists left homeless by New Labour, and after Labour won in 1997 made an opening to its rivals, setting up a party to fight elections, the Socialist Alliance, with Militant (by then the Socialist Party of England and Wales), which contested the 2001 general election. The SA won nothing, and meanwhile the brains behind the SWP got old and died: Tony Cliff (2000), Duncan Hallas (2002), Paul Foot (2004).

The SWP terminated the great Trot love-in amid recriminations, but after 9/11, the SWP threw itself into anti-war activism – and found itself new allies in the form of the Muslim Association of Britain and the maverick pro-Saddam Hussein Labour MP George Galloway. The result, after Galloway’s expulsion from Labour in 2003, was the creation of another new electoral party, Respect, which did very well for Gorgeous George, who won Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005, but not so well for the SWP, which got few recruits from the initiative and a lot of ridicule for cosying up to barmy reactionary Islamists.

The SWP left Respect and jettisoned the two leading figures most responsible for the Islamist turn, John Rees and Lindsay German, who now run a website-cum-party called Counterfire. It was obvious when they left that the party was in trouble, but it still dominated the far-left scene: every union branch had a resident SWPer. Now the party is a laughing-stock: no one will even talk to them after all this. I’m not mourning, but it’s worth noting. British Leninism is finished.

EU SHOULD TELL CAMERON TO GET LOST

What the EU needs right now is more integration – a Eurozone-wide tax-and-spend regime to mitigate the impact of the single currency and democratic institutions to run it. David Cameron's proposal for Britain to become a free-rider with access to the common market but able to undercut everyone else on workers' rights and to evade regulation on everything from banking to the environment deserves nothing but contempt. Our European partners should – and probably will – tell him where to stick it. And we don't need a referendum on Europe, or indeed on anything else. Ed Miliband has called this one perfectly.

THE MAN WHO GOT IT WRONG

I've no desire to speak ill of the dead, but William Rees-Mogg, who has just died, was the Man Who Got Everything Wrong. He was a great modernising editor of the Times. More than anyone else, he turned it into a modern broadsheet paper between the late 1960s and early 1980s: it stopped being fuddy-duddy and dull and put on circulation.

But after he left the chair, is there anything he got right? His columns in the Independent and later in the Times were fuddy-duddy and dull and became a laughing-stock because of his enthusiasm for ill-informed predictions – Private Eye taunted him as "Mystic Mogg" – but they never went away. He was wrong about everything imaginable, from the state of the world economy and other geopolitical issues right down to the minutiae of arts policy, and was wrong so barmily and systematically that his column became a must-read for anyone with a taste for comedy. We need another chief establishment chump, and we need one now.

REMEMBER WHAT WE DON'T KNOW

Can you imagine what it's like to be in the bunker with Bashar Al-Assad? I can, but it's not journalism. As his regime crumbles – or does Russian military aid keep it going? – all the user-generated-content new-media palaver shows only that his regime is brutal and cynically prepared to do anything to stay in power. We've got more pictures than we're used to. Some of them are shocking. But are we any better informed about what is actually going than the outside world was in 1917 about the October revolution in Russia? We're not, and technology will never replace journalists on the ground. Where is the correspondent with Assad's ear?

DEVIANTS LAUNCH NEW BOOK IMPRINT

Aaaargh! Press, a new Brit alternative small press, is celebrating its birth with a party in London next month to mark the publication of its first titles, Reaching for my Gnu by Anna Chen (Kindle e-book and paperback) and The Guitar Geek Dossier by Charles Shaar Murray (Kindle e-book only for now).

Reaching for my Gnu, a collection of poems by British-Chinese poet and performer Anna Chen is available as a paperback here for £9.99 and as a Kindle e-book here for £1.99.

'Brilliant and dangerous ... one wild-ride roller-coaster that soars to altitudes of unfettered wit and then plunges with a startling and implacably knowing anger' MICK FARREN

'Superb' GREG PALAST

'Charming, witty and sophisticated' SUNDAY TIMES

The Guitar Geek Dossier, an author's-choice collection of columns from Guitarist by legendary music journalist Charles Shaar Murray is available as a Kindle e-book here for £1.99.

'The Johnny Cash of rock journalism' PHIL CAMPBELL, MOTORHEAD

'The rock critic’s rock critic' Q MAGAZINE

'Front-line cultural warrior' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

Charles is author of Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix And Post-war Pop and Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century (both Canongate). His first novel, The Helhound Sample, was published by Head Press in 2011.



The details of the launch party, which will be something to remember, will be posted here and on the official Aaaargh! Press website very soon.

CENSUS LATEST

We're winning! "No religion" up from 15 per cent in the 2001 census to 25 per cent in 2011! 

BY-ELECTION FOOTNOTES

A few points to add to what has already been said elsewhere:

1. As everyone says, the Croydon North, Middlesbrough and Rotherham by-elections were good for Labour (as indeed were Cardiff South, Corby and Manchester Central earlier in the month) – but it wasn’t just because Labour won what had been safe seats. Most importantly, in Rotherham and Croydon North it saw off what ambushed it in Bradford West, a populist-left challenge from Respect, and it did so convincingly.
2. Respect was written off by most commentators after the 2010 general election – but it sprang miraculously from the dead when George Galloway won Bradford West in March. It is not going to get a better shot at replicating that than Rotherham – a disgraced Labour MP, a large Muslim population, momentum from Bradford West. But it failed. Its performance (just over 8 per cent for Yvonne Ridley) was good for a far-left party historically (anything over 5 per cent is) but poor given everything that it thought was going in its favour. And 707 votes for Lee Jasper (and sixth place behind the Green) in Croydon North was risible. Respect is now nothing more than George Galloway’s personal political machine.
3. UKIP did well, but the hype should be kept in perspective. New insurgent parties have actually won by-elections in the past rather than celebrate their best performance as coming a distant second with 22 per cent of the vote. UKIP has a long way to go before matching the Scottish National Party in Motherwell in 1945, let alone the Social Democratic Party in Crosby in 1981.
4. The real danger from these by-elections is that they encourage Labour to adopt an even more opportunist populist approach to Europe and immigration than hitherto because that’s where the voters are. In Rotherham, more than one-third of those who voted chose candidates to the right of the Tories on Europe and immigration – and Labour’s focus groups are jammed with people moaning about bloody foreigners coming over here from eastern Europe, taking our jobs and houses and scrounging on the dole. The Labour leadership is of a generation that listens to the focus groups then works out what it believes – and Ed Miliband, despite his coherent though hardly inspiring speech in favour of remaining part of Europe the other week, has not broken the habit of telling people what the focus-group analysts think they want to hear. I’m afraid I expect a lot of Labour attempts to hijack UKIP themes over the next few months.
5. It's utterly disgraceful that there was not a proper by-election news programme on the BBC last night or for the previous round of by-elections. If the public service remit of the BBC means anything, it is that it reports the proceedings of British democracy. Last night, the Croydon Advertiser's blogger beat the BBC to the Croydon North result (though he or she got a lot of the figures wrong) and the BBC didn't run a comprehensive report on the results until 40 minutes after the declaration. It was better by far in the good old days of Vincent Hanna and sing-songs round the piano with Larry Whitty.

THE GUARDIAN NEEDS A PLAN B

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 30 November 2012

Management and unions at the Guardian and the Observer are set for an almighty confrontation after management this month announced the start of compulsory redundancy proceedings in order to get rid of 100 journalists out of 600-odd on staff.

Guardian News and Media management claims that it needs 100 to go to save £7 million a year – and that only 30 have offered themselves for voluntary severance. After years of job cuts that have seen some 250 editorial staff leave voluntarily, management says that GNM is losing £44 million a year.

GNM journalists say that the losses have nothing to do with editorial over-staffing and everything to do with a misguided commercial strategy. Rather than getting rid of journalists, they say that GNM needs to rethink its commitment to offering all content for free online and to reduce spending on exorbitant management salaries and expensive marketing gimmicks.

The Guardian is no stranger to financial crisis. Until the 1980s, it relied on a subsidy from its sister paper, the Manchester Evening News, to cover its losses – and in the 1960s its management got so jittery that they seriously considered a merger with the Times. Nothing came of it, the MEN continued to pay the bills, and the Guardian put on circulation and cornered the market in advertising for media and public-sector jobs. By the late 1980s, after production costs (and printers’ jobs) were slashed by the introduction of new technology, the Guardian was making money. For a good 15 years it enjoyed a commercial golden age. The Guardian Media Group bought the Observer in 1993 and took over Auto Trader, the profitable used car listing magazine, then in the mid-noughties paired up with a venture capitalist firm for a leveraged buy-out of the magazine company EMAP.

So what has gone wrong? The easy answer is the internet and recession. The internet allows us all to access what news we want online for free, so we don’t buy newspapers as much. It is also how we find out about jobs (and houses and cars) and increasingly how we buy consumer goods. All this means there’s less advertising for print publications. And in a recession advertisers cut back on spending and readers buy fewer newspapers.

This is a challenging environment for all newspapers. With print advertising and sales on the slide, they need to find new revenue streams. And that is what the Guardian has failed to do.

It embraced the internet early, and by 2000 its online audience was bigger than that of any newspaper in Britain – with the website attracting increasing traffic from the US. While other newspapers tried paywalls or limited access to their print versions, the Guardian made everything free to all. The hope was that before long the site would attract sufficient online ad revenues to make up for any fall in sales and print advertising.

But the online advertising has not materialised – or at least not in sufficient quantity. At which point, you might think, the old adage “If you’re in a hole, stop digging” might come into play. Not a bit of it. The Guardian management has stuck to plan A – pour money into online in the hope that web advertising comes to the rescue – with messianic zeal, declaring its strategy to be “digital first”, pouring cash into a new US office in an attempt to establish the Guardian as a genuinely global brand and embracing what editor Alan Rusbridger calls “open journalism”, roughly speaking the idea that the barrier between journalists and reader-contributors will be broken down by digital interactivity.

Its commitment was epitomised by its vastly expensive TV advertising campaign earlier this year, an animation showing a zippy online Guardian awash with user-generated content retelling the fairy story of the three little pigs. Much praised by the ad industry, it had no effect on print sales, but that didn’t stop the man behind it, David Pemsel, being taken on as GNM’s commercial supremo this autumn. Meanwhile, the message from the Guardian to advertisers remains that its online reach is stupendous – but advertisers just won’t pay very much for digital ads.

Of course, GNM needs to stop haemorrhaging money. But getting rid of journalists really isn’t the best way to do it. The work they produce is the main reason people buy the Guardian and Observer and visit the website – not the user-generated content or the dating agency or the coolness of the brand or the interactivity of the mobile apps. I’m not surprised that they’re up in arms and demanding a plan B.

HOW INDEPENDENT IS INDEPENDENT?

There are two big stories about the police and crime commissioner elections: the low turnout, and the success of 12 independents (out of 41 commissioners elected).

The low turnout is hardly surprising – but the success of the independents is, at least on first sight. Other than in local elections in some rural areas where "independent" means "Tory by another name", independents win UK elections only in freakish circumstances.

So why the 12 independent successes in the PCC elections? What's common to all of the independents is the pledge to keep politics out of policing. As any Marxist fule kno, that's a false prospectus, because  policing is intensely political: you can't take the politics out of decisions about how to police industrial disputes, demonstrations, civil disobedience, immigration, terrorism, hate speech, state secrets, drugs, business malpractice, domestic violence, prostitution, deviant sexualities, you name it. The problem, of course, is that most people aren't interested in this sort of stuff most of the time: they just want the cops to stop other people nicking and damaging their personal possessions and behaving in violent and threatening ways towards them. What could be political, let alone party-political about that?

So that's the appeal, and with very low turnout the independents tapped into the common sense of prioritising  stopping the stuff everyone wants stopped, with varying degrees of genuflection to social inclusivity and due process.

But the independents aren't really very independent. There's at least one former Tory and one actual Lib Dem among them, and nearly all have been cops, magistrates or members of police authorities. They are policing insiders to a man and woman – as indeed are most of the Labour and Tory PCCs elected on Thursday – and it's difficult to imagine them playing any roles other than cheerleading for their chief constables or populist showboating. Would any of them have stood up to denounce systemic corruption in the Met, or the Hillsborough cover-up, or Orgreave? If police accountability is the goal, this isn't the way to do it.

UNIVERSITIES: A CASE OF MARKET FAILURE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 2 November 2012 

It is, I admit, difficult to feel sympathy for the Russell Group of elite universities. Its 24 members – Oxford, Cambridge, most of the University of London and a handful of other institutions, which between them scoop up more than 80 per cent of higher-education research funding – have a deserved reputation for special pleading. The Russell Group universities enthusiastically embraced Labour’s introduction of student loans and the current coalition government’s move to make higher education entirely student-debt-funded by hiking fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year for undergraduates.

We’ll be all right, they said, and sod the rest. But now, it seems, they’re starting to have second thoughts. Last week, the director of the Russell Group, Wendy Piatt, told a BBC Radio Four documentary that its members have taken a hit of £80 million in lost income because of the shortfall in student recruitment caused by the increase in student fees.

And if they’re hurting, just think of the non-elite universities. The Russell Group have been the main beneficiaries of the government’s decision to relax recruitment controls and allow higher education institutions to recruit as many students as they want with top A-level grades.

The recruitment figures for “post-1992” universities – the former polytechnics – are not yet available. But all the anecdotal evidence suggests a slump in numbers that threatens the viability of many courses and departments. Universities are in crisis as a consequence of a half-arsed government policy, even the posh ones. And last week, a projection by the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think tank, suggested that there is a £1 billion “black hole” in the government’s calculations of its likely income from the repayment of student loans because of ludicrous optimism about graduates’ pay in the future. They didn’t think this one through.

I’ve been teaching journalism at various higher education outfits for more than 20 years, and so far there is no sign of any collapse in demand for journalism courses – which is a relief for me but also a concern, because there aren’t many jobs in journalism right now.

Yes, there are opportunities for young journos with the right skills. I’m as committed as ever to getting talented working-class and ethnic-minority kids into the business. My students today are as good as any I’ve had. But I’m worried that the pell-mell expansion of HE journalism training over the past two decades – driven by an extraordinary boom in journalism employment from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s – has gone too far. I had a particularly brilliant group that finished a university course I ran two years ago that I thought would take over Fleet Street: they’ve done well, but they’re mostly not working in journalism. I wouldn’t go as far as a former colleague, who described the journalism training business as “a giant Ponzi scheme”, but we’re training too many journalists today, and that’s not responsible (even if it pays my mortgage).

It’s not quite as ridiculous as pathology, which, as a result of the popularity of TV crime dramas featuring forensic scientists, has seen an increase in the number qualifying as pathologists rising from five 10 years ago to more than 400 – prompting the vice-president of the Royal College of Patholgists, Suzy Lishman, to tell the Times the other week: “If all these young people want a job when they qualify, at least half will have to retrain as mass murderers.”

But the brutal fact is that it is senseless to organise higher education on front-end market demand: particularly with vocational courses, what seems sexy now won’t be so hot in three years. It’s essential to plan ahead with an eye on the employment market.

OK, there will always be a lag and some guesswork, but there is a role for the person in Whitehall who knows better than 18-year-olds who want to be Julian Assange or the star in a TV cop show.

That isn’t, however, the only problem. Just as idiotic as allowing the passing fancies of 18-year-olds to determine the shape of higher education, the way the worth of university teachers and courses is now assessed is a tick-box questionnaire that all undergraduates get before they do their finals, the National Student Survey. A bad NSS is higher-education death – even though it is usually the result of cock-ups and foibles: one lecturer is parachuted in and pitches the lectures too high or low for the students, another is a particularly tough marker, another has a cohort of students he or she fails to enthuse after a badly judged first lecture.

I’ve been all those, and I regret nothing apart from the stupidity of university managements who accept the tick-box questionnaire as the last word. I’ve never handed out over-generous marks to keep students quiet in the NSS, but I know plenty of lecturers that do. The NSS means grade inflation and falling standards.
And it doesn’t empower students a jot.

I know it’s old-fashioned, but what Britain’s universities need now is national planning, professional independence for lecturers and funding from general taxation. Marketisation has been a disaster. It privileges the stupid wannabe and the whinger above all others. Time for a change: politics back in command.

THE EU BUDGET SHOULD GROW

It fits with the unpopularity of all things European among British voters, but the enthusiasm of Ed Balls and Douglas Alexander for cutting the EU budget is a mistake. Europe does need to cut  its subsidies for agriculture, but more importantly it needs a massive increase in it structural funds to develop the infrastructure of its poorest areas (some of which are in Britain). Europe-wide super-big-state top-down Keynesian infrastructure spending could work wonders in bringing the continent out of recession, and that's what Labour should be saying. I really get the sense that they've spent so much time looking at what focus groups are saying that they've completely lost the policy plot.

BLOGGING IS SO NOUGHTIES

It's hardly earth-shattering news, but the Orwell Prize has decided not to award a blogger next year. Its chair, Jean Seaton, explains in a piece on the Guardian's Comment is Free website here:

Blogging has evolved so rapidly over the past five years that it is no longer one thing. Many of our shortlisted bloggers have migrated to journalism, writing books and becoming (in ConservativeHome for example) political powers in the land. They have become insiders not outsiders. And as newspapers, periodicals, individual journalists and broadcasting have rapidly converged, everyone is a blogger now. As the press heads online, blogging is dissolving. While there is a community of independent blogging voices, their form has grown up. Blogging is no longer a thing but a glorious bouquet of things.

She's right about how blogging has become part of the mainstream media -- and I know how fraught the process of judging blogs has been for the Orwell Prize, a tiny outfit with minimal resources that puts on dazzling highbrow public events. (The most recent of them was last night's debate at the Frontline Club to launch the 2013 prize, which turned into a multi-expert and extraordinarily frank discussion of Muslim-Asian child sex abuse, though it was billed as being on policing.)

I'm sad, however, that the Orwell Prize has dropped its blog award. I don't have a dog in this race: I've been blogging 10 years but most of what I've posted for the past five is what I've written for dead-trees publications. I've been aware for rather a long time that blogging is firing out missives that will be read by very few people, even if you use Facebook and Twitter to publicise your efforts.

But ... self-publishing online is now established and important even if it ain't what we dreamed of in 2002. The best of it should be rewarded.

A POOR EFFORT

I wasn't exactly waiting with bated breath for David Cameron's Tory conference speech today, but I was expecting something rather better than the boilerplate nonsense he delivered. I'm sure there are a couple of soundbites that can be retrieved for news programmes this evening, but it was a pedestrian performance aimed at the conference hall rather than the electorate, retelling old tales and repeating old tropes. If this was a relaunch, it never even got into orbit. How he can have managed at once to look less managerial than Boris Johnson and less charismatic than Ed Miliband is a source of wonder. Long may it continue.

KILL A BURGLAR, WIN A METRO

It's been back to the eighties at the Tory conference so far. The opinion polls and focus groups show middle-class swing voters angry about immigration, crime and scroungers -- so the Tories are targeting them with some extraordinarily crude messages, the most idiotic of which so far has been Chris Grayling's endorsement of the householder's right to shoot a burglar. This is utterly desperate stuff. "Kill the burglar!" might have made a line in a Smiths' song 30 years ago (it didn't, but it works very well in "Panic" instead of "Hang the DJ"), but it's so removed from everyday life as experienced by most Brits as to be ridiculous as a party policy. Boris Johnson was asinine, and if he's the Tories' best hope they should give up on general elections for 15 years. David Cameron has a big job to rescue this conference from disaster tomorrow.

ABUSE WE MISSED

The story that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile was widespread even in the mid-1970s: I remember being told as a teenager by one of my schoolmates that he had a particular enthusiasm not for young girls but for paraplegic boys -- hence his enthusiastic support for Stoke Mandeville. None of my schoolmates had any media connections, as far as I'm aware, or any direct experience of Savile: the story had spread by word of mouth, and had been improved in the telling, no doubt, throughout teenage Britain. As such it was rumour, and no one could publish without evidence. But it was so pervasive that the failure of the newspapers or broadcasters to investigate -- or to publish or air after investigation -- is quite scandalous. I'm with Suzanne Moore: you can't claim it was simply a matter of different times and different mores. Savile's victims weren't groupies who wanted a piece of the action with the star -- which is maybe stupid and sad but at least consensual -- they were molested by a trusted children's TV presenter who bathed in the star's reflected glory, as Savile himself seems to have known. It's not quite the same as priests abusing kids, but it's in the same territory.

There are excellent pieces from my good comrades Padraig Reidy, Anna Chen, Suzanne Moore, Nick Cohen, Charles Shaar Murray

ONE NATION UNDER A GEEK

I'm late on this, because I've only just watched that Ed Miliband speech in full. But here we go:

• It was very good as a performance, but the ability to memorise a speech and ad lib a little without notes is not that remarkable. Actors, stand-up comedians and teachers do it all the time.
• There wasn't anything new in it. Not that there needed to be – the business of political communications is endless repetition –  and what Miliband had to do was prove he was a man of the people, or at least a man capable of communicating with the people, which he did.
• The "One Nation" theme is at once inspired and dangerous. "One Nation Labour" is as good as "New Labour" in suggesting a fresh start, a break with a damaged reputation, and there's just about enough in the tag to give the impression that Labour is now with everyone but the super-rich, which is what it needs to do: it can't win unless it convinces people who see themselves as middle-class (even if they're actually wage-slaves). It's also a clever piece of political larceny: "One Nation" is a Tory slogan with its origins in Benjamin Disraeli's daring gamble that enfranchising a patriotic imperialist working class  –  or at least some of it  – would benefit his party. (I simplify, but that's the basic story.)
• The problem is that it's as vulnerable as David Cameron's claim that "we're all in this together": unless it's fleshed out in credible policy, it's no more than warm words. And Labour is all over the place on what it wants to do. On one hand, the top rate of tax goes up if Labour wins (cheers from the left); on the the other, the welfare budget will be cut (cheers from the right). It would be idiotic to make firm promises this far from a general election, but Miliband's speech gave no one any idea even about the policy framework he'd be using as prime minister. There is a lot more work to be done.

LET THE LIB DEMS STEW

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 5 October 2012

There was a time, not so long ago, when I was all in favour of co-operation between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. From the early 1990s until 2007, I couldn’t see fundamental ideological differences between the two parties – and thought that the Lib Dems’ enthusiasm for Europe, proportional representation and civil liberties, and their caution on foreign military adventures, might be good influences on Labour. I annoyed Tribune readers during the 2001 and 2005 general election campaigns by arguing for tactical voting against the Tories – which was, I admit, my intention.

Two things changed my mind: the refusal of the then leader of the Lib Dems, Menzies Campbell, to consider the offer of cabinet seats soon after Gordon Brown became prime minister in summer 2007; and the election of Nick Clegg as Lib Dem leader after Campbell resigned later that year.

Clegg was the real decider for me. He was an ambitious young politician – elected to parliament for the first time in 2005 – who had been one of the moving spirits behind the Orange Book, a collection of essays published in 2004 that marked a concerted attempt to shift the Lib Dems from the social-democratic ground they’d occupied since their creation into small-state free-market liberalism.

 I twigged that Clegg would go with the Tories pretty much from the start, though I was surprised at the alacrity with which he concluded the coalition deal in 2010 and initially almost as surprised at the concessions he appeared to have got from David Cameron.

 Today, it’s clear that the deal has gone horribly wrong for the Lib Dems. As Polly Toynbee and David Walker make clear in their scathing new book on the coalition, Dogma and Disarray, the one thing they got from the Tories that has actually come to pass, the raising of income-tax thresholds, isn’t particularly progressive, and every one of the Lib Dems’ much-vaunted political reforms – electoral reform for the House of Commons, a largely elected second chamber, reform of political funding – is dead.

Orange Book liberalism has turned the Lib Dems into foot-soldiers for the most right-wing government since 1945, a national coalition like that of the 1930s, making similar policy mistakes.

And now, well, the reckoning. Left-leaning voters have long-since abandoned the Lib Dems: the party has been on 10 per cent or thereabouts in the opinion polls for nearly two years and shows no sign of recovery. Last week’s Lib Dem conference in Brighton was a sorry spectacle, Clegg’s leader’s speech the worst at any conference since Iain Duncan Smith’s “quiet man” performance 10 years ago. There’s still talk about Clegg being usurped by Vince Cable, but Cable’s time has run out: he’ll be 73 by the time of the next election if it happens as planned in 2015. And otherwise the Lib Dems have the lovely Christopher Huhne – who is still embroiled in a ludicrous legal action with his ex-wife – and, er, that’s just about it. Paddy Ashdown might just give them some credibility, but he’s the same age as Cable. And as for Simon Hughes …

The desperation of the Lib Dems’ plight has given rise to merriment in Labour ranks, which I share to some extent. They got themselves into this mess, and it’s down to them to get themselves out of it.

But a few words of caution. First, a collapse of the Lib Dem vote will benefit the Tories more than Labour, even without boundary changes or a Tory-Lib Dem electoral pact. Except in a handful of seats they hold, Lib Dem MPs face Tories as their main challengers. If Ukip supporters vote Tory at a general election and the Lib Dems plunge, the Tories get a lot more seats.

Second, it’s still not impossible that the Tories and Lib Dems will agree a pact before the next general election. All the talk in the past couple of weeks has been about how the Lib Dems are differentiating themselves from the Tories and possibly preparing for life in a centre-left coalition – but that isn’t their only option by any means. The Tories and Lib Dems could still arrange a non-aggression agreement on sitting MPs, for example, and the temptation to do so will increase every month that the opinion polls show the Tories well below what they need to win an outright victory and the Lib Dems heading for a parliamentary party that can fit in the back of a London cab.

Labour has to keep open the option of co-operation with the Lib Dems after the next general election – and it would be sensible to have a plan for a possible coalition ready to roll if needs be in 2015. But it would be idiotic to cosy up to Clegg or Cable right now. Let them stew, and see how it goes.

OBITUARY: ERIC HOBSBAWM

Tribune, 5 October 2012

Eric Hobsbawm, who has died at the age of 95, was the last survivor of an extraordinary generation of British Marxist historians who first developed their ideas in the late 1940s and early 1950s as members of the Communist Party Historians Group – among them Christopher Hill, Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Raphael Samuel. John Saville and George Rude. The group broke up after its majority left the Communist Party in protest at the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 – but Hobsbawm stuck to the CP to the very bitter end in 1991, and never apologised for his decision to do so.

Perhaps it had something to do with his experience as an adolescent. Born into a Jewish family in Egypt in 1917, he spent his early childhood in Vienna before his parents died and he moved to Berlin with an uncle – where he witnessed at first hand the violence of the Nazi party as it rose to power, escaping to Britain in 1933. The story is told well in his 2002 memoir, Interesting Times.

For Hobsbawm, until his death, the hopes of 1917 and the role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of fascism always still trumped the crimes of the Soviet regime, and there was little in 20th-century history (pre-1956 at least) on which he did not take a line that in the end was sympathetic to the official Soviet position at the time. He remained hostile to the anarchists in the Spanish civil war and the 1956 revolutionaries in Hungary and evasive about the Moscow show trials and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939-41 even in his most recent writing.

But he was much more than an apologist for Stalinism. In the CP after 1956, though hardly an active member, he took a reform-communist position, criticising the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 and then in the 1970s becoming the leading Anglophone advocate of the Eurocommunism of the Italian Communist Party. He and Stuart Hall played a crucial role in developing a left critique of the militant workerism of the traditional left in the Labour Party, the CP and the trade unions in the dying days of the 1974-79 Labour government, which in turn inspired both the Labour soft left and the Eurocommunist magazine Marxism Today in the 1980s – though the idea that he was somehow responsible for New Labour is quite ridiculous (and something he rejected).

What he will be remembered for above all are his books on world history, epic works of synthesis covering giant swaths of time and geography but never lacking in telling anecdotes. Whatever their lacunae, they are brilliant accounts of the growth and crises of global capitalism.

But just as thrilling are Hobsbawm’s more focused works, essays on small aspects of social history that are an utter delight to read even when they’re wrong.

Hobsbawm’s students remember him as kind and generous as a teacher, and he was indeed a lovely man. He will always be a subject of controversy because he never said sorry for being a communist. But he will be missed.

THAT CUBA FEELING

Red Pepper, October-November 2012

Fifty years ago this October the world watched, seemingly powerless to do anything as a US-Soviet stand-off brought us close to nuclear Armageddon. PAUL ANDERSON looks at what has happened with nuclear disarmament in the half century since

On 14 October 1962, a US Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane flew over Cuba taking photographs of the ground below. The next day, Central Intelligence Agency analysts examined the pictures – and concluded that they showed the construction of a launch site for Soviet missiles, confirming their suspicions that Moscow was creating a nuclear forward base in the Caribbean.

Thus began the Cuban missile crisis – a 13-day stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union that brought the world closer to all-out nuclear war than at any time before or since.

US president John F Kennedy spent the best part of a week working out how to respond. He was still smarting from the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, the unsuccessful US-backed Cuban-exile invasion of the island in 1961 to overthrow Fidel Castro’s by then pro-Soviet revolutionary regime, and he resisted pressure from hawks to launch an immediate invasion. But the strategy he eventually adopted was high-risk. The US imposed a naval blockade on Cuba and promised not to invade if Moscow withdrew its missiles – but backed up the offer with a secret ultimatum threatening immediate invasion if it did not comply, with the only sweetener a secret promise to withdraw US nuclear missiles from Italy and Turkey.

Both superpowers put their military forces on full alert, and for a week it seemed to the whole world that nuclear Armageddon was imminent. Nikita Khrushchev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denounced the naval blockade in fiery language; the United Nations security council met in emergency session and resolved nothing; a Soviet surface-to-air missile shot down an American U-2 over Cuba …

But then Khrushchev blinked. Out of the blue, he agreed to Kennedy’s deal: no Soviet missiles in Cuba, no American missiles in Turkey or Italy. At the time, because the US withdrawal of missiles from Turkey and Italy was not made public, it looked like a straightforward Soviet climbdown – and Khrushchev’s authority in domestic Soviet politics took a blow from which it never recovered: he was ousted two years later. Kennedy won, but he did not live long to savour his victory – he was assassinated in November 1963 – and the hubris that the successful resolution of the crisis instilled in the American establishment played a disastrous role in escalating US intervention in Vietnam.

Britain and CND

Britain was not an actor in the missile crisis. Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government was kept in the dark by the Kennedy administration in its early stages. Macmillan privately expressed polite concern to Kennedy that the US might be going too far in ratcheting up the confrontation with the Soviets – he was worried most of all by the implications for West Berlin, which he feared could be subjected to another Soviet blockade or even invasion – but in public he gave robust support to the Americans.

For the British people, the problem was not the future of Berlin but what appeared to be the strong possibility of nuclear war. Newspaper circulations soared as, day by day, tension mounted.

But the crisis didn’t benefit the movement for nuclear disarmament. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in early 1958 with the support of the Labour left and its weekly papers, the New Statesman and Tribune, had enjoyed a spectacular political success in 1960, when its lobbying of trade unions and constituency Labour parties led to the Labour conference adopting a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament, against the histrionic opposition of the party leader, Hugh Gaitskell. But Gaitskell and his allies had overturned unilateralism at the next year’s conference – and the CND leadership subsequently found itself without a viable political strategy and facing a barrage of criticism from activists for putting all its energies into Labour. By 1962, its influence was on the wane.

There was still life in the peace movement. CND’s Easter 1962 annual march from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment to London attracted 150,000 to its closing rally, its biggest ever crowd. But the impact of the Cuban crisis was demobilising. On one hand, it showed the futility of demonstrating – and on the other it showed that the leaders of the superpowers were not in the end prepared to launch a nuclear war. Activists drifted away from the movement; the nuclear powers agreed a Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 that seemed to indicate there was hope of multilateral nuclear disarmament by negotiation; and by 1964, when Labour won a general election under Harold Wilson, the movement for British unilateral nuclear disarmament was part of the past. Its activists moved on, to housing campaigns, workplace militancy and opposition to the US war in Vietnam.

The second wave

CND kept going as a small pressure group with a few thousand members through the 1960s and 1970s, a forlorn survivor that few thought would again play a significant role. Meanwhile, international nuclear diplomacy ground on. The Partial Test-Ban Treaty was followed by the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which committed non-nuclear states to remaining non-nuclear and nuclear states to keeping nuclear know-how to themselves (though its impact was limited because India, Pakistan and Israel refused to sign and subsequently developed their own nuclear weapons). The two superpowers negotiated interminably, reaching significant agreements on limiting strategic nuclear forces and anti-ballistic missile systems in 1972 (SALT-1 and the ABM treaty) and a further agreement on strategic arms in 1979 (SALT-2), though it was not ratified by the US Congress.

But then everything changed. What had seemed to be an inexorable process of winding down the cold war – the 1970s saw not only nuclear arms agreements but also the Helsinki accords guaranteeing borders in Europe and respect for human rights – suddenly went into reverse. In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Days later, Nato announced that it would be deploying new American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe – cruise and Pershing 2– if Moscow did not withdraw its own new-generation intermediate-range missiles from Europe. The Nato announcement thrust nuclear arms into the political limelight for the first time since the Cuba crisis. One man in particular made the running in Britain, the historian E P Thompson. He wrote a furious polemical piece for the New Statesman; followed it with a pamphlet for CND, Protest and Survive, excoriating the government’s asinine advice on how to cope with a nuclear war; then, with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others, launched the European Nuclear Disarmament Appeal, a manifesto for a ‘nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal’. By summer 1980 – when the Thatcher government announced that it would be replacing Britain’s ageing Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles with American Trident SLBMs – anti-nuclear protest groups had sprung up throughout Britain and CND was a mass movement again. Labour adopted a non-nuclear defence policy at its autumn 1980 conference; the next month Michael Foot, a founder member of CND, became Labour leader. In 1981, feminist pacifists established a peace camp outside the US base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, where the first batch of cruise missiles would be based.

For the next six years, the movement against nuclear arms was central to politics in Britain. It was huge: at its height in 1983-84, CND estimated that it had 100,000 national members and perhaps 250,000 in affiliated local groups, and its demonstrations were massive, with 300,000 turning out in London in 1983. The movement was also much more sophisticated than in its first wave: there was no serious argument between advocates of working through the Labour Party and proponents of direct action; and END provided it with leadership that could not easily be dismissed as pro-Soviet or hard-left (though the Tory government did its very best to persuade voters otherwise).

But Labour lost the 1983 election; cruise arrived in Britain in 1984; and work started on the Trident submarines. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader and soon made it clear that he wanted an end to the new cold war. Under Neil Kinnock, who succeeded Foot as Labour leader in 1983, Labour stuck to a non-nuclear defence policy through the mid-1980s – but after Labour lost again in 1987, with a new détente apparently in the air and the peace movement much less vocal, he wavered. Gorbachev and US president Ronald Reagan agreed a deal to remove all intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe, codified in the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in December 1987. Kinnock declared that the agreement changed everything and announced the abandonment of the non-nuclear defence policy. It took two attempts to get it through Labour conference, but by the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 Labour was fully signed up to retaining British nuclear arms to resist a threat that had ceased to exist. The dwindling band of peaceniks pointed at the emperor’s new clothes, but no one took any notice.

Disarmament stalls

The INF treaty was signed nearly 25 years ago, and it should have inaugurated an era of nuclear disarmament – particularly after the implosion of the Soviet bloc and Soviet communism between 1989 and 1991. At first it seemed to have done so. In 1991, the US and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-1), and the result, combined with the effect of the INF treaty, was a significant reduction of US and Soviet (after 1991, Soviet successor states’) stockpiles of nuclear warheads: the global total halved by 2000 from 70,000 in 1987.

But the disarmament momentum soon ran out. Russia balked at further reductions of its nuclear weaponry; the US cooled on the whole disarmament process; and the smaller nuclear powers – Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel – either refused to engage or made minimal gestures towards denuclearisation. START-1’s successor, START-2, was signed but not implemented and replaced by an interim Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).

Meanwhile, it became clear that nuclear weapons were not central to the international crises of the time – Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the bloody conflicts in Africa, the rise of al-Qaida, 9/11 and its aftermath – and that insofar as nuclear weapons were an issue the key problem was that the anti-proliferation regime was not working. Iran and North Korea were close to joining India, Pakistan and Israel as nuclear powers – and neither they nor the Indians, Pakistanis or Israelis were prepared to disarm.

US-Russian nuclear arms negotiations have continued: the START process was revived and concluded with a new treaty in 2010, when US president Barack Obama and Russian president Dimitry Medvedev agreed to deep cuts in strategic arsenals. Both Russia and the US have since reduced the number of actively deployed nuclear warheads to 2,000 apiece. But the stockpiles remain frighteningly large. According to the Stockholm Independent Peace Research Institute, the US retains in reserve nearly 6,000 and Russia more than 8,000. The total global warhead count in 2011 was around 20,000, not quite as many as at the time of the Cuba crisis, but not far off.

The nuclear threat now

British anti-nuclear-arms campaigners didn’t give up after 1987. Some went off to create think-tanks, others put their efforts into making CND an alternative foreign policy pressure group. During the 1991 Gulf war, the campaign formed the core of the anti-war movement. Almost simultaneously, however, came a calamitous collapse of membership and an austerity drive that closed down Sanity, its monthly magazine. The organisation never quite went under, but it returned to the margins. Whereas in 1991 it had set the agenda for opposition to the military intervention against Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, a decade later it was reduced to a minor supporting role in the organised opposition to the US and UK military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Nuclear arms are still there, but the politics of nuclear arms has changed. The future of Britain’s own bomb is more at risk from government budget cuts than it ever was from CND-inspired Labour oppositions; and the threat of nuclear war no longer appears to come from a suicide pact between Washington and Moscow. For the past decade or more, the most likely sources of Armageddon have been India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, and North and South Korea – all stand-offs that no one in Britain can realistically hope to influence. That Cuba feeling, that we’re powerless to effect change, is back again, and it’s difficult to see how we can get rid of it.