THE NEXT STAFFORD CRIPPS?

Funny as it is that someone once nicknamed “Brains” has joined an outfit called International Rescue – if you don’t get it, you didn’t watch Thunderbirds in the 1960s – it’s not really big news. David Miliband was never going to be part of his brother’s top team, simply because the former foreign secretary can never escape the fact that Ed beat him for the Labour leadership in 2010.

I wonder, though, whether David sees himself as Stafford Cripps. The onetime darling of the Labour left, expelled from Labour for advocating a popular front with the Communist Party, Cripps was sent to Moscow  by Winston Churchill in 1940 as ambassador. When he came back in 1942 – having brought Uncle Joe into the war according to popular myth – there was widespread support for Cripps to replace Churchill as PM. Of course, it didn't happen, but ...

AN EXTRA CITIZENSHIP QUESTION

Who or what is Magna Carta?
 An assertion of feudal landowners' powers against the monarchy
 A brave Hungarian peasant girl who closed the boozers at half past ten
 A $21.3 million investment
 A primary school in Staines, Middlesex

NEW LEFT PARTY? GIVE US A BREAK!

I’ve never been a great one for “once a Leninist, always a Leninist”, but certain biographical details are missing from the call for a new left party by Ken Loach, Kate Hudson and Gilbert Achcar published in the Guardian today. Loach was a member of the (Trotskyist) Workers Revolutionary Party and is still – gasp! – a Trotskyist; Hudson, formerly of the (Stalinist) Communist Party of Britain, has long been a fan of Leninist left unity and is married to Andrew Burgin, once of the WRP; and Achcar is a disciple of the late Trotskyist thinker Ernest Mandel and a contributor to the (Trotskyist) International Viewpoint website.

The initiative is an opportunist attempt by jackals in the Leninist swamp – the most orthodox Trots, I’d say (and I know that jackals don't live in swamps: it's a joke!) – to get naive people to sign up to the same old rubbish that they’ve been peddling for years. Why on earth has the Guardian published it? It couldn’t be just because Loach has a new film out?

TEN YEARS ON ...

I've been so busy I missed this blog's 10th anniversary a fortnight ago ... not that there's cause for celebration, but I thought I should at least mention it.

LOOK FORWARD TO SCUMBAG ONLINE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 22 March 2013

Now, I'm not going to do this, you understand, but ...

What if I set up a website – let's call it Scumbag – and got it hosted on a web server in the United States. Scumbag would be explicitly committed to publishing stories about UK celebrities obtained by fair means or foul that involved the most outrageous breaches of privacy, would be explicitly racist, misogynist and homophobic, would campaign relentlessly in favour of climate-change denial and reduction of welfare payments to supposed scroungers, and would never allow anyone it traduced to reply (let alone publish apologies). Familiar profile?

Although Scumbag would concentrate entirely on UK stories, as its sole proprietor I would not be resident in the UK but in Sicily. Scumbag would have no UK employees (though it would use UK freelances) and it would not register the website with any UK regulator.

The question is this: is there anything in any of the proposals currently being made for UK press regulation – including the Leveson-lite compromise that seems to have been agreed by the party leaders last weekend – that would stop Scumbag in its tracks?

I don’t think so. Scumbag would no more be published in the UK than the New York Times is published here – but it would be available to anyone with an internet connection. I’d be in Italy, ogling the girls on the beach and smoking big cigars. Scumbag’s UK freelances would be vulnerable to libel actions in the UK, but the cunningly clever ruse of not giving them bylines and refusing to identify them when anyone contacted HQ in Sicily would make them very difficult to sue. They would also of course be subject to the criminal law in the UK, but if they got caught hacking phones or trespassing in the grounds of royal properties it would be their look-out. No (overt) legal support, though Scumbag would reward initiative generously…

OK, that’s enough grim fantasy – though to be honest, we’re almost there already with dreck like the Guido Fawkes blog and Press TV available to anyone with a smartphone. You’d need a good business head for Scumbag to wash its face as an enterprise, but it already looks an awful lot easier than publishing a highbrow leftwing dead-trees weekly or fortnightly.

But if you do want to publish a highbrow leftwing dead-trees weekly or fortnightly – let’s call it Tribune – in Britain, old-style, and you don’t have big money or even small money, and it’s difficult getting it legalled every issue because you’re broke, all of the proposals put up by self-styled reformers post-Leveson are grounds for panic. You don’t have a Scumbag escape.

Most of the reformers are media studies academics who last worked as journalists 30 or more years ago and have had little published – except think-pieces on media reform and dull stuff in academic journals – for more than two decades. They’re all in favour in theory of insurgent journalism, investigations and all the rest, but they’ve not done any real journalism themselves for ages and are pretty much clueless about how the media have changed since the arrival of the internet. For the best of academic reasons circa 1987, they’re focused on the big players of the late 20th-century, the Murdochs and the Rothermeres. But they don’t know about the internet, and they are barely aware of the minnows on the edges of commercial viability.

And actually, it’s the internet and the minnows that matter. Leave grand principles aside. How much is it going to cost to sign up for being part of the regulatory system that would allow participants in a Leveson-type scheme to avoid being subject to exemplary damages in libel actions if you don’t join – something backed by all parties right now? If it’s twenty quid a year, maybe cough up. If it’s £2,000? Well, that’s the difference between survival and death, so bollocks to that.

As for the idea that third-party complainants – people who think a piece is outrageous for one reason or another though it has nothing directly to do with them – should be given rights to reply or to moan at length that can be enforced by a regulator or a court of law? Bollocks again, to the Freedom Association, the East London Mosque, the British National Party, the various publicists for Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Socialist Workers Party, who have no right whatsoever to any kind of reply from Tribune or my blog apart from the opportunity of contributing to the letters page or comments, with publication at the editor’s – in the case of this blog, my – discretion. And if they don’t like that, they can stick it wherever they want.

The would-be regulators are sad old men with leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets. Hacked Off, the campaign to support the victims of phone-hacking, has been very successful in getting party political support for its proposals to clamp down on the press as it remembers it in the 1980s. But it should be told to get lost. It’s now dangerously past-it.

THE MOST IMPORTANT BY-ELECTION SINCE …

The result in Eastleigh has provoked a lot of commentary – which is hardly surprising, because the by-election was hyped as the most important in living memory by rather a lot of people who should have known better.

Yet what Eastleigh actually shows is rather banal. The Liberal Democrats hung on after a backs-to-the-wall by-election campaign in a constituency they had held with a comfortable majority in 2010 in which they completely dominate local government – but they did so despite haemorrhaging support. The other government party, the Tories, also haemmoraghed support. And the beneficiary was UKIP, which came second, not Labour, which came fourth.

If the result had been different by just a little, of course, it might have been a game-changer. But, er, it wasn’t. Eastleigh means business as usual. David Cameron faces a little more pressure from the right of his party to be more like UKIP – but that pressure has been there for a long time. And the failure of the Tories in Eastleigh means that he has no practical option but continue to keep the coalition with the Lib Dems going just as before for the foreseeable future. (That in turn makes an electoral pact between Cameron and Nick Clegg before the next general election more likely, though that’s another story.)

UKIP’s performance in Eastleigh was impressive, to be sure, but it was in line with national opinion polls – and it is no clearer today than it was four weeks ago whether it will prove capable of mounting a credible general election campaign in 2015.

As for Labour, its poor result is hardly a disaster even though its campaign was inept. Several senior figures raised unrealistic expectations that Eastleigh was Labour’s chance for a big breakthrough in the south of England – and selecting John O’Farrell as candidate was not very clever. He’s funny as a writer and affable as a human being, but he was an outsider parachuted into a campaign dominated by local issues, and no one in the Labour camp seems to have thought that there might be quite a few hostages to fortune in his writing. The hoo-hah over his admission in his 1998 book Things Can Only Get Better that he had momentarily regretted that the IRA did not kill Margaret Thatcher was not the main reason for Labour’s poor showing, but it didn’t help. Whatever, the upshot is that Labour still needs to show that it can win in the south.

At least, though, there was a proper by-election special on the BBC…