A small point, but an important one, about the government resignations that have rocked Gordon Brown into meltdown.
So far (as of 11.30am Friday 5 June), apart from Patricia Hewitt and John Hutton, all of them appear to have been severely compromised by the Daily Telegraph's expenses revelations.
And now they have resigned, with most of them making it known that they left because Gordon had been horrid/hates women/is useless, it becomes much more difficult for Labour's NEC panel to haul them in for questioning. "It's not fair!" they will declare. "He's just trying to take revenge!"
Convenient, huh?
5 June 2009
4 June 2009
HEADLESS CHICKENS SHOOTING THEMSELVES IN THE FOOT - 456
The current “febrile atmosphere in Westminster”, as everyone is calling it, is not something I have had the pleasure to witness directly: I’ve been nowhere near parliament for months. But anyone who reads the papers and watches the television news can tell that the Parliamentary Labour Party is in the grip of the most serious of its periodic fits of hysteria for more than 25 years.
The expenses scandal has hit Labour harder than the other parties – partly because it is in government, partly because there is a feeling among traditional Labour supporters that what many MPs have done in claiming expenses to fund property speculation and lavish lifestyles is radically at odds with what Labour should stand for. Gordon Brown has not covered himself in glory in dealing with the problem – though it’s difficult to see what exactly he could have done much better in the circumstances – and as the party faces what looks set to be a drubbing in today’s European and county council elections, two cabinet ministers and two other ministers have resigned from the government in advance of a widely flagged reshuffle. Meanwhile, backbench Labour MPs are trying to put together a petition demanding that Brown stands down now.
I have no more idea than anyone else how this will pan out over the next few days. My hunch is that Brown will neither resign over Labour’s disastrous election performance nor provoke a revolt that forces him out with his reshuffle. He doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t have to go, and there is no alternative Labour leader that opinion polls suggest would rescue Labour from ignominious defeat at a general election.
I hope my hunch is right – not because I think Brown is the right person to lead Labour into the next general election but because it would be utterly stupid for him to stand down now. Labour’s priority for this summer must be to weed out all the MPs who have abused the expenses system and replace them as parliamentary candidates, and a leadership election would prevent that from happening. Can you imagine Labour’s NEC sub-committee calling in alleged expenses fiddlers who are on the campaign teams of would-be leaders? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
What’s more, a new Labour leader elected this summer would be under massive pressure as prime minister from the media and the public to call a general election in autumn – which would be entirely against Labour’s electoral interests. On one hand, the brand would still be toxic because the leadership change had prevented the necessary cleansing of Labour’s parliamentary ranks. On the other, the chances of the economy having picked up sufficiently to provide voters with a reason to return to Labour would be extremely slim.
Gordon should go, but now is not the time. He should oversee a purge this summer, starting with a really brutal cabinet reshuffle to ensure that no one at the top table has dirty hands. Then he should announce his retirement gracefully in his party conference speech in the autumn, offering to stay on as PM until the Labour leadership election is complete to ensure a smooth handover to his successor by Xmas. Whoever took over could then announce a spring general election – and who knows, Labour might not even lose that badly …
Will it happen? I doubt it. But I live in hope.
Right, now off to vote (Labour of course).
The expenses scandal has hit Labour harder than the other parties – partly because it is in government, partly because there is a feeling among traditional Labour supporters that what many MPs have done in claiming expenses to fund property speculation and lavish lifestyles is radically at odds with what Labour should stand for. Gordon Brown has not covered himself in glory in dealing with the problem – though it’s difficult to see what exactly he could have done much better in the circumstances – and as the party faces what looks set to be a drubbing in today’s European and county council elections, two cabinet ministers and two other ministers have resigned from the government in advance of a widely flagged reshuffle. Meanwhile, backbench Labour MPs are trying to put together a petition demanding that Brown stands down now.
I have no more idea than anyone else how this will pan out over the next few days. My hunch is that Brown will neither resign over Labour’s disastrous election performance nor provoke a revolt that forces him out with his reshuffle. He doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t have to go, and there is no alternative Labour leader that opinion polls suggest would rescue Labour from ignominious defeat at a general election.
I hope my hunch is right – not because I think Brown is the right person to lead Labour into the next general election but because it would be utterly stupid for him to stand down now. Labour’s priority for this summer must be to weed out all the MPs who have abused the expenses system and replace them as parliamentary candidates, and a leadership election would prevent that from happening. Can you imagine Labour’s NEC sub-committee calling in alleged expenses fiddlers who are on the campaign teams of would-be leaders? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
What’s more, a new Labour leader elected this summer would be under massive pressure as prime minister from the media and the public to call a general election in autumn – which would be entirely against Labour’s electoral interests. On one hand, the brand would still be toxic because the leadership change had prevented the necessary cleansing of Labour’s parliamentary ranks. On the other, the chances of the economy having picked up sufficiently to provide voters with a reason to return to Labour would be extremely slim.
Gordon should go, but now is not the time. He should oversee a purge this summer, starting with a really brutal cabinet reshuffle to ensure that no one at the top table has dirty hands. Then he should announce his retirement gracefully in his party conference speech in the autumn, offering to stay on as PM until the Labour leadership election is complete to ensure a smooth handover to his successor by Xmas. Whoever took over could then announce a spring general election – and who knows, Labour might not even lose that badly …
Will it happen? I doubt it. But I live in hope.
Right, now off to vote (Labour of course).
21 May 2009
SPEED IS OF THE ESSENCE FOR LABOUR
The Labour National Executive Committee on Monday threw out the proposal to reopen selections for all sitting MPs who have been reselected to stand again at the next general election – which would have been by far the quickest and most sensible way for the party to lance the boil of the parliamentary expenses scandal, as it would be for the other parties.
Instead, there’s going to be an NEC panel to investigate Labour MPs expenses, which will then make recommendations to the NEC, which will then decide on various MPs' fates. (This is not the same thing as the independent investigation of the whole scandal,agreed between the party leaders earlier.)
The details and timescale for this NEC panel are currently vague, but it is imperative that it completes its work very quickly. MPs might complain of summary justice, but it is essential that any necessary disciplinary action takes place in time for constituency Labour parties to choose new candidates over the summer.
This would at least means that Labour could go into its conference - or even an autumn election - with sleaze no longer hanging over it quite so obviously. I don’t think there will be an autumn election, though the current situation is so extraordinary now I wouldn’t rule it out, say if Labour is almost wiped out in the Euroelections or a very big fish is caught in the expenses-fiddling net. But even if Labour manages to carry on until spring next year, it needs to neutralise the expenses story (in so far as it can) as soon as possible if it is not going to suffer utter humiliation at the polls.
Instead, there’s going to be an NEC panel to investigate Labour MPs expenses, which will then make recommendations to the NEC, which will then decide on various MPs' fates. (This is not the same thing as the independent investigation of the whole scandal,agreed between the party leaders earlier.)
The details and timescale for this NEC panel are currently vague, but it is imperative that it completes its work very quickly. MPs might complain of summary justice, but it is essential that any necessary disciplinary action takes place in time for constituency Labour parties to choose new candidates over the summer.
This would at least means that Labour could go into its conference - or even an autumn election - with sleaze no longer hanging over it quite so obviously. I don’t think there will be an autumn election, though the current situation is so extraordinary now I wouldn’t rule it out, say if Labour is almost wiped out in the Euroelections or a very big fish is caught in the expenses-fiddling net. But even if Labour manages to carry on until spring next year, it needs to neutralise the expenses story (in so far as it can) as soon as possible if it is not going to suffer utter humiliation at the polls.
16 May 2009
RE-OPEN NOMINATIONS NOW
The more that has emerged from the Telegraph about MPs' expenses, the clearer it has become that the only way any of the main political parties can hope to recover credibility is to hold new candidate selections in every single seat they hold where the sitting MP has been confirmed as the candidate for the next general election.
If Labour's National Executive Committee goes for anything less when it meets next week it will destroy any chance the party has of avoiding a catastrophic defeat at the next general election.
The parliamentary expense-fiddlers and property speculators need to be cleared out, and the best people to do that in the Labour Party are the members. They know their MPs and they can read.
This isn't ultra-left posturing, it's plain common sense.
If Labour's National Executive Committee goes for anything less when it meets next week it will destroy any chance the party has of avoiding a catastrophic defeat at the next general election.
The parliamentary expense-fiddlers and property speculators need to be cleared out, and the best people to do that in the Labour Party are the members. They know their MPs and they can read.
This isn't ultra-left posturing, it's plain common sense.
15 May 2009
MPS HAVE BEEN TAKING THE PISS
Paul Anderson, Tribune column 15 May 2009
It’s that time of year again. I’ve got to sort out my accounts and file a tax return. I spent hours last weekend sifting through invoices, receipts, bank statements and wage slips, working out what to declare to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs about my freelance income and related expenditure for tax year 2008-09.
I used to hire an accountant to do it, but I realised that he was charging me £500 to fill in a form, so for years I’ve done it myself. It’s a lot easier now than it used to be, partly because I’m not doing as much freelance work as I used to and partly because HMRC has made it easier with self-assessment. Whereas ten years ago the process took three days, this week I did in one.
Believe it or not, I’m meticulously honest about what I declare to the Revenue. That’s not down to asceticism or stupidity: I had a nasty scare 20 years ago after I failed to file a tax return and was threatened with court action for not paying the £12,000 the Revenue told me I owed. It took a lot of grovelling to get out of that, but I learned my lesson. Ever since, I’ve sent the taxman a return soon after the end of the financial year that scrupulously details my economic activity.
Except … well, I do what everyone does. The income is always right, but the tax-deductible expenses are less precise.
I know I can’t claim travel to and from salaried work against tax but can claim travel for freelance jobs. Quite often, I have to go to London to do research as a freelance – but I also travel to London to get to my place of employment or just to go out. Of course, I keep all the ticket receipts, but by the time I do my accounts I can’t remember which was for what journey. Had I gone to the LSE library, or was I off to the Guardian for a shift? Or was that the day I spent canoodling in the park with the nubile Letitia? What the hell, the Revenue isn’t going to know, just put down 25 trips to London that are claimable against tax: it’s about right and I’ve got the paperwork to cover it. And so it goes with the share of the heating bill related to working at home and a whole lot more besides.
In other words, I do a certain amount of estimating, then put the ball into the Revenue’s court. And so far the Revenue has believed me. OK, we’re talking piffling sums – I earned £50,000-odd last year and only £5,000 was from freelancing. It might be that I’m such small fry I’m not worth bothering to catch. I like to think, however, that there is a bond of trust between me and the taxman. He hasn’t a clue what I earn or what I spend, but he accepts what I tell him because I’m not taking the piss.
You can see where this is going. If only our parliamentary representatives had taken a small fraction of the minimal care that most taxpayers take when filling in their tax returns, we wouldn’t now be facing a frighteningly complete collapse of public confidence in the entire political class.
They didn’t, however, and we are. The leaked expenses claims published by the Telegraph show that MPs of all parties have been taking the piss big-time for years.
True, the Telegraph paid for the info. True, the sums are not huge in terms of GDP or Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension – and, given the cost of accommodation in central London, £24,000 a year is not a ridiculously generous sum to allow non-London MPs for nights they have to stay in the capital. True, MPs are not particularly well-paid by comparison with bankers or lawyers. And of course the system for paying MPs’ expenses is absurd – although we only know how absurd thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.
But there really are no acceptable excuses for what so many MPs have done. Four nights a week in a modest hotel, rent on a two-bedroom flat in Pimlico, mortgage interest on a small town house in Kennington – any of that is fine. So too are a cleaner and a bit of gardening and home maintenance. Beyond these basics, however, it’s impossible to see any justification for claiming. Many if not most MPs have used expenses allowances to fund blatant speculation in the housing market, home improvements they could have afforded from their salaries and luxuries that are in no sense related to their work.
On the evidence so far, at least 50 MPs should resign in shame. But I’ll put a tenner on no one doing so (as long as I can claim it on exes).
It’s that time of year again. I’ve got to sort out my accounts and file a tax return. I spent hours last weekend sifting through invoices, receipts, bank statements and wage slips, working out what to declare to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs about my freelance income and related expenditure for tax year 2008-09.
I used to hire an accountant to do it, but I realised that he was charging me £500 to fill in a form, so for years I’ve done it myself. It’s a lot easier now than it used to be, partly because I’m not doing as much freelance work as I used to and partly because HMRC has made it easier with self-assessment. Whereas ten years ago the process took three days, this week I did in one.
Believe it or not, I’m meticulously honest about what I declare to the Revenue. That’s not down to asceticism or stupidity: I had a nasty scare 20 years ago after I failed to file a tax return and was threatened with court action for not paying the £12,000 the Revenue told me I owed. It took a lot of grovelling to get out of that, but I learned my lesson. Ever since, I’ve sent the taxman a return soon after the end of the financial year that scrupulously details my economic activity.
Except … well, I do what everyone does. The income is always right, but the tax-deductible expenses are less precise.
I know I can’t claim travel to and from salaried work against tax but can claim travel for freelance jobs. Quite often, I have to go to London to do research as a freelance – but I also travel to London to get to my place of employment or just to go out. Of course, I keep all the ticket receipts, but by the time I do my accounts I can’t remember which was for what journey. Had I gone to the LSE library, or was I off to the Guardian for a shift? Or was that the day I spent canoodling in the park with the nubile Letitia? What the hell, the Revenue isn’t going to know, just put down 25 trips to London that are claimable against tax: it’s about right and I’ve got the paperwork to cover it. And so it goes with the share of the heating bill related to working at home and a whole lot more besides.
In other words, I do a certain amount of estimating, then put the ball into the Revenue’s court. And so far the Revenue has believed me. OK, we’re talking piffling sums – I earned £50,000-odd last year and only £5,000 was from freelancing. It might be that I’m such small fry I’m not worth bothering to catch. I like to think, however, that there is a bond of trust between me and the taxman. He hasn’t a clue what I earn or what I spend, but he accepts what I tell him because I’m not taking the piss.
You can see where this is going. If only our parliamentary representatives had taken a small fraction of the minimal care that most taxpayers take when filling in their tax returns, we wouldn’t now be facing a frighteningly complete collapse of public confidence in the entire political class.
They didn’t, however, and we are. The leaked expenses claims published by the Telegraph show that MPs of all parties have been taking the piss big-time for years.
True, the Telegraph paid for the info. True, the sums are not huge in terms of GDP or Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension – and, given the cost of accommodation in central London, £24,000 a year is not a ridiculously generous sum to allow non-London MPs for nights they have to stay in the capital. True, MPs are not particularly well-paid by comparison with bankers or lawyers. And of course the system for paying MPs’ expenses is absurd – although we only know how absurd thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.
But there really are no acceptable excuses for what so many MPs have done. Four nights a week in a modest hotel, rent on a two-bedroom flat in Pimlico, mortgage interest on a small town house in Kennington – any of that is fine. So too are a cleaner and a bit of gardening and home maintenance. Beyond these basics, however, it’s impossible to see any justification for claiming. Many if not most MPs have used expenses allowances to fund blatant speculation in the housing market, home improvements they could have afforded from their salaries and luxuries that are in no sense related to their work.
On the evidence so far, at least 50 MPs should resign in shame. But I’ll put a tenner on no one doing so (as long as I can claim it on exes).
10 May 2009
HALLELUJAH, I'M A NEOCON - 2
I discover that my entry on David Miller's disgraceful left-McCarthyite website Neocon Europe, listing supposed "neocons", has been changed after I objected to it.
I am now listed as being "not a neoconservative, though he is involved in a number of organisations linked to neoconservatives such as Democratiya and the Euston Manifesto".
But there is a further page in which I am said to be "involved in pro-war left organisations" – Democratiya and Euston again, though neither is "pro-war" in fact – and am quoted (more-or-less accurately) on various subjects. Then comes an editorial comment:
"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
I am now listed as being "not a neoconservative, though he is involved in a number of organisations linked to neoconservatives such as Democratiya and the Euston Manifesto".
But there is a further page in which I am said to be "involved in pro-war left organisations" – Democratiya and Euston again, though neither is "pro-war" in fact – and am quoted (more-or-less accurately) on various subjects. Then comes an editorial comment:
Anderson's defence of the neoconservative trope of 'Islamic fascism' ignores the reality that this has not been limited to a caricature of authoritarian movements like Al Qaeda, but in the hands of Douglas Murray and others, it has been used to smear Muslim communities as a whole. Nor has its use been limited to an analysis of ideology and practises. Rather, it has been employed in neoconservative propaganda campaigns that sought to portray Iraq as a military threat analogous to Nazi Germany.I don't mind vigorous criticism, but this is bollocks. So – I'm not a neocon but a fellow-traveller who deserves a listing because my arguments objectively play into the hands of the neocons? Get lost, you cretino-leftist, and stop your blacklisting.
"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
BEST COLUMNIST IN THE COUNTRY
My good friend Padraig Reidy from Index on Censorship and I were talking in the pub about columnists last week, and we concurred after 30 seconds that the best in any UK newspaper is DJ Taylor in the Independent on Sunday.
His latest is a gem.He is doing Orwell's "As I Please" better than anyone since Orwell. And I'm not saying that just because I know him very slightly, like him and share many of his enthusiasms (but not Norwich City). This is how to do it!
His latest is a gem.He is doing Orwell's "As I Please" better than anyone since Orwell. And I'm not saying that just because I know him very slightly, like him and share many of his enthusiasms (but not Norwich City). This is how to do it!
9 May 2009
HOLD ON A MINUTE
OK, I know how bad the MPs' expenses claims look. But £24,000 a year as an allowance for accommodation in central London on the money most of them are on seems to me to be about right.
London is bloody expensive. You're not going to get a decent cheap hotel room midweek near Westminster for much less than £120 a night unless you spend hours on the budget hotels' websites -- and it takes only 200 nights in town to make the total allowance.
I'm not defending the disgraceful expenses scams, but why not just give all MPs outside the M25 a £24,000 non-London-weighting supplement and let them spend it as they will?
London is bloody expensive. You're not going to get a decent cheap hotel room midweek near Westminster for much less than £120 a night unless you spend hours on the budget hotels' websites -- and it takes only 200 nights in town to make the total allowance.
I'm not defending the disgraceful expenses scams, but why not just give all MPs outside the M25 a £24,000 non-London-weighting supplement and let them spend it as they will?
4 May 2009
DEAD CANARIES
I have just been informed of a tragic incident last year in which 65 canaries died of asphyxiation while being transported cruelly from their native habitat in Norfolk. There can be few sights more moving than this:
30 April 2009
HALLELUJAH, I'M A NEO-CON - 1
I find that I am on a blacklist here of supposed "neo-conservatives". The perpetrator, David Miller, professor of sociology at the University of Strathclyde, is an utter disgrace.
16 April 2009
TIME FOR LABOUR TO KISS SPIN GOODBYE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 17 April 2009
And there I was thinking the worst was over… As Neil Kinnock would have put it in his pomp, it is difficult to exaggerate how completely, totally and utterly Derek Draper and Damian McBride have let down the Labour Party.
OK, there are questions about how the creepy Tory blogger Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, got hold of the emails the idiots exchanged. OK, the grand plans for a website publishing rumours about the sexual peccadilloes, drug use and mental health of leading Tories and their spouses never came to fruition. OK, it’s hardly Watergate.
All the same, the scandal takes the breath away. To put it bluntly, what the fuck did they think they were doing?
I am absolutely in favour of a full-on anti-Tory attack blog – as it happens, provoked by the oleaginous Dan Hannan’s dissing of the National Health Service on Fox TV the week before last, I was in the process of planning one myself when the scandal broke, though I now think it can wait a bit.
But the way you get at the Tories is not by spreading puerile defamatory personal tittle-tattle. David Cameron’s fitness for office has nothing to do with whether or not or why he visited the clap clinic at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford as a student many years ago: what counts is what a Cameron government would do for the funding of clap clinics. As for the supposed mental instability of a senior Tory politician’s wife – you what? There’s nothing to suggest there’s anything to the story. But even if it were true and you had evidence, you wouldn’t touch it in public, and in private, if asked, you’d express sympathy, warmth, tenderness, understanding, even solidarity. Only a complete shit would even think of doing anything else. And unless you have solid evidence for coke-and-hookers stories, just leave them alone because of the libel laws – and I say that as a confirmed coke-and-hookers man myself.
Seriously – I’m not into coke and hookers really, darling! It was a joke, honest! Why have you put the phone down? – this is the end of New Labour’s spin regime. And it’s time to state the obvious. Derek Draper, Damian McBride et al: what a bunch of tossers you are.
For all your cocksure swagger, you couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. Your antics – not just in the past couple of months – have done incalculable harm to people’s faith in the democratic system in Britain and to the cause of social democracy. I thought you were rubbish many years ago, but now it’s clear to everyone. Charlatans. Liars. Incompetents. Now get lost, and don’t ever come back.
***
The Draper-McBride affair has prompted a lot of speculation about why the political blogosphere in Britain is dominated by the right – but no one has mentioned the main reason, which is money.
This might seem a little counterintuitive, because blogging – unlike self-publishing in print – doesn’t cost a penny. You write your piece, upload it to your personal website and that’s it. There’s no need to buy expensive desktop publishing software, there’s no printers’ bill and there are no postage or promotional costs. What could possibly be less elitist?
But that’s not quite the whole story. To generate traffic to your blog, you need to get a reputation both for the quality of your posts and their frequency – and that takes time most people don’t have.
I’ve had a blog for more than six years, and when I started I was full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of the medium, posting nearly every day and eagerly following dozens of stories.
Slowly but surely, however, I started to flag. Spending a couple of hours a day researching and writing for a blog read by a few hundred people simply wasn’t compatible with working full-time and all the other commitments of everyday life – and that was with a flexible work routine, a generally indulgent employer and no kids. Increasingly, I found I was posting my monthly Tribune columns, the odd review, lots of You Tube videos – and nothing else.
Would it have been different if I’d been a man of independent means? I’ve no idea, but I do know that being rich and not having to work is rather an advantage in the new media age. The most obvious case in point is Arianna Huffington in the United States, who has used her fortune to bankroll the Huffington Post website – but Britain’s Tory bloggers have got the upper hand at least in part because they don’t need to do anything else. Yes, it’s easier to be oppositional on the web than it is to support a ruling party. Yes, the blogosphere is inherently individualistic. But cash counts too. Give me loads of it and I’ll show you.
And there I was thinking the worst was over… As Neil Kinnock would have put it in his pomp, it is difficult to exaggerate how completely, totally and utterly Derek Draper and Damian McBride have let down the Labour Party.
OK, there are questions about how the creepy Tory blogger Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, got hold of the emails the idiots exchanged. OK, the grand plans for a website publishing rumours about the sexual peccadilloes, drug use and mental health of leading Tories and their spouses never came to fruition. OK, it’s hardly Watergate.
All the same, the scandal takes the breath away. To put it bluntly, what the fuck did they think they were doing?
I am absolutely in favour of a full-on anti-Tory attack blog – as it happens, provoked by the oleaginous Dan Hannan’s dissing of the National Health Service on Fox TV the week before last, I was in the process of planning one myself when the scandal broke, though I now think it can wait a bit.
But the way you get at the Tories is not by spreading puerile defamatory personal tittle-tattle. David Cameron’s fitness for office has nothing to do with whether or not or why he visited the clap clinic at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford as a student many years ago: what counts is what a Cameron government would do for the funding of clap clinics. As for the supposed mental instability of a senior Tory politician’s wife – you what? There’s nothing to suggest there’s anything to the story. But even if it were true and you had evidence, you wouldn’t touch it in public, and in private, if asked, you’d express sympathy, warmth, tenderness, understanding, even solidarity. Only a complete shit would even think of doing anything else. And unless you have solid evidence for coke-and-hookers stories, just leave them alone because of the libel laws – and I say that as a confirmed coke-and-hookers man myself.
Seriously – I’m not into coke and hookers really, darling! It was a joke, honest! Why have you put the phone down? – this is the end of New Labour’s spin regime. And it’s time to state the obvious. Derek Draper, Damian McBride et al: what a bunch of tossers you are.
For all your cocksure swagger, you couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. Your antics – not just in the past couple of months – have done incalculable harm to people’s faith in the democratic system in Britain and to the cause of social democracy. I thought you were rubbish many years ago, but now it’s clear to everyone. Charlatans. Liars. Incompetents. Now get lost, and don’t ever come back.
***
The Draper-McBride affair has prompted a lot of speculation about why the political blogosphere in Britain is dominated by the right – but no one has mentioned the main reason, which is money.
This might seem a little counterintuitive, because blogging – unlike self-publishing in print – doesn’t cost a penny. You write your piece, upload it to your personal website and that’s it. There’s no need to buy expensive desktop publishing software, there’s no printers’ bill and there are no postage or promotional costs. What could possibly be less elitist?
But that’s not quite the whole story. To generate traffic to your blog, you need to get a reputation both for the quality of your posts and their frequency – and that takes time most people don’t have.
I’ve had a blog for more than six years, and when I started I was full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of the medium, posting nearly every day and eagerly following dozens of stories.
Slowly but surely, however, I started to flag. Spending a couple of hours a day researching and writing for a blog read by a few hundred people simply wasn’t compatible with working full-time and all the other commitments of everyday life – and that was with a flexible work routine, a generally indulgent employer and no kids. Increasingly, I found I was posting my monthly Tribune columns, the odd review, lots of You Tube videos – and nothing else.
Would it have been different if I’d been a man of independent means? I’ve no idea, but I do know that being rich and not having to work is rather an advantage in the new media age. The most obvious case in point is Arianna Huffington in the United States, who has used her fortune to bankroll the Huffington Post website – but Britain’s Tory bloggers have got the upper hand at least in part because they don’t need to do anything else. Yes, it’s easier to be oppositional on the web than it is to support a ruling party. Yes, the blogosphere is inherently individualistic. But cash counts too. Give me loads of it and I’ll show you.
20 March 2009
MULLIN TELLS IT AS IT IS
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 20 March 2009
Most political memoirs and diaries are deeply disappointing. I know, because I’ve ploughed through hundreds of them in the past 25 years in the course of everyday political journalism and historical research.
The best – the diaries of Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn on the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, for example – are not only essential historical sources but also enthralling. The worst are utterly worthless. I have on the bookshelf by my desk half-a-dozen bland, plodding accounts of the Thatcher years by retired ministers that have remained unopened since the week before publication when I desperately searched through their pages for something – anything – that might make a diary story.
No one has produced anything quite as bad on the Blair era – though The Blunkett Tapes ran them close. But even the most intelligent and revealing New Labour memoirs and diaries up to now have been seriously flawed. Robin Cook’s The Point of Departure was telling on many things (and included a chapter on how Labour should renew itself that bears rereading today) but Cook was restrained by his intention to make his departure only temporary, an ambition sadly thwarted by his early death. And the extracts from Alastair Campbell’s diaries published as The Blair Years, although extraordinarily revealing on quite a lot, were edited to omit anything that might be embarrassing to Gordon Brown, making them rather like Hamlet without the ghost.
All of which makes the publication of Chris Mullin’s A View from the Foothills a real landmark. The diaries of the former Tribune editor and soon-to-retire MP for Sunderland South are the first no-holds-barred account of life inside the Blair administration – and hunch tells me that they will become as important for future historians as the Crossman, Castle and Benn diaries.
This is not because Mullin held high office: as the book’s title makes clear, he did not. He was a junior minister in the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions from 1999 to 2001, then a slightly less junior one first in the Department for International Development and then in the Foreign Office, from which he was dropped in 2005, returning to the back benches.
But if Mullin was not a senior player, he has other things to offer. He is a great observer of people and a connoisseur of the absurdities of ministerial life: the speeches written for ministers by civil servants in impenetrable jargon, the endless futile meetings, the inability of senior ministers to delegate. He captures perfectly the tedium of the constituency MP’s existence. He is spectacularly rude – with reason – about John Prescott and Gordon Brown (but not about Tony Blair, whom he dubs “The Man”) and a perceptive analyst of what’s happening in cabinet even though he’s not there. And all of it is done in the clearest of prose with dry self-deprecating humour. I read it in a weekend and couldn’t put it down …
***
On a different matter entirely, I’ve been amazed by the hoo-hah in the past fortnight over the revelation in the Guardian that the historian Eric Hobsbawm had been refused access to his MI5 file.
My first thought was that it was rather mean of MI5 – the old boy is 91, and anything in his file could only relate to his activity as a member, from the mid-1930s, of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which breathed its last as long ago as 1991 – but hardly a big deal.
Others had different ideas, however. The Daily Mail went into full hate mode, denouncing Hobsbawm as an unreconstructed apologist for Stalin’s terror – and the Guardian responded with pieces arguing that the Mail was out-of-order because (a) Hobsbawm is a great historian and (b) it’s outrageous that MI5 kept files on members of the Communist Party.
There are several things that strike me as weird about this. First, I can’t see why Hobsbawm’s enduring sympathy for the Soviet Union – which is not quite the same thing as unreconstructed Stalinism, though he was certainly a Stalinist when Stalin was around – is news: he’s never made any secret of it. Secondly, I don’t understand why the fact that he is a brilliant historian should preclude criticism of his politics (or indeed of the influence his political allegiance has had on his historical work). And thirdly, I can’t grasp why it’s so outrageous that MI5 kept files on prominent members of the CP. For most of its life, after all, the party was a dedicated servant of a foreign power that had hostile intentions towards Britain (and between 1939 and 1941 was effectively allied with another foreign power that was waging war against Britain).
None of which is to defend the decision not to release the file. The cold war has been over 20 years now, and there is no excuse whatsoever for not opening the books on it – however embarrassing the results might be.
Most political memoirs and diaries are deeply disappointing. I know, because I’ve ploughed through hundreds of them in the past 25 years in the course of everyday political journalism and historical research.
The best – the diaries of Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn on the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, for example – are not only essential historical sources but also enthralling. The worst are utterly worthless. I have on the bookshelf by my desk half-a-dozen bland, plodding accounts of the Thatcher years by retired ministers that have remained unopened since the week before publication when I desperately searched through their pages for something – anything – that might make a diary story.
No one has produced anything quite as bad on the Blair era – though The Blunkett Tapes ran them close. But even the most intelligent and revealing New Labour memoirs and diaries up to now have been seriously flawed. Robin Cook’s The Point of Departure was telling on many things (and included a chapter on how Labour should renew itself that bears rereading today) but Cook was restrained by his intention to make his departure only temporary, an ambition sadly thwarted by his early death. And the extracts from Alastair Campbell’s diaries published as The Blair Years, although extraordinarily revealing on quite a lot, were edited to omit anything that might be embarrassing to Gordon Brown, making them rather like Hamlet without the ghost.
All of which makes the publication of Chris Mullin’s A View from the Foothills a real landmark. The diaries of the former Tribune editor and soon-to-retire MP for Sunderland South are the first no-holds-barred account of life inside the Blair administration – and hunch tells me that they will become as important for future historians as the Crossman, Castle and Benn diaries.
This is not because Mullin held high office: as the book’s title makes clear, he did not. He was a junior minister in the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions from 1999 to 2001, then a slightly less junior one first in the Department for International Development and then in the Foreign Office, from which he was dropped in 2005, returning to the back benches.
But if Mullin was not a senior player, he has other things to offer. He is a great observer of people and a connoisseur of the absurdities of ministerial life: the speeches written for ministers by civil servants in impenetrable jargon, the endless futile meetings, the inability of senior ministers to delegate. He captures perfectly the tedium of the constituency MP’s existence. He is spectacularly rude – with reason – about John Prescott and Gordon Brown (but not about Tony Blair, whom he dubs “The Man”) and a perceptive analyst of what’s happening in cabinet even though he’s not there. And all of it is done in the clearest of prose with dry self-deprecating humour. I read it in a weekend and couldn’t put it down …
***
On a different matter entirely, I’ve been amazed by the hoo-hah in the past fortnight over the revelation in the Guardian that the historian Eric Hobsbawm had been refused access to his MI5 file.
My first thought was that it was rather mean of MI5 – the old boy is 91, and anything in his file could only relate to his activity as a member, from the mid-1930s, of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which breathed its last as long ago as 1991 – but hardly a big deal.
Others had different ideas, however. The Daily Mail went into full hate mode, denouncing Hobsbawm as an unreconstructed apologist for Stalin’s terror – and the Guardian responded with pieces arguing that the Mail was out-of-order because (a) Hobsbawm is a great historian and (b) it’s outrageous that MI5 kept files on members of the Communist Party.
There are several things that strike me as weird about this. First, I can’t see why Hobsbawm’s enduring sympathy for the Soviet Union – which is not quite the same thing as unreconstructed Stalinism, though he was certainly a Stalinist when Stalin was around – is news: he’s never made any secret of it. Secondly, I don’t understand why the fact that he is a brilliant historian should preclude criticism of his politics (or indeed of the influence his political allegiance has had on his historical work). And thirdly, I can’t grasp why it’s so outrageous that MI5 kept files on prominent members of the CP. For most of its life, after all, the party was a dedicated servant of a foreign power that had hostile intentions towards Britain (and between 1939 and 1941 was effectively allied with another foreign power that was waging war against Britain).
None of which is to defend the decision not to release the file. The cold war has been over 20 years now, and there is no excuse whatsoever for not opening the books on it – however embarrassing the results might be.
9 February 2009
WHAT TO KEEP?
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 9 February 2009
After more than 30 years of hoarding books, magazines, academic journals and newspaper clippings, I’ve decided to have a clear-out. I’m not going to get rid of any books – well, maybe a few duplicates – but everything else that can go will go. I can fit only two more bookcases into my house unless I let them take over the kitchen and the bathroom, and my cellar is so full of boxes that the electricity man had difficulty getting to the meter the other week. I really don’t need to hang on to 20 years’ worth of the Economist, because I can access it online or in the library; and I’m never going to look again at those mid-1980s issues of New Left Review that have now been stored in boxes for more than two decades.
Or at least that’s the theory. The problem with having a clear-out when you’ve let your hoarding get as out-of-control as I have is that it takes a vast amount of time and effort. First, you have to decide what goes – which is easy enough with the Economist and most of my clippings from the national press over the past ten years because all that stuff is available instantly online (at least as long as I have an academic job). But it gets more difficult the more obscure the publication becomes. Although I probably know a couple of people with, say, a complete run of Socialist Action, I’m wary of chucking out my collection just in case neither they nor the British Library or the Bodleian can locate a particular issue.
So clearing out also involves spending a lot of time reading and thinking. Is it worth keeping those tattered copies of Xtra!, the anarchist paper of the late 1970s, or the issue of Class War that was edited by Tribune’s current theatre critic, Aleks Sierz, 25 or so years ago? Yes, because the chances are high that Xtra! and Class War didn’t make it to the copyright libraries – and because they’re part of my own history. But what about the issue of the pro-Albanian Maoist Weekly Worker commemorating the death of Enver Hoxha? A worthless artefact with which I have no personal connection – but again yes, because it’s so weird. I have however decided not to keep Labour Weekly, the party’s official paper, or Sanity, the CND magazine, or most of my Fabian pamphlets.
Which brings me to the second problem: disposal. I currently have a vast pile of paper I have decided I don’t want any more, and I’m not sure what to do with it. The newspaper clippings have already gone into the recycling bin, but the rest is a headache. Some of it I can flog to a specialist secondhand dealer, and some I’ll give to local charity shops. But what about the 1,000 or so copies of the Economist? It seems a waste to put them in the bin – and I can’t put them all in it at once – but who the hell would want them and be prepared to collect? I really can’t be arsed with ebay…
***
The great thing about having a clear-out, of course, is what you turn up unexpectedly. I’d completely forgotten that I had such a large collection of articles and pamphlets on the split in the Communist Party in the mid-1980s over the miners’ strike and the Soviet Union – and I was surprised to find a box full of embarrassingly craven British and American left praise for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua from the same era.
What has really stopped me short, however, is the Labour material from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The sense of desperation and panic in the party between the IMF crisis of 1976 and the end of the miners’ strike in 1985 – through the Winter of Discontent, the Tory election victory of 1979, the slump that followed it, the defection of the SDP, the Falklands War, the debacle of the 1983 election, the miners’ strike itself – is palpable in every article I clipped and every pamphlet I saved. Labour hung on under Michael Foot and rebuilt itself under Neil Kinnock, but it was touch-and-go for at least five years.
I know it’s not done to wonder what happens if we lose in 2010 – and I still think Labour can win because I’m less pessimistic about the economic downturn than everyone else and believe the Tories can be exposed for the hopeless reactionaries that they are. But Labour’s bleak midwinter this past month is horribly reminiscent of 1979, and I’ve got a feeling in my bones that the party will be in opposition within 18 months. And awful as it was after 1979, there was a lot more energy and enthusiasm around Labour then than there is now. Be afraid, deliver those leaflets – and pray.
After more than 30 years of hoarding books, magazines, academic journals and newspaper clippings, I’ve decided to have a clear-out. I’m not going to get rid of any books – well, maybe a few duplicates – but everything else that can go will go. I can fit only two more bookcases into my house unless I let them take over the kitchen and the bathroom, and my cellar is so full of boxes that the electricity man had difficulty getting to the meter the other week. I really don’t need to hang on to 20 years’ worth of the Economist, because I can access it online or in the library; and I’m never going to look again at those mid-1980s issues of New Left Review that have now been stored in boxes for more than two decades.
Or at least that’s the theory. The problem with having a clear-out when you’ve let your hoarding get as out-of-control as I have is that it takes a vast amount of time and effort. First, you have to decide what goes – which is easy enough with the Economist and most of my clippings from the national press over the past ten years because all that stuff is available instantly online (at least as long as I have an academic job). But it gets more difficult the more obscure the publication becomes. Although I probably know a couple of people with, say, a complete run of Socialist Action, I’m wary of chucking out my collection just in case neither they nor the British Library or the Bodleian can locate a particular issue.
So clearing out also involves spending a lot of time reading and thinking. Is it worth keeping those tattered copies of Xtra!, the anarchist paper of the late 1970s, or the issue of Class War that was edited by Tribune’s current theatre critic, Aleks Sierz, 25 or so years ago? Yes, because the chances are high that Xtra! and Class War didn’t make it to the copyright libraries – and because they’re part of my own history. But what about the issue of the pro-Albanian Maoist Weekly Worker commemorating the death of Enver Hoxha? A worthless artefact with which I have no personal connection – but again yes, because it’s so weird. I have however decided not to keep Labour Weekly, the party’s official paper, or Sanity, the CND magazine, or most of my Fabian pamphlets.
Which brings me to the second problem: disposal. I currently have a vast pile of paper I have decided I don’t want any more, and I’m not sure what to do with it. The newspaper clippings have already gone into the recycling bin, but the rest is a headache. Some of it I can flog to a specialist secondhand dealer, and some I’ll give to local charity shops. But what about the 1,000 or so copies of the Economist? It seems a waste to put them in the bin – and I can’t put them all in it at once – but who the hell would want them and be prepared to collect? I really can’t be arsed with ebay…
***
The great thing about having a clear-out, of course, is what you turn up unexpectedly. I’d completely forgotten that I had such a large collection of articles and pamphlets on the split in the Communist Party in the mid-1980s over the miners’ strike and the Soviet Union – and I was surprised to find a box full of embarrassingly craven British and American left praise for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua from the same era.
What has really stopped me short, however, is the Labour material from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The sense of desperation and panic in the party between the IMF crisis of 1976 and the end of the miners’ strike in 1985 – through the Winter of Discontent, the Tory election victory of 1979, the slump that followed it, the defection of the SDP, the Falklands War, the debacle of the 1983 election, the miners’ strike itself – is palpable in every article I clipped and every pamphlet I saved. Labour hung on under Michael Foot and rebuilt itself under Neil Kinnock, but it was touch-and-go for at least five years.
I know it’s not done to wonder what happens if we lose in 2010 – and I still think Labour can win because I’m less pessimistic about the economic downturn than everyone else and believe the Tories can be exposed for the hopeless reactionaries that they are. But Labour’s bleak midwinter this past month is horribly reminiscent of 1979, and I’ve got a feeling in my bones that the party will be in opposition within 18 months. And awful as it was after 1979, there was a lot more energy and enthusiasm around Labour then than there is now. Be afraid, deliver those leaflets – and pray.
6 January 2009
OH, COME ON, IT'S NOT THAT BAD
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 6 January 2009
Sometimes it seems that everything in Britain these days is doom and gloom. The banking crisis has dragged on and on and the credit famine is now having a devastating effect on consumer confidence, the housing market and employment.
Every day there are announcements of new redundancies and business failures. Forecasts of collapsing house prices, negative growth and exploding unemployment range from the deeply depressing to the terrifying. Slump is upon us.
For anyone on the left, the political outlook is at first sight dire, too. The brief recovery in the opinion polls enjoyed by Labour in the autumn of 2008 appears to be over - and the Tories are back to being overwhelming favourites to win the next general election. Oh dear.
But is it all as bad as it seems? Well, at least it's not as bad as it might have been. Granted, some of the economic projections of the past couple of months have been a lot worse than most experts expected at the beginning of 2008 - and there's little doubt that a lot of people are now suffering, with more pain to come. But so far it hasn't been a matter of economic meltdown. The overwhelming majority of Brits are still doing OK. And although the Government has made mistakes it has given a pretty good impression of knowing what has to be done to get out of the mess we're in.
To be sure, the failure of the October bank bail-out, which necessitated this week's even-bigger emergency package, is an embarrassment; and it might well be that even this week's efforts will not be enough to prevent wholesale bank nationalisation, which the government wants to avoid (for a mixture of good and bad reasons).
Nevertheless, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have not done at all badly in the past few months, dealing with a crisis unlike any other in living memory with confidence and some panache. More might well need to be done to restore credit to the economy, but they appear to have the will and daring to do whatever is necessary, at least in the short term.
Certainly they have been running rings around the Tories, although whether they continue to do so now Ken Clarke is back in the Shadow Cabinet is another matter. Clarke, unlike David Cameron and George Osborne, understands crisis management and is a formidable opponent for Labour. On the other hand, as became apparent within minutes of his being appointed, his differences with his Eurosceptic colleagues have the potential to reignite the internal Tory battle that more than anything else destroyed the party's credibility in the 1990s and early 2000s.
It is less easy to be sanguine about the Government's medium-term plans. Sorting out the banks is the top priority, but once that's done the state needs to intervene with a major programme of public works to boost the overall level of demand in the economy.
So far, the proposals that have emerged from government look back-of-the-envelope and unimaginative. Speeding up planned projects is fine as long as the projects are worth pursuing in the first place - say school and hospital investment - but the case is difficult to argue when it comes to the third runway at Heathrow Airport or the Trident replacement or hard-shoulder carriageways on the M1 and M25. What's missing is the vision thing: plans for a high-speed rail network, a massive expansion in green energy generation and a large-scale revival of social housing construction. Yes, all that would take time to prepare and longer to put into practice, but Labour needs to have a bold programme it can introduce immediately after the next election: the work on it must be done now.
The good news is that the party appears to be in better shape to do that than anyone could have imagined six months ago. Last summer, Brown seemed to be on his last legs - and Labour looked ready to dissolve into poisonous factionalism.
However, the Prime Minister survived the conference, acted decisively on the economic crisis and performed a healing reshuffle (I never thought I'd welcome the return of Peter Mandelson to the Cabinet, but it appears to have worked wonders for everyone but postal workers). The bounce Brown got might have been short-lived, but Labour now comes across as more united than for at least five years.
I'm still not optimistic about the next general election. Between now and then (and it must be 18 months away, mustn't it?), there are all sorts of things that can go wrong - the economy most obviously, but there are also small problems such as the proposed Royal Mail sell-off, Afghanistan, Heathrow and June's European elections.
There is, however, more than a glimmer of hope. Hunch tells me that 2010 could be Labour's 1992.
Sometimes it seems that everything in Britain these days is doom and gloom. The banking crisis has dragged on and on and the credit famine is now having a devastating effect on consumer confidence, the housing market and employment.
Every day there are announcements of new redundancies and business failures. Forecasts of collapsing house prices, negative growth and exploding unemployment range from the deeply depressing to the terrifying. Slump is upon us.
For anyone on the left, the political outlook is at first sight dire, too. The brief recovery in the opinion polls enjoyed by Labour in the autumn of 2008 appears to be over - and the Tories are back to being overwhelming favourites to win the next general election. Oh dear.
But is it all as bad as it seems? Well, at least it's not as bad as it might have been. Granted, some of the economic projections of the past couple of months have been a lot worse than most experts expected at the beginning of 2008 - and there's little doubt that a lot of people are now suffering, with more pain to come. But so far it hasn't been a matter of economic meltdown. The overwhelming majority of Brits are still doing OK. And although the Government has made mistakes it has given a pretty good impression of knowing what has to be done to get out of the mess we're in.
To be sure, the failure of the October bank bail-out, which necessitated this week's even-bigger emergency package, is an embarrassment; and it might well be that even this week's efforts will not be enough to prevent wholesale bank nationalisation, which the government wants to avoid (for a mixture of good and bad reasons).
Nevertheless, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have not done at all badly in the past few months, dealing with a crisis unlike any other in living memory with confidence and some panache. More might well need to be done to restore credit to the economy, but they appear to have the will and daring to do whatever is necessary, at least in the short term.
Certainly they have been running rings around the Tories, although whether they continue to do so now Ken Clarke is back in the Shadow Cabinet is another matter. Clarke, unlike David Cameron and George Osborne, understands crisis management and is a formidable opponent for Labour. On the other hand, as became apparent within minutes of his being appointed, his differences with his Eurosceptic colleagues have the potential to reignite the internal Tory battle that more than anything else destroyed the party's credibility in the 1990s and early 2000s.
It is less easy to be sanguine about the Government's medium-term plans. Sorting out the banks is the top priority, but once that's done the state needs to intervene with a major programme of public works to boost the overall level of demand in the economy.
So far, the proposals that have emerged from government look back-of-the-envelope and unimaginative. Speeding up planned projects is fine as long as the projects are worth pursuing in the first place - say school and hospital investment - but the case is difficult to argue when it comes to the third runway at Heathrow Airport or the Trident replacement or hard-shoulder carriageways on the M1 and M25. What's missing is the vision thing: plans for a high-speed rail network, a massive expansion in green energy generation and a large-scale revival of social housing construction. Yes, all that would take time to prepare and longer to put into practice, but Labour needs to have a bold programme it can introduce immediately after the next election: the work on it must be done now.
The good news is that the party appears to be in better shape to do that than anyone could have imagined six months ago. Last summer, Brown seemed to be on his last legs - and Labour looked ready to dissolve into poisonous factionalism.
However, the Prime Minister survived the conference, acted decisively on the economic crisis and performed a healing reshuffle (I never thought I'd welcome the return of Peter Mandelson to the Cabinet, but it appears to have worked wonders for everyone but postal workers). The bounce Brown got might have been short-lived, but Labour now comes across as more united than for at least five years.
I'm still not optimistic about the next general election. Between now and then (and it must be 18 months away, mustn't it?), there are all sorts of things that can go wrong - the economy most obviously, but there are also small problems such as the proposed Royal Mail sell-off, Afghanistan, Heathrow and June's European elections.
There is, however, more than a glimmer of hope. Hunch tells me that 2010 could be Labour's 1992.
28 November 2008
OBITUARY: PATRICK FITZGERALD
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 28 November 2008
Last week, one of my best friends died. I first met Patrick Fitzgerald at a meeting of the Oxford Anarchist Group in the first week of term when I went up to university in October 1978. It was in Danny Simpson’s Exeter college room in a house on Turl Street.
We were both 18, but Pat was a seasoned veteran. He’d been an anarchist for all of two years and a university student for one, having started at Keble at a tender age because he was such a brilliant mathematician. And he was rather suspicious of the influx of raw new recruits to the anarchist group from freshers’ week. He sat on Danny’s bed looking sullen, smoking, rigged out in unfashionable denim – flared trousers when flares were out – and a Chelsea scarf. Pat’s style was always his own.
We didn’t make friends at first. We were rivals over several girls – and Pat always won. But, through a shared enthusiasm for pills, booze and rock’n’roll, we bonded. And we became – literally – partners in crime.
I have no idea how he acquired the knack, but as a youth Pat was an accomplished cat-burglar. He was always one for digging up dirt – and one of his main means of doing it when he started out in the late 1970s was the break-in.
He burgled dons who were recruiting for MI5, and wrote up his findings in Back Street Bugle, Oxford’s alternative paper. He burgled the army recruitment office. And he burgled college bars for money – an enterprise that went badly wrong when he and two others were caught red-handed.
When the Oxford University Student Union had a general meeting at which the left hoped it would secure a majority to occupy a building that became the social science department library – the idea was that we’d turn it into a proper central students’ union that put on gigs – it was Pat who waited with the crowbar for the call that never came from the meeting. (He was waiting with Sarah Baxter, now of the Sunday Times, who had a bicycle.) It was Pat too who cut the outside broadcast link from Billy Graham’s Christian revivalist meeting in Oxford town hall that we disrupted as a protest against – well, Billy Graham.
I only once benefited materially from any of this, and only in a small way. The heist – and it was a great one – was of booze from an Oxford college boat clubhouse, the getaway transport a punt on to which crates of summer drinks were loaded before it was inexpertly floated a couple of miles down the river, where a waiting crew spirited the haul to their bedsits in east Oxford. Ten years later there were still unopened bottles of Pimm’s in many former Oxford anarchists’ parents’ drinks cabinets.
Meanwhile, Pat got serious. After he left Oxford, he started a doctorate at the University of Kent but soon decided that his vocation was as an investigative journalist. He did work for various radical magazines – including Tribune from the mid-1980s – and Fleet Street newspapers, but put his main efforts into books. British Intelligence and Covert Action, co-authored with the émigré South African journalist Jonathan Bloch, appeared in 1983. A ground-breaking exposé of secret operations since the second world war, it met a furious response from the political and military establishment, but its accuracy on all its key stories remains unquestioned. In 1987 came Stranger on the Line, co-authored with Mark Leopold, an exhaustive account of the British state’s enthusiasm for phone-tapping, and a side project, The Comic Book of MI5, with illustrations by the Irish cartoonist Cormac.
Pat was an enthusiastic hedonist, and at times in the late 1980s and 1990s he overdid it, but he kept up an impressive journalistic output, covering intelligence and security issues for Tribune and the New Statesman among others and earning money writing business travel guides. He was less obviously prolific in recent years – partly because of lack of outlets, partly because of poor health – but still managed a great deal, most recently doing a substantial body of work on a soon-to-be-published book on the war on terror with Jonathan Bloch and Paul Todd.
He’d not been well for some time – he contracted cellulitis earlier in the year, and the treatment had dragged on and on without apparently working – but his sudden death was a shock to all his friends, not least his partner of 20 years, Leila Carlyle, with whom he lived in east London. Frighteningly intelligent and well informed, immensely funny and above all extraordinarily kind, he will be missed. There’s a wake for him tonight (November 28) in the Calthorpe Arms in Gray’s Inn Road, London EC1, just up the road from Tribune’s old offices.
Last week, one of my best friends died. I first met Patrick Fitzgerald at a meeting of the Oxford Anarchist Group in the first week of term when I went up to university in October 1978. It was in Danny Simpson’s Exeter college room in a house on Turl Street.
We were both 18, but Pat was a seasoned veteran. He’d been an anarchist for all of two years and a university student for one, having started at Keble at a tender age because he was such a brilliant mathematician. And he was rather suspicious of the influx of raw new recruits to the anarchist group from freshers’ week. He sat on Danny’s bed looking sullen, smoking, rigged out in unfashionable denim – flared trousers when flares were out – and a Chelsea scarf. Pat’s style was always his own.
We didn’t make friends at first. We were rivals over several girls – and Pat always won. But, through a shared enthusiasm for pills, booze and rock’n’roll, we bonded. And we became – literally – partners in crime.
I have no idea how he acquired the knack, but as a youth Pat was an accomplished cat-burglar. He was always one for digging up dirt – and one of his main means of doing it when he started out in the late 1970s was the break-in.
He burgled dons who were recruiting for MI5, and wrote up his findings in Back Street Bugle, Oxford’s alternative paper. He burgled the army recruitment office. And he burgled college bars for money – an enterprise that went badly wrong when he and two others were caught red-handed.
When the Oxford University Student Union had a general meeting at which the left hoped it would secure a majority to occupy a building that became the social science department library – the idea was that we’d turn it into a proper central students’ union that put on gigs – it was Pat who waited with the crowbar for the call that never came from the meeting. (He was waiting with Sarah Baxter, now of the Sunday Times, who had a bicycle.) It was Pat too who cut the outside broadcast link from Billy Graham’s Christian revivalist meeting in Oxford town hall that we disrupted as a protest against – well, Billy Graham.
I only once benefited materially from any of this, and only in a small way. The heist – and it was a great one – was of booze from an Oxford college boat clubhouse, the getaway transport a punt on to which crates of summer drinks were loaded before it was inexpertly floated a couple of miles down the river, where a waiting crew spirited the haul to their bedsits in east Oxford. Ten years later there were still unopened bottles of Pimm’s in many former Oxford anarchists’ parents’ drinks cabinets.
Meanwhile, Pat got serious. After he left Oxford, he started a doctorate at the University of Kent but soon decided that his vocation was as an investigative journalist. He did work for various radical magazines – including Tribune from the mid-1980s – and Fleet Street newspapers, but put his main efforts into books. British Intelligence and Covert Action, co-authored with the émigré South African journalist Jonathan Bloch, appeared in 1983. A ground-breaking exposé of secret operations since the second world war, it met a furious response from the political and military establishment, but its accuracy on all its key stories remains unquestioned. In 1987 came Stranger on the Line, co-authored with Mark Leopold, an exhaustive account of the British state’s enthusiasm for phone-tapping, and a side project, The Comic Book of MI5, with illustrations by the Irish cartoonist Cormac.
Pat was an enthusiastic hedonist, and at times in the late 1980s and 1990s he overdid it, but he kept up an impressive journalistic output, covering intelligence and security issues for Tribune and the New Statesman among others and earning money writing business travel guides. He was less obviously prolific in recent years – partly because of lack of outlets, partly because of poor health – but still managed a great deal, most recently doing a substantial body of work on a soon-to-be-published book on the war on terror with Jonathan Bloch and Paul Todd.
He’d not been well for some time – he contracted cellulitis earlier in the year, and the treatment had dragged on and on without apparently working – but his sudden death was a shock to all his friends, not least his partner of 20 years, Leila Carlyle, with whom he lived in east London. Frighteningly intelligent and well informed, immensely funny and above all extraordinarily kind, he will be missed. There’s a wake for him tonight (November 28) in the Calthorpe Arms in Gray’s Inn Road, London EC1, just up the road from Tribune’s old offices.
31 October 2008
TRIBUNE'S NINE LIVES
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 31 October 2008
I hope that somewhere else in this magazine there is a cheery announcement that Tribune has secured financial backing and that this will not be the last issue. But I’m not sure there is, so I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank you, dear readers, for having me. It’s now more than 22 years since I first wrote for Tribune and 10 since I started this column, and your persistent poisonous sniping and personal abuse have sustained me through many a dark hour.
Seriously, if this isn’t the last issue – and I don’t think it is – it has been a damn close-run thing, as the Duke of Wellington didn’t actually say of the Battle of Waterloo. Perhaps it’s not quite as close as it was in 1988, when we ran a front page adorned with the words “DON’T LET THIS BE THE LAST ISSUE OF TRIBUNE” after the then board of directors decided to pull the plug in a week – this time, the magazine has had all of a month to organise a rescue. But it’s closer than at any time in the intervening two decades.
Of course, Tribune has a glorious history of financial crisis. It was launched as a newspaper in 1937 by two rich Labour MPs, Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, as a vehicle for the Unity Campaign, a quixotic attempt to unite the Labour left with the Communist Party and the Independent Labour Party, with Cripps and Strauss putting up £18,000 of their own cash (roughly £800,000 in today’s money). They assumed they would achieve a break-even circulation of 50,000 in a matter of weeks and then recoup their investment – but in fact the paper used up all the dosh in nine months and barely hit 25,000.
Cripps continued reluctantly to subsidise its losses through 1938 and 1939 – a period when Tribune became an adjunct to the publisher Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club – but then lost interest and dropped out of completely in spring 1940 on his appointment as ambassador to Moscow, leaving control of the paper to Aneurin Bevan and Strauss. Strauss picked up the tab and continued to do so for several years – but he too blew hot and cold and dropped out on becoming a junior minister in the 1945 Labour government.
By the late 1940s, Tribune was on its uppers again and resorted to selling editorial space to Labour Party headquarters – and in 1950 it was forced to go fortnightly, resuming weekly publication only in 1952. Throughout the 1950s, it survived only thanks to non-stop fundraising, most of it from readers but some from anonymous rich benefactors. One of these was the maverick Tory press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who handed over £3,000 when his rival Lord Kemsley sued Tribune for libel.
The 1960s and 1970s were decades of relative stability for the paper despite a slow decline in circulation – largely because many of the trade unions were left-led and were persuaded to take bulk orders and solidarity advertising – and in the early 1980s Tribune’s finances were buoyed by advertisements from local councils under left-wing Labour control, particularly Ken Livingstone’s GLC. But in the mid-1980s the financial situation deteriorated rapidly. The unions, with membership in decline, tightened their belts and merged. The GLC was abolished by the Thatcher government and the rules on local council spending were tightened. By the end of 1987 it looked as if the writing was on the wall, and in early 1988, with circulation around 5,000, the board decided Tribune would have to close.
It didn’t, for two reasons. The paper’s readers rallied round magnificently, raising £40,000 in a little more than a fortnight, and the unions agreed to pay for a promotion campaign. That worked, but not quite well enough, and there was another minor crisis in early 1991 that led to the paper going down from 12 tabloid pages to eight for six months. In the meantime, however, we raised sufficient funds to buy desktop publishing equipment, which slashed production costs – and the rest of the 1990s were plain sailing.
There was another wobble in 2002-03, which was resolved by a consortium of unions taking ownership of Tribune and promising long-term investment – but by this spring they had got cold feet, and last month they decided that this would be the last issue unless a buyer could be found. Every time I’ve spoken to the editor since, he has expressed cautious optimism about the prospects. I’ve just been keeping my fingers crossed: I hope we haven’t used up our nine lives.
And the moral of the story? Well, there isn’t one, except that it has always been difficult to sustain left-wing newspapers. Whether it is more difficult now than it used to be is a moot point – but that’s for another column. If there is one …
I hope that somewhere else in this magazine there is a cheery announcement that Tribune has secured financial backing and that this will not be the last issue. But I’m not sure there is, so I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank you, dear readers, for having me. It’s now more than 22 years since I first wrote for Tribune and 10 since I started this column, and your persistent poisonous sniping and personal abuse have sustained me through many a dark hour.
Seriously, if this isn’t the last issue – and I don’t think it is – it has been a damn close-run thing, as the Duke of Wellington didn’t actually say of the Battle of Waterloo. Perhaps it’s not quite as close as it was in 1988, when we ran a front page adorned with the words “DON’T LET THIS BE THE LAST ISSUE OF TRIBUNE” after the then board of directors decided to pull the plug in a week – this time, the magazine has had all of a month to organise a rescue. But it’s closer than at any time in the intervening two decades.
Of course, Tribune has a glorious history of financial crisis. It was launched as a newspaper in 1937 by two rich Labour MPs, Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, as a vehicle for the Unity Campaign, a quixotic attempt to unite the Labour left with the Communist Party and the Independent Labour Party, with Cripps and Strauss putting up £18,000 of their own cash (roughly £800,000 in today’s money). They assumed they would achieve a break-even circulation of 50,000 in a matter of weeks and then recoup their investment – but in fact the paper used up all the dosh in nine months and barely hit 25,000.
Cripps continued reluctantly to subsidise its losses through 1938 and 1939 – a period when Tribune became an adjunct to the publisher Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club – but then lost interest and dropped out of completely in spring 1940 on his appointment as ambassador to Moscow, leaving control of the paper to Aneurin Bevan and Strauss. Strauss picked up the tab and continued to do so for several years – but he too blew hot and cold and dropped out on becoming a junior minister in the 1945 Labour government.
By the late 1940s, Tribune was on its uppers again and resorted to selling editorial space to Labour Party headquarters – and in 1950 it was forced to go fortnightly, resuming weekly publication only in 1952. Throughout the 1950s, it survived only thanks to non-stop fundraising, most of it from readers but some from anonymous rich benefactors. One of these was the maverick Tory press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who handed over £3,000 when his rival Lord Kemsley sued Tribune for libel.
The 1960s and 1970s were decades of relative stability for the paper despite a slow decline in circulation – largely because many of the trade unions were left-led and were persuaded to take bulk orders and solidarity advertising – and in the early 1980s Tribune’s finances were buoyed by advertisements from local councils under left-wing Labour control, particularly Ken Livingstone’s GLC. But in the mid-1980s the financial situation deteriorated rapidly. The unions, with membership in decline, tightened their belts and merged. The GLC was abolished by the Thatcher government and the rules on local council spending were tightened. By the end of 1987 it looked as if the writing was on the wall, and in early 1988, with circulation around 5,000, the board decided Tribune would have to close.
It didn’t, for two reasons. The paper’s readers rallied round magnificently, raising £40,000 in a little more than a fortnight, and the unions agreed to pay for a promotion campaign. That worked, but not quite well enough, and there was another minor crisis in early 1991 that led to the paper going down from 12 tabloid pages to eight for six months. In the meantime, however, we raised sufficient funds to buy desktop publishing equipment, which slashed production costs – and the rest of the 1990s were plain sailing.
There was another wobble in 2002-03, which was resolved by a consortium of unions taking ownership of Tribune and promising long-term investment – but by this spring they had got cold feet, and last month they decided that this would be the last issue unless a buyer could be found. Every time I’ve spoken to the editor since, he has expressed cautious optimism about the prospects. I’ve just been keeping my fingers crossed: I hope we haven’t used up our nine lives.
And the moral of the story? Well, there isn’t one, except that it has always been difficult to sustain left-wing newspapers. Whether it is more difficult now than it used to be is a moot point – but that’s for another column. If there is one …
8 October 2008
TRIBUNE ON THE ROCKS - 2
The leftwing weekly Tribune will close after its 31 October edition unless a buyer can be found.
At a meeting of its board last night, its trade union shareholders agreed to what its editor Chris McLaughlin called an "amicable parting of the ways" with the magazine. Tribune is now actively seeking a new owner.
McLaughlin said that he was optimistic about interest already being shown but that a deal would have to be done very soon to ensure continuity of publication.
A consortium of five trade unions took over ownership of Tribune four years ago, promising substantial investment in the magazine. But the unions declined to give financial support to a business plan put forward earlier this year by McLaughlin and his team.
Tribune, founded in 1937 by Sir Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan, has lived a precarious existence for most of its life. It currently sells 4,000 copies a week.
At a meeting of its board last night, its trade union shareholders agreed to what its editor Chris McLaughlin called an "amicable parting of the ways" with the magazine. Tribune is now actively seeking a new owner.
McLaughlin said that he was optimistic about interest already being shown but that a deal would have to be done very soon to ensure continuity of publication.
A consortium of five trade unions took over ownership of Tribune four years ago, promising substantial investment in the magazine. But the unions declined to give financial support to a business plan put forward earlier this year by McLaughlin and his team.
Tribune, founded in 1937 by Sir Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan, has lived a precarious existence for most of its life. It currently sells 4,000 copies a week.
5 October 2008
TRIBUNE ON THE ROCKS
The clock is ticking for the left weekly Tribune, which desperately needs its union proprietors to cough up the cash they promised four years ago to have a chance of survival. And the crunch could come in the next couple of days. The paper's editor, Chris McLaughlin, makes it abundantly clear here what's at stake. More to come on this...
4 October 2008
DEATH NOT FAR FROM VENICE
Paul Anderson, review of The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson (Faber and Faber, £25), Tribune, 3 October 2008
The Italian front in the first world war has not been a favoured topic for historians writing in English. It would be wrong to say that it has been completely ignored – but by comparison with the western front, the war at sea, Gallipoli, the eastern front or even Palestine it has received scant attention, apart from two key battles: the central powers’ rout of Italy at Caporetto in autumn 1917, which was followed by a spectacular Italian retreat; and the Italians’ decisive triumph of Vittorio Veneto a year later, after which the Italians recovered all their lost territory (and seized some more) in the last days before the war ended.
In some respects, this lack of attention is hardly surprising. Italy joined the allies late – in spring 1915 – and the front lines established by the Italians and the Austro-Hungarian empire within days of the start of hostilities changed only marginally over the next two-and-a-half years. For the western allies (Britain and France), Italy was a sideshow compared with the western front and the German blockade, and they committed few troops and little hardware until almost the very end; for the Russians, the Italian campaign was of interest solely because it tied up large numbers of Austro-Hungarian troops that would otherwise have been sent to fight them. Germany was directly involved in the Italian campaign only briefly (although its intervention was almost decisive).
Yet, as Mark Thompson makes clear in this fascinating book, the Italian front was rather more important than it seemed at the time to outsiders or has since appeared to most non-Italian historians. It is a commonplace that the experience of war is socially and politically cathartic, and many historians have remarked on the importance of the first world war in the breakdown of Italy’s fragile, flawed democracy and the rise of Mussolini’s fascists: 1.2 million Italians died, nearly half of them civilians. But Thompson makes that process extraordinarily vivid, using an impressive range of sources – official reports, newspaper articles, veterans’ memoirs, intellectual manifestos – to put into context and humanise the story of military actions and casualty statistics.
The picture he paints is little short of horrifying. Italy was bounced into war by a cynical nationalist propaganda campaign in which most liberals and socialists acquiesced. Then the Italian commander-in-chief, Luigi Cadorna, adopted tactics of breathtaking stupidity – frontal assaults up bare mountainsides against well-defended Austro-Hungarian positions – that he stuck with, despite shocking casualties, for more than two years. The troops were treated as dirt, even when they were not being sent to their deaths in futile attacks on mountain redoubts: their rations and clothing were inadequate and their leave minimal, and summary execution of supposed malingerers and cowards was the norm. (This extended to the systematic execution of soldiers chosen by lot to discourage their comrades from mutiny or desertion.)
Cadorna regarded the democratic politicians that were supposedly in charge with utter contempt – and was cheered on loudly by Mussolini (miraculously transformed from socialist militant into ultra-patriotic publicist) and other extreme nationalist intellectuals, among them the poets Gabriele d’Annunzio and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Cadorna was sacked after the debacle of Caporetto, but by then Italy’s liberal political class had lost the plot. After the war ended, it found itself outmanoeuvred by insistent and hysterical right-wing nationalist demands for Italy to be rewarded for its sacrifices with Trieste, Fiume and a large swath of the northern Adriatic coast – and, to cut a long story short, it capitulated.
The White War – the title refers to the snow and limestone of the mountains over which most of the Italian campaign of 1915-18 was fought – is meticulously researched and a gripping read. I could have done with a big fold-out map, but otherwise this is an exemplary and erudite work of popular history.
The Italian front in the first world war has not been a favoured topic for historians writing in English. It would be wrong to say that it has been completely ignored – but by comparison with the western front, the war at sea, Gallipoli, the eastern front or even Palestine it has received scant attention, apart from two key battles: the central powers’ rout of Italy at Caporetto in autumn 1917, which was followed by a spectacular Italian retreat; and the Italians’ decisive triumph of Vittorio Veneto a year later, after which the Italians recovered all their lost territory (and seized some more) in the last days before the war ended.
In some respects, this lack of attention is hardly surprising. Italy joined the allies late – in spring 1915 – and the front lines established by the Italians and the Austro-Hungarian empire within days of the start of hostilities changed only marginally over the next two-and-a-half years. For the western allies (Britain and France), Italy was a sideshow compared with the western front and the German blockade, and they committed few troops and little hardware until almost the very end; for the Russians, the Italian campaign was of interest solely because it tied up large numbers of Austro-Hungarian troops that would otherwise have been sent to fight them. Germany was directly involved in the Italian campaign only briefly (although its intervention was almost decisive).
Yet, as Mark Thompson makes clear in this fascinating book, the Italian front was rather more important than it seemed at the time to outsiders or has since appeared to most non-Italian historians. It is a commonplace that the experience of war is socially and politically cathartic, and many historians have remarked on the importance of the first world war in the breakdown of Italy’s fragile, flawed democracy and the rise of Mussolini’s fascists: 1.2 million Italians died, nearly half of them civilians. But Thompson makes that process extraordinarily vivid, using an impressive range of sources – official reports, newspaper articles, veterans’ memoirs, intellectual manifestos – to put into context and humanise the story of military actions and casualty statistics.
The picture he paints is little short of horrifying. Italy was bounced into war by a cynical nationalist propaganda campaign in which most liberals and socialists acquiesced. Then the Italian commander-in-chief, Luigi Cadorna, adopted tactics of breathtaking stupidity – frontal assaults up bare mountainsides against well-defended Austro-Hungarian positions – that he stuck with, despite shocking casualties, for more than two years. The troops were treated as dirt, even when they were not being sent to their deaths in futile attacks on mountain redoubts: their rations and clothing were inadequate and their leave minimal, and summary execution of supposed malingerers and cowards was the norm. (This extended to the systematic execution of soldiers chosen by lot to discourage their comrades from mutiny or desertion.)
Cadorna regarded the democratic politicians that were supposedly in charge with utter contempt – and was cheered on loudly by Mussolini (miraculously transformed from socialist militant into ultra-patriotic publicist) and other extreme nationalist intellectuals, among them the poets Gabriele d’Annunzio and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Cadorna was sacked after the debacle of Caporetto, but by then Italy’s liberal political class had lost the plot. After the war ended, it found itself outmanoeuvred by insistent and hysterical right-wing nationalist demands for Italy to be rewarded for its sacrifices with Trieste, Fiume and a large swath of the northern Adriatic coast – and, to cut a long story short, it capitulated.
The White War – the title refers to the snow and limestone of the mountains over which most of the Italian campaign of 1915-18 was fought – is meticulously researched and a gripping read. I could have done with a big fold-out map, but otherwise this is an exemplary and erudite work of popular history.
1 October 2008
NOW IT REALLY IS THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 3 October 2008
So – surprise, surprise – there was no attempt to topple Gordon Brown in Manchester last week, and he lives to fight another day. Indeed, thanks largely to a better-than-expected speech that seems to have given Labour a big bounce in the opinion polls, his position appears significantly stronger after Labour conference than it did just before.
How lasting this new strength will prove is another matter. It might well have started to dissipate by the time you read this – the first polls after David Cameron’s main Tory conference speech were due to be published as Tribune went to press – and there is so much that could go wrong for Brown in the very near future. The sullen internal Labour Party truce observed (for the most part) in Manchester is fragile at best, and it would not take a lot for hostilities to break out again: a botched reshuffle, a couple of really bad polls, defeat in the Glenrothes by-election, you name it …
But the best guess is that Brown has won himself some breathing space. The young pretender, David Miliband, no longer looks quite such an obvious alternative as he did in summer. The media consensus is that he had a poor conference – his nadir being pictured holding a banana, which is apparently something only done by nerds. Whatever, there is no one else remotely credible as a would-be prime minister.
So the likelihood is that what will determine both Brown’s and Labour’s fate is the way the government handles the economy in the next six to 12 months.
The only certainty here is that it will not be easy. Economists differ on precisely how severe a downturn Britain will experience as a consequence of the combined credit crunch, energy squeeze and banking crisis. But nearly all agree that it will be severe, particularly if the housing market, currently pretty-much frozen, goes into meltdown US-style. The worst-case scenario, horribly plausible in a way that premonitions of slump have not been for 30 years, is of a vicious circle of collapsing consumption, business failures, rising unemployment and mortgage defaults that creates the worst recession in living memory.
Brown and Alistair Darling are aware of the threat – which is more than can be said of the Conservative opposition, whose economic illiteracy this week has been utterly breathtaking. The prime minister and the chancellor both made it clear in their conference speeches that current economic conditions necessitate the state playing an active role not just in restoring confidence in the banking system but also, crucially, in maintaining the overall level of demand in the economy and in ensuring that the poor do not bear the brunt of the downturn.
In other words, unlike the Tories, they do not appear to be singing from the same song sheet as Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931: in the medium term at least, Labour will borrow and spend to compensate for the effects of tight private credit and will not slash the welfare state.
But if that’s reassuring, it’s not enough. Coded statements of intent in conference speeches are all very well, but they need to be translated into hard policy to have any serious impact either economically or politically – and so far the government’s proposals have been timid, unimaginative and short-term. Of course, dealing with the immediate financial crisis has to be the priority and is in itself a daunting challenge, but the government also needs to come up with concrete medium-term plans for taking the sting out of recession.
The key here is a serious programme of public works – social housing, renewable and nuclear energy, dedicated cycle tracks in every city, urban trams and light railways, a high-speed rail network – to take up the slack in the economy. Needless to say, it would take time to assemble and cost, but that is precisely why the government should be working on it right now even though the scale and duration of the downturn are unclear.
Bad economic times generally do governments no good, and it would be foolish to be too optimistic about Labour’s chances of weathering the gathering storm. The opinion polls are dire even with the post-conference bounce. The party’s position is not, however, completely hopeless. The Tories have no credible economic policy to deal with the recessionary times in which we are now living. With a coherent and bold programme of state intervention to alleviate the pain of market failure, Labour might just persuade the voters to give it another term in spring 2010. Who knows, it could even manage it under its current leader.
So – surprise, surprise – there was no attempt to topple Gordon Brown in Manchester last week, and he lives to fight another day. Indeed, thanks largely to a better-than-expected speech that seems to have given Labour a big bounce in the opinion polls, his position appears significantly stronger after Labour conference than it did just before.
How lasting this new strength will prove is another matter. It might well have started to dissipate by the time you read this – the first polls after David Cameron’s main Tory conference speech were due to be published as Tribune went to press – and there is so much that could go wrong for Brown in the very near future. The sullen internal Labour Party truce observed (for the most part) in Manchester is fragile at best, and it would not take a lot for hostilities to break out again: a botched reshuffle, a couple of really bad polls, defeat in the Glenrothes by-election, you name it …
But the best guess is that Brown has won himself some breathing space. The young pretender, David Miliband, no longer looks quite such an obvious alternative as he did in summer. The media consensus is that he had a poor conference – his nadir being pictured holding a banana, which is apparently something only done by nerds. Whatever, there is no one else remotely credible as a would-be prime minister.
So the likelihood is that what will determine both Brown’s and Labour’s fate is the way the government handles the economy in the next six to 12 months.
The only certainty here is that it will not be easy. Economists differ on precisely how severe a downturn Britain will experience as a consequence of the combined credit crunch, energy squeeze and banking crisis. But nearly all agree that it will be severe, particularly if the housing market, currently pretty-much frozen, goes into meltdown US-style. The worst-case scenario, horribly plausible in a way that premonitions of slump have not been for 30 years, is of a vicious circle of collapsing consumption, business failures, rising unemployment and mortgage defaults that creates the worst recession in living memory.
Brown and Alistair Darling are aware of the threat – which is more than can be said of the Conservative opposition, whose economic illiteracy this week has been utterly breathtaking. The prime minister and the chancellor both made it clear in their conference speeches that current economic conditions necessitate the state playing an active role not just in restoring confidence in the banking system but also, crucially, in maintaining the overall level of demand in the economy and in ensuring that the poor do not bear the brunt of the downturn.
In other words, unlike the Tories, they do not appear to be singing from the same song sheet as Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931: in the medium term at least, Labour will borrow and spend to compensate for the effects of tight private credit and will not slash the welfare state.
But if that’s reassuring, it’s not enough. Coded statements of intent in conference speeches are all very well, but they need to be translated into hard policy to have any serious impact either economically or politically – and so far the government’s proposals have been timid, unimaginative and short-term. Of course, dealing with the immediate financial crisis has to be the priority and is in itself a daunting challenge, but the government also needs to come up with concrete medium-term plans for taking the sting out of recession.
The key here is a serious programme of public works – social housing, renewable and nuclear energy, dedicated cycle tracks in every city, urban trams and light railways, a high-speed rail network – to take up the slack in the economy. Needless to say, it would take time to assemble and cost, but that is precisely why the government should be working on it right now even though the scale and duration of the downturn are unclear.
Bad economic times generally do governments no good, and it would be foolish to be too optimistic about Labour’s chances of weathering the gathering storm. The opinion polls are dire even with the post-conference bounce. The party’s position is not, however, completely hopeless. The Tories have no credible economic policy to deal with the recessionary times in which we are now living. With a coherent and bold programme of state intervention to alleviate the pain of market failure, Labour might just persuade the voters to give it another term in spring 2010. Who knows, it could even manage it under its current leader.
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