Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 21 March 2008
Events, dear boy, events... It's a cliché - but Harold Macmillan's famous line about what's most likely to blow a government off-course remains as apposite as when he is supposed to have uttered it.
And doesn't Gordon Brown know it this week. Amid an international financial crisis that sober experts say could be the worst for the world economy since the Wall Street crash of 1929, the opinion polls appear to have turned irrevocably against Labour. According to YouGov and ICM, Alistair Darling's attempt at reassurance in his first Budget last week has gone down with the punters like a bucket of dodgy oysters.
OK, it's not all over by any means. Precisely what the collapse of the US investment bank Bear Stearns signifies for Britain or indeed anywhere else is not yet clear - and there are always good reasons to resist the temptation to predict the imminent breakdown of the capitalist system. A dull Budget that enthuses no one is not necessarily an omen of electoral disaster. There are still two years before Brown has to go to the polls, and mid-term unpopularity is something governments should treat as the norm rather than the exception (contrary to Labour's experience since 1997). And the Tories are still a long way short of being a shoo-in.
But it doesn't look good at all. The panic in the stock markets might not last for long - indeed it might be over as I write - but the credit crunch is for real, and it's difficult to see how it won't at very least bring the British housing bubble to an end.
UK house prices have been ludicrously inflated for at least five years, and we Brits - or rather those of us who consider ourselves home-owners, though in fact we're not because we've borrowed to buy - have been binge-consuming on the back of more borrowing against our equity.
Now that is all grinding to a halt, it seems. If banks won't lend money to one another because they're worried about their competitors' US sub-prime exposure, they certainly won't lend to any but the least-risky Brit consumers. The scenario every Labour politician fears is that everyone who has lived the high life on equity-based credit tightens his or her belt, the bottom falls out of the housing market, repossessions rocket, businesses of all kinds go bust - and in six months we're into a recession deeper than that of the early 1990s.
Will it happen? I don't know any more than anyone else, but right now I'm not optimistic. And the thought that we might be facing recession makes me gloomier than I have ever been about Labour's chances at the next general election.
Governments do sometimes survive recessions: the Tories won in 1992, remember. It's not impossible to imagine public opinion rallying to dull, dependable Labour if times really were to get tough. Hunch tells me, however, that it wouldn't be like that. Voters would want to punish Labour for bringing the housing bonanza to an end - and the Tories would reap the benefit. Not a pleasant prospect, but has anyone got a more realistic one?
* * *
On a different matter entirely, I spent Tuesday evening at a meeting of the Suffolk branch of the National Union of Journalists. It was unusually full - in part, no doubt, because of the pulling power of the main speaker, Jeremy Dear, NUJ general secretary and fellow Tribune columnist, but also because of the subject of discussion: the announcement by Archant, the publisher of the Ipswich East Anglian Daily Times and Evening Star, that it was going to replace many of its sub-editors with non-journalist (and worse-paid) page-designers.
You might think this an arcane matter of obvious interest to those whose jobs are threatened but of little wider importance. But it's not. It's yet another example of aggressive newspaper management sacrificing quality journalism in pursuit of greater profits - part of the culture of "churnalism" attacked with such verve by the Guardian's Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News. Getting rid of subs might save Archant several thousand pounds a year - but it would also inevitably mean stories being published full of grammatical, spelling and factual mistakes.
And that's not because the reporters and feature-writers on the Anglian and the Star are incompetent - just that they're human and fallible. I've been working as a sub at least part of the time for nearly 25 years now, and I have never come across a writer whose work has not been improved by subbing. Even the most elegant stylist will now and again misspell a proper name or attribute a quotation to the wrong person - and many of the best reporters do not write very well. It's true that technology has changed the sub's job out of all recognition since I started, but it hasn't rendered it obsolete - and never will.
19 March 2008
10 March 2008
PODER OBRERO
Congratulations to our comrades in the PSOE. Much more important than anything in Venezuela or Cuba; hardly reported.
6 March 2008
THEY'D NONE OF THEM BE MISSED...
The 29 Europhobe Labour MPs who voted with the Tories for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty:
Colin Burgon (Elmet), Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley), Frank Cook (Stockton North), Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North), John Cummings (Easington), Ian Davidson (Glasgow South West), David Drew (Stroud), Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe & Nantwich), Frank Field (Birkenhead), Mark Fisher (Stoke-on-Trent Central), Roger Godsiff (Birmingham Sparkbrook & Small Heath), Kate Hoey (Vauxhall), Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North), Lindsay Hoyle (Chorley), Lynne Jones (Birmingham Selly Oak), John McDonnell (Hayes & Harlington), David Marshall (Glasgow East), Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby), Anne Moffat (East Lothian), George Mudie (Leeds East), Denis Murphy (Wansbeck), Alan Simpson (Nottingham South), Dennis Skinner (Bolsover), Graham Stringer (Manchester Blackley), Gisela Stuart (Birmingham Edgbaston), David Taylor (Leicestershire North West), Paul Truswell (Pudsey), Robert Wareing (Liverpool West Derby), Mike Wood (Batley & Spen)
Colin Burgon (Elmet), Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley), Frank Cook (Stockton North), Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North), John Cummings (Easington), Ian Davidson (Glasgow South West), David Drew (Stroud), Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe & Nantwich), Frank Field (Birkenhead), Mark Fisher (Stoke-on-Trent Central), Roger Godsiff (Birmingham Sparkbrook & Small Heath), Kate Hoey (Vauxhall), Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North), Lindsay Hoyle (Chorley), Lynne Jones (Birmingham Selly Oak), John McDonnell (Hayes & Harlington), David Marshall (Glasgow East), Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby), Anne Moffat (East Lothian), George Mudie (Leeds East), Denis Murphy (Wansbeck), Alan Simpson (Nottingham South), Dennis Skinner (Bolsover), Graham Stringer (Manchester Blackley), Gisela Stuart (Birmingham Edgbaston), David Taylor (Leicestershire North West), Paul Truswell (Pudsey), Robert Wareing (Liverpool West Derby), Mike Wood (Batley & Spen)
27 February 2008
DID THE EARTH MOVE FOR YOU?
I thought it was a big lorry that shouldn't have been out so late. But in Market Rasen it was something else, according to the BBC:
At the offices of the town's local newspaper, the Market Rasen Mail, the earthquake broke the usual daily news agenda.
Michael Steed, one of the paper's two reporters, said the earthquake had happened too late to make this week's edition, but it was likely to be the front page story next week.
22 February 2008
UP TO A POINT ...
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 22 February 2008
Few books have caused quite such a stir of late as the Guardian journalist Nick Davies’s excoriating expose of British journalism, Flat Earth News. It has been reviewed at length in every quality national, discussed in columns and on radio and TV, excerpted by four different newspapers and magazines.
And it’s not hard to see why there is such interest. Davies breaks the journalistic convention that “dog doesn’t eat dog” – in other words, that journalists don’t attack one another in public – and he does it with panache. No newspaper or broadcaster is spared in his assault on what he calls “churnalism”, “journalists failing to perform the basic functions of their profession; quite unable to tell the reader the truth about what is happening on their patch”.
But is he right? On quite a lot, yes. Journalists too often fail to question received wisdom of all kinds. They are too often bamboozled by spin doctors, corporate public relations companies, axe-grinding pressure groups and disinformation specialists from the spook world. Too many journalists – particularly on local newspapers – are so overworked that they spend nearly all their time recycling press releases, interview only over the phone (never face-to-face) and rarely leave the office. In many news organisations, pressure of time means that facts aren’t checked. Many newspapers and broadcasting outlets have cut back on investigative journalism because it’s too expensive. Some journalists use extraordinarily dubious methods to dig up information; some get too close to their sources. There’s a deeply unpleasant culture of bullying in some national newspapers; others are utterly cynical about running any story that will boost circulation even though they know it to be untrue.
All the same, Davies over-eggs the pudding. He started work on Flat Earth News, he says, because of “a single, notorious story – the long and twisting saga of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”: “As the sand settled after the invasion in March 2003 and the weaponless reality slowly began to emerge, journalists across the world started looking for the truth and yet almost all of them wrote about it as though this were a screw-up generated only by intelligence agencies and governments, invariably failing to expose their own profession’s global contribution.”
Yet the chapter of the book that focuses most directly on WMD andIraq
The chapter starts well: its first part is about the reporter David Rose, who ran a series of articles in the wake of 9/11 based on dubious sources: Iraqi exiles and US and British intelligence officials. Rose swallowed the story that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11, used ropey evidence to question the credibility of Scott Ritter (the American former-weapons-inspector who questioned whether Saddam had WMD) and generally got caught up in what he later described as “a calculated set-up, devised to foster the propaganda for war”. It’s an amazing tale of journalistic misjudgment and Davies tells it well, though I’m unconvinced by his assumption that Rose’s work had a massive impact on the minds of Observer readers: I remember his stories well, and like everyone I know took them with a very large pinch of salt.
What has got them talking in Farringdon Road, though, are Davies’s allegations about the relationship between the Observer and the British government in 2002-03. He has it that the Observer’s editor, Roger Alton, and its political editor, Kamal Ahmed, were manipulated by Alastair Campbell into becoming mouthpieces for No 10 Downing Street – and it’s here that I start to get really sceptical.
Davies suggests that Alton and Ahmed were tricked into supporting the toppling of Saddam and then themselves used underhand means to ensure that the Observer, in defiance of its liberal traditions, backed the government. But a much more plausible explanation of their actions is the simplest: that they came independently to the conclusion that Saddam was a vile dictator who should be overthrown, and so backed the war. They might have been wrong, but there is insufficient evidence to impugn their integrity as Davies does.
I also think he exaggerates both the reliance of the quality national press on news agencies and the unreliability of agency copy – and there are plenty of counter-examples that undermine his claim that investigative journalism is disappearing, not least from his own paper (though you can also find it on occasion even in the Daily Mail). In other words, most journalism in Britain is pretty good, and the best of it is excellent.
But Flat Earth News provides a salutary warning about where things are wrong and what could happen in a worst-case projection of current trends. And you know what? Dog eating dog is horribly watchable.
Few books have caused quite such a stir of late as the Guardian journalist Nick Davies’s excoriating expose of British journalism, Flat Earth News. It has been reviewed at length in every quality national, discussed in columns and on radio and TV, excerpted by four different newspapers and magazines.
And it’s not hard to see why there is such interest. Davies breaks the journalistic convention that “dog doesn’t eat dog” – in other words, that journalists don’t attack one another in public – and he does it with panache. No newspaper or broadcaster is spared in his assault on what he calls “churnalism”, “journalists failing to perform the basic functions of their profession; quite unable to tell the reader the truth about what is happening on their patch”.
But is he right? On quite a lot, yes. Journalists too often fail to question received wisdom of all kinds. They are too often bamboozled by spin doctors, corporate public relations companies, axe-grinding pressure groups and disinformation specialists from the spook world. Too many journalists – particularly on local newspapers – are so overworked that they spend nearly all their time recycling press releases, interview only over the phone (never face-to-face) and rarely leave the office. In many news organisations, pressure of time means that facts aren’t checked. Many newspapers and broadcasting outlets have cut back on investigative journalism because it’s too expensive. Some journalists use extraordinarily dubious methods to dig up information; some get too close to their sources. There’s a deeply unpleasant culture of bullying in some national newspapers; others are utterly cynical about running any story that will boost circulation even though they know it to be untrue.
All the same, Davies over-eggs the pudding. He started work on Flat Earth News, he says, because of “a single, notorious story – the long and twisting saga of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”: “As the sand settled after the invasion in March 2003 and the weaponless reality slowly began to emerge, journalists across the world started looking for the truth and yet almost all of them wrote about it as though this were a screw-up generated only by intelligence agencies and governments, invariably failing to expose their own profession’s global contribution.”
Yet the chapter of the book that focuses most directly on WMD and
The chapter starts well: its first part is about the reporter David Rose, who ran a series of articles in the wake of 9/11 based on dubious sources: Iraqi exiles and US and British intelligence officials. Rose swallowed the story that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11, used ropey evidence to question the credibility of Scott Ritter (the American former-weapons-inspector who questioned whether Saddam had WMD) and generally got caught up in what he later described as “a calculated set-up, devised to foster the propaganda for war”. It’s an amazing tale of journalistic misjudgment and Davies tells it well, though I’m unconvinced by his assumption that Rose’s work had a massive impact on the minds of Observer readers: I remember his stories well, and like everyone I know took them with a very large pinch of salt.
What has got them talking in Farringdon Road, though, are Davies’s allegations about the relationship between the Observer and the British government in 2002-03. He has it that the Observer’s editor, Roger Alton, and its political editor, Kamal Ahmed, were manipulated by Alastair Campbell into becoming mouthpieces for No 10 Downing Street – and it’s here that I start to get really sceptical.
Davies suggests that Alton and Ahmed were tricked into supporting the toppling of Saddam and then themselves used underhand means to ensure that the Observer, in defiance of its liberal traditions, backed the government. But a much more plausible explanation of their actions is the simplest: that they came independently to the conclusion that Saddam was a vile dictator who should be overthrown, and so backed the war. They might have been wrong, but there is insufficient evidence to impugn their integrity as Davies does.
I also think he exaggerates both the reliance of the quality national press on news agencies and the unreliability of agency copy – and there are plenty of counter-examples that undermine his claim that investigative journalism is disappearing, not least from his own paper (though you can also find it on occasion even in the Daily Mail). In other words, most journalism in Britain is pretty good, and the best of it is excellent.
But Flat Earth News provides a salutary warning about where things are wrong and what could happen in a worst-case projection of current trends. And you know what? Dog eating dog is horribly watchable.
18 February 2008
15 February 2008
14 February 2008
... AND IT'S GOODNIGHT FROM JOHN KAMPFNER
I have no insider gossip on the shenanigans at the New Statesman that have led to the resignation of its editor, John Kampfner, and I'm not particularly shocked: I didn't think he was any good. Under his watch the paper — with notable exceptions, most importantly the contributions of Martin Bright as political editor — has been terribly predictable and intellectually unchallenging .
But Kampfner's demise is significant, not least because it highlights the role of Geoffrey Robinson as NS proprietor. I'm almost prepared to accept that the millionaire MP for Coventry North West — who is, incidentally, a complete dickhead — doesn't interfere day-to-day with the editorial side of the paper. But he bought it as a favour for Gordon and Tony way back in 1996, and his "non-interventionism" has always on balance favoured his mates (Gordon and his pals). From the paper's point of view, now might be a rather good time to sell out to its readers, as we wanted to in 1996, and regain a little credibility.
But Kampfner's demise is significant, not least because it highlights the role of Geoffrey Robinson as NS proprietor. I'm almost prepared to accept that the millionaire MP for Coventry North West — who is, incidentally, a complete dickhead — doesn't interfere day-to-day with the editorial side of the paper. But he bought it as a favour for Gordon and Tony way back in 1996, and his "non-interventionism" has always on balance favoured his mates (Gordon and his pals). From the paper's point of view, now might be a rather good time to sell out to its readers, as we wanted to in 1996, and regain a little credibility.
26 January 2008
SIGNS OF THE TIMES - 1
Unless Amazon is kidding me, Robert Michels's Political Parties, one of the most important works of 20th-century political sociology, is now out-of-print. So, it appears, is just about all of Max Weber apart from The Protestant Ethic. OK, you can get the books through Abebooks and some of them are online, but I'm disturbed.
25 January 2008
THE TAMED REVOLUTIONARIES OF CITY HALL
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 25 January 2008
All right, I know this makes me sound like a Guardian leader-writer, but I can see both points of view in the gigantic spat that has erupted of late between Ken Livingstone and his media critics, most recently the makers of Monday's Channel Four Dispatches programme on the London mayor (available through Channel Four's on-demand service here: registration and so on take a couple of minutes).
On one hand, Livingstone is, as the Dispatches programme's presenter, Martin Bright, puts it, an entirely legitimate subject for journalistic investigation – and some of the material Bright and others have dug up on him and his administration does not cast Ken and co in a favourable light.
The Dispatches programme showed conclusively that Livingstone has indulged in serious cronyism, with a coterie of old mates, many of them veterans of the Trotskyist groupuscule Socialist Action, occupying key positions at City Hall and getting very well paid for it. And one of Ken's buddies, Lee Jasper, the mayor's senior policy adviser on race, is alleged (by the Evening Standard rather than Dispatches) to have engaged in serious cronyism himself: projects run by his pals are said to have received a disproportionate share of financial support from City Hall. These are precisely the sorts of things that journalists should probe, and Livingstone's dismissal of the Dispatches programme as a "hatchet job" and his attempt to get the programme pulled at the last minute were way over-the-top.
On the other hand, Livingstone does have a case against the media coverage he has been getting of late, including parts of the Dispatches programme – so what if he drank whisky in the morning at a public meeting and is sometimes rude to people? The Evening Standard has undoubtedly been running a vendetta against him (although it gave him space this week to respond to his critics) and the misdemeanours of which he is accused (although not all the allegations about his advisers) are trifles, particularly when set against the GLA's achievements since he was first elected in 2000: the congestion charge, all the new buses, the Olympics and so on. The fact that Livingstone has a tight-knit group of Trots as his core team is certainly noteworthy and deserves to be in the public sphere – but isn't it weird rather than chilling?
Think about it. Socialist Action – if indeed it still exists as an organisation in any conventional sense – is an ideological blast from the past. Its origins are in the International Marxist Group, the erstwhile political home of Tariq Ali and one of the four biggest Trotskyist groups of the 1970s. Then, its members (mostly students) turned up to every demo and political meeting to harangue the masses about the necessity of making the IMG the leadership of the coming British revolution.
The revolution never came, and during the 1980s the IMG fell apart after a series of arcane disputes. Socialist Action was the tiny bit of it that was (a) keenest to work as "entryists" in the Labour Party and (b) least critical of Soviet-style socialism. Its members spent the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s keeping their heads down and attempting to lever themselves into key positions in Labour left organisations and campaigns – what used to be called in left circles "the long march through the institutions". Socialist Action people were prominent in the Campaign for Labour Democracy, Labour CND, the Labour Committee on Ireland, Campaign Group News and a host of other initiatives, most long-forgotten. They proved themselves hard-working and didn't give up – and that's what attracted Livingstone to them.
He needed a political machine to further his political ambitions – and he found it in the comrades of Socialist Action. Throughout his wilderness years in the late 1980s and 1990s, they supported him – and as London mayor he has rewarded them with jobs. John Ross is his economic adviser, Simon Fletcher his chief-of-staff and Redmond O'Neill his transport chief. (There are others.)
Now, this is a remarkable success for the Socialist Action strategy in one sense: the group's key people are in key positions. But if you judge Socialist Action by its original goals – world socialist revolution – it can only count as failure. In nearly eight years, these one-time revolutionaries have managed to increase the tax on London motorists and modernise London's buses – oh, and cut a rather dubious symbolic oil deal with a third-world populist. Man the barricades, I don't think.
I was never much of a fan of Socialist Action – but I must admit I have a sneaking admiration for the way Livingstone used the comrades. It's difficult to imagine where else he could have acquired a core team so completely loyal, and they have played a useful part in the leftist political gestures (support for the 2004 European Social Forum, the Chavez oil deal, initiatives to counter "Islamophobia") that will probably be enough to ensure that Livingstone does not lose many votes to the Respect or Green candidates in May. Whether you like him or loathe him, he's a wily old fox, that Ken.
All right, I know this makes me sound like a Guardian leader-writer, but I can see both points of view in the gigantic spat that has erupted of late between Ken Livingstone and his media critics, most recently the makers of Monday's Channel Four Dispatches programme on the London mayor (available through Channel Four's on-demand service here: registration and so on take a couple of minutes).
On one hand, Livingstone is, as the Dispatches programme's presenter, Martin Bright, puts it, an entirely legitimate subject for journalistic investigation – and some of the material Bright and others have dug up on him and his administration does not cast Ken and co in a favourable light.
The Dispatches programme showed conclusively that Livingstone has indulged in serious cronyism, with a coterie of old mates, many of them veterans of the Trotskyist groupuscule Socialist Action, occupying key positions at City Hall and getting very well paid for it. And one of Ken's buddies, Lee Jasper, the mayor's senior policy adviser on race, is alleged (by the Evening Standard rather than Dispatches) to have engaged in serious cronyism himself: projects run by his pals are said to have received a disproportionate share of financial support from City Hall. These are precisely the sorts of things that journalists should probe, and Livingstone's dismissal of the Dispatches programme as a "hatchet job" and his attempt to get the programme pulled at the last minute were way over-the-top.
On the other hand, Livingstone does have a case against the media coverage he has been getting of late, including parts of the Dispatches programme – so what if he drank whisky in the morning at a public meeting and is sometimes rude to people? The Evening Standard has undoubtedly been running a vendetta against him (although it gave him space this week to respond to his critics) and the misdemeanours of which he is accused (although not all the allegations about his advisers) are trifles, particularly when set against the GLA's achievements since he was first elected in 2000: the congestion charge, all the new buses, the Olympics and so on. The fact that Livingstone has a tight-knit group of Trots as his core team is certainly noteworthy and deserves to be in the public sphere – but isn't it weird rather than chilling?
Think about it. Socialist Action – if indeed it still exists as an organisation in any conventional sense – is an ideological blast from the past. Its origins are in the International Marxist Group, the erstwhile political home of Tariq Ali and one of the four biggest Trotskyist groups of the 1970s. Then, its members (mostly students) turned up to every demo and political meeting to harangue the masses about the necessity of making the IMG the leadership of the coming British revolution.
The revolution never came, and during the 1980s the IMG fell apart after a series of arcane disputes. Socialist Action was the tiny bit of it that was (a) keenest to work as "entryists" in the Labour Party and (b) least critical of Soviet-style socialism. Its members spent the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s keeping their heads down and attempting to lever themselves into key positions in Labour left organisations and campaigns – what used to be called in left circles "the long march through the institutions". Socialist Action people were prominent in the Campaign for Labour Democracy, Labour CND, the Labour Committee on Ireland, Campaign Group News and a host of other initiatives, most long-forgotten. They proved themselves hard-working and didn't give up – and that's what attracted Livingstone to them.
He needed a political machine to further his political ambitions – and he found it in the comrades of Socialist Action. Throughout his wilderness years in the late 1980s and 1990s, they supported him – and as London mayor he has rewarded them with jobs. John Ross is his economic adviser, Simon Fletcher his chief-of-staff and Redmond O'Neill his transport chief. (There are others.)
Now, this is a remarkable success for the Socialist Action strategy in one sense: the group's key people are in key positions. But if you judge Socialist Action by its original goals – world socialist revolution – it can only count as failure. In nearly eight years, these one-time revolutionaries have managed to increase the tax on London motorists and modernise London's buses – oh, and cut a rather dubious symbolic oil deal with a third-world populist. Man the barricades, I don't think.
I was never much of a fan of Socialist Action – but I must admit I have a sneaking admiration for the way Livingstone used the comrades. It's difficult to imagine where else he could have acquired a core team so completely loyal, and they have played a useful part in the leftist political gestures (support for the 2004 European Social Forum, the Chavez oil deal, initiatives to counter "Islamophobia") that will probably be enough to ensure that Livingstone does not lose many votes to the Respect or Green candidates in May. Whether you like him or loathe him, he's a wily old fox, that Ken.
24 January 2008
SO FAREWELL, THEN, PETER HAIN
Of course, he had to go – but it's sad. Hain, for all his faults, was the last remaining member of the cabinet who was on the left in the 80s and 90s and who still retained some credibility as a leading soft-left (or democratic-left or whatever you want to call it) figure in Labour politics.
His demise is significant. The extraordinary incompetence of his deputy leadership campaign speaks volumes about the state of the democratic left in the Labour Party: leaving aside the allegations of dodgy donations, it's hard for anyone who was around 15 or 20 years ago not to notice that he took on the most useless people to run his bid for the post. No names, no pack-drill, but ... Jesus!
I guess they were the only comrades from the old days who were still around. The whole democratic left scene has hollowed out. Whatever, the Hainites spent a vast amount of money and failed – not least because they stupidly targeted the trade union and individual membership vote in Labour's electoral college rather than the MPs who have much greater weight inside it. (Hain came fifth out of sixth in the overall result but was a respectable third in terms of the actual number of votes cast: his humiliation came from his fellow MPs.)
Oh, well. Another long march through the institutions that ends in nothing much. Time for sex and drugs and rock'n'roll.
His demise is significant. The extraordinary incompetence of his deputy leadership campaign speaks volumes about the state of the democratic left in the Labour Party: leaving aside the allegations of dodgy donations, it's hard for anyone who was around 15 or 20 years ago not to notice that he took on the most useless people to run his bid for the post. No names, no pack-drill, but ... Jesus!
I guess they were the only comrades from the old days who were still around. The whole democratic left scene has hollowed out. Whatever, the Hainites spent a vast amount of money and failed – not least because they stupidly targeted the trade union and individual membership vote in Labour's electoral college rather than the MPs who have much greater weight inside it. (Hain came fifth out of sixth in the overall result but was a respectable third in terms of the actual number of votes cast: his humiliation came from his fellow MPs.)
Oh, well. Another long march through the institutions that ends in nothing much. Time for sex and drugs and rock'n'roll.
20 January 2008
THE PROBLEM WITH DEEP ENTRYISM … IS THAT YOU ALWAYS GET FOUND OUT
I’m rather looking forward to tomorrow’s Channel Four Despatches programme on Ken Livingstone and (inter alia) his relationship with the Trots of Socialist Action. I had a couple of pints several months ago with one of the researchers on the programme and tried to make it clear that the London mayor’s relationship with the comrades was a bit one-way – he got a completely loyal mini-political-machine in return for a little bit of leftist posturing on his part – but it doesn’t seem that my analysis convinced her. All the pre-broadcast press (see Nick Cohen here and the Sunday Times here and here) suggests that the programme takes the line that Socialist Action is a dangerous shady conspiracy. Oh, well. What's more amazing is that it has taken so long for this to turn into a story. The Guardian had it (buried in paragraph 98) eight years ago, and even I mentioned it in passing nearly five years back.
USELESS HOME SECRETARY
What sort of idiot could say of walking in the streets of Hackney after dark:
Er, we do it all the time.
"Well, I just don't think that's a thing that people do, is it, really?"
Er, we do it all the time.
17 January 2008
11 January 2008
NO MORE LENIN
Paul Anderson, review of Complications: communism and the dilemmas of democracy by Claude Lefort (Columbia University Press, £22.50), Tribune, 11 January 2008
Claude Lefort is one of the last survivors of the French intellectual left that dazzled even the Anglophone world for 30 years after the end of the second world war – a student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the 1940s, co-founder with Cornelius Castoriadis of the libertarian-socialist journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, the subject of one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s most vehement polemics of the 1950s and, since the 1960s, the exponent sans pareil of a radical democratic critique of totalitarianism and bureaucratic liberalism.
This book is his response to a raft of liberal triumphalist accounts of the history of communism published in the late 1990s, in particular those by the great French historian Francois Furet (who died in 1997) and the American Sovietologist Martin Malia (who died in 2004), authors respectively of The Passing of an Illusion and The Soviet Tragedy. Although it is late to arrive in English – it was published in French eight years ago as La Complication – it is a welcome addition to the literature that deserves a wide readership.
Lefort’s disagreement with the liberal triumphalists is emphatically not that of those Stalinist nostalgics who think that the Furets and Malias exaggerate Soviet crimes. Nor has he anything in common with Trotskyists and other Leninists who assert that everything would have been fine had Stalin not won the battle for control of the Soviet party-state in the 1920s. His argument is that the impact of the Bolshevik revolution was disastrous from the start – and that it was much more profound and much more pernicious than even enthusiastic anti-communist liberals admit.
Western communists and fellow-travellers worshipped Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia not out of ignorance, Lefort argues, but in admiration of the efficacy of its elimination of supposed counter-revolutionaries and deviants. The friends of the Soviet Union in the west were not deluded innocents, as Furet’s book title suggests, but enthusiasts for totalitarianism.
Just as important, says Lefort, we must be wary of history written with the benefit of hindsight. Even in the late 1980s, hardly anyone thought that the Soviet Union was anything but a permanent fixture on the world stage. To write now of the inevitability of the demise of communism is an act of intellectual bad faith.
Complications is hard going at times, mainly because Lefort is expressing complex ideas and makes frequent excursions into his own intellectual and personal history. (One chapter is devoted to Hannah Arendt, another to the history of the French Communist Party after 1945.) There is also a problem, however, with Julian Bourg’s over-literal translation, particularly on tenses. The convention in English is to use the present tense when discussing contemporary work: here everything is in simple past, as in the French original.
All the same, this is a minor gripe – and Bourg’s introductory essay is a model of clarity. Anyone with any interest in understanding the rise and fall of communism in the 20th century will find this book immensely stimulating.
Claude Lefort is one of the last survivors of the French intellectual left that dazzled even the Anglophone world for 30 years after the end of the second world war – a student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the 1940s, co-founder with Cornelius Castoriadis of the libertarian-socialist journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, the subject of one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s most vehement polemics of the 1950s and, since the 1960s, the exponent sans pareil of a radical democratic critique of totalitarianism and bureaucratic liberalism.
This book is his response to a raft of liberal triumphalist accounts of the history of communism published in the late 1990s, in particular those by the great French historian Francois Furet (who died in 1997) and the American Sovietologist Martin Malia (who died in 2004), authors respectively of The Passing of an Illusion and The Soviet Tragedy. Although it is late to arrive in English – it was published in French eight years ago as La Complication – it is a welcome addition to the literature that deserves a wide readership.
Lefort’s disagreement with the liberal triumphalists is emphatically not that of those Stalinist nostalgics who think that the Furets and Malias exaggerate Soviet crimes. Nor has he anything in common with Trotskyists and other Leninists who assert that everything would have been fine had Stalin not won the battle for control of the Soviet party-state in the 1920s. His argument is that the impact of the Bolshevik revolution was disastrous from the start – and that it was much more profound and much more pernicious than even enthusiastic anti-communist liberals admit.
Western communists and fellow-travellers worshipped Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia not out of ignorance, Lefort argues, but in admiration of the efficacy of its elimination of supposed counter-revolutionaries and deviants. The friends of the Soviet Union in the west were not deluded innocents, as Furet’s book title suggests, but enthusiasts for totalitarianism.
Just as important, says Lefort, we must be wary of history written with the benefit of hindsight. Even in the late 1980s, hardly anyone thought that the Soviet Union was anything but a permanent fixture on the world stage. To write now of the inevitability of the demise of communism is an act of intellectual bad faith.
Complications is hard going at times, mainly because Lefort is expressing complex ideas and makes frequent excursions into his own intellectual and personal history. (One chapter is devoted to Hannah Arendt, another to the history of the French Communist Party after 1945.) There is also a problem, however, with Julian Bourg’s over-literal translation, particularly on tenses. The convention in English is to use the present tense when discussing contemporary work: here everything is in simple past, as in the French original.
All the same, this is a minor gripe – and Bourg’s introductory essay is a model of clarity. Anyone with any interest in understanding the rise and fall of communism in the 20th century will find this book immensely stimulating.
6 January 2008
PROLETARIAN ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT SITUATION
I didn't realise anyone did crazy shit like this any more.
BELATED NEW YEAR GREETINGS
I'm getting the feeling that blogging is a bit 2005 and am thinking of giving it up completely very soon.
But while I chew over the options, a thought. It's now 40 years since 1968 - which means that the May evenements in Paris are pretty much as long ago as the Spanish revolution of 1936-38 was when I first got into politics in the 1970s. The first wave of CND 50 years ago is more distant than the Russian revolutions of 1917 were to Edward Thompson and others when they left the Communist Party in 1956. Before we know it, the 1945 general election will be as far away as the Paris Commune was to Aneurin Bevan, George Orwell and all the rest who celebrated the victory of Clement Attlee.
Time to sort the oral history.
But while I chew over the options, a thought. It's now 40 years since 1968 - which means that the May evenements in Paris are pretty much as long ago as the Spanish revolution of 1936-38 was when I first got into politics in the 1970s. The first wave of CND 50 years ago is more distant than the Russian revolutions of 1917 were to Edward Thompson and others when they left the Communist Party in 1956. Before we know it, the 1945 general election will be as far away as the Paris Commune was to Aneurin Bevan, George Orwell and all the rest who celebrated the victory of Clement Attlee.
Time to sort the oral history.
26 December 2007
BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Everyone else has been doing it, so here are the five non-fiction titles I’ve most enjoyed in 2007 in no particular order (no fiction because I’ve been reading 1930s and 1940s novels):
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin
An absolute corker: lots of stuff from the Georgian archives and a stunning narrative. You couldn’t make it up.
Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy
Veteran French libertarian democratic leftist responds (belatedly in English translation) to the hardcore French anticommunist histories of the 20th century. They’re not tough enough intellectually, he says. Right on!
Patrick Wright, Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War
Not quite sure it coheres, but this is a great history of the left’s delusions about Soviet communism.
Kenneth O Morgan, Michael Foot: A Life
Very readable and perhaps over-friendly, but hey, a solid piece of work on a lovely geezer.
Nick Cohen, What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way
Well, I would, wouldn’t I?
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin
An absolute corker: lots of stuff from the Georgian archives and a stunning narrative. You couldn’t make it up.
Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy
Veteran French libertarian democratic leftist responds (belatedly in English translation) to the hardcore French anticommunist histories of the 20th century. They’re not tough enough intellectually, he says. Right on!
Patrick Wright, Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War
Not quite sure it coheres, but this is a great history of the left’s delusions about Soviet communism.
Kenneth O Morgan, Michael Foot: A Life
Very readable and perhaps over-friendly, but hey, a solid piece of work on a lovely geezer.
Nick Cohen, What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way
Well, I would, wouldn’t I?
21 December 2007
BLAST FROM THE PAST
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 21 December 2007
James Lamond, the former Labour MP who died last month at the age of 78, was not someone I knew well. I interviewed him for news stories in the late 1980s and early 1990s and met him several times, mostly at meetings. He was, in my limited experience, a polite, witty and friendly man – and by all accounts he was an excellent constituency MP, first of all for Oldham East and then for Oldham Central and Royton, and an assiduous parliamentarian.
But in one crucial respect his politics reeked. He might not have made headlines in the London papers, but to the rest of the world he was the most prominent Soviet fellow-traveller in Labour’s parliamentary ranks during the 1970s and 1980s, serving for several years as vice-president of the World Peace Council, the Moscow-funded front organisation created early in the cold war to campaign for Soviet and against American foreign policy.
The reason I interviewed him was precisely to get the residual pro-Soviet Labour left line on events as the cold war first froze and then melted in the course of the 1980s. And he never failed to oblige. He echoed the official Soviet position on every issue, defending the invasion of Afghanistan, the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, the stationing of SS-20 missiles in eastern Europe and all the rest. The last time I saw him, I think in 1990, he admitted to being depressed by the fall of the Berlin wall.
Lamond was not a mainstream figure. His extraordinarily uncritical brand of pro-Sovietism was always at odds with official Labour policy, and by the early-to-mid 1980s was freakish even among the most hard-left Labour MPs, shared by a handful of veteran Stalinists whose careers were coming to an end (Frank Allaun, Joan Maynard) and a smattering of younger dupes (Ron Brown, George Galloway).
But Lamond’s politics had a colourful history. As Patrick Wright shows in his brilliant new book, Iron Curtain, the British left’s fascination with and delusions about Soviet Russia started as soon as the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917. Through the 1920s and 1930s, a string of British left-wing tourists -- most famously George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, but they were not alone -- declared that they had seen the future and that it worked. Much of the Labour Party leadership agreed.
Stalin’s betrayal of Spain, the show trials and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact immunised a generation of Labourites and left-wingers to the charms of the Soviet Union; the onset of the cold war did the same for another tranche. But in the 1950s, as the historian John Callaghan has related convincingly, the Labour left for the most part reverted to wishful thinking about the possibilities for democratic reform of what became known as “actually existing socialism”.
All that was distant by the 1980s -- Czechoslovakia 1968 and Poland 1981 had intervened, along with an increasingly apparent crisis in the Soviet economy. But pro-Sovietism retained a significant foothold in the left outside the parliamentary Labour Party. In the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament there was a strong pro-Soviet minority. The World Peace Council and its British affiliate, the British Peace Assembly, had sufficient support to be taken seriously by their opponents, and many people who should have known better accepted their bona fides. In several trade unions, particularly in Scotland, there was a well-organised pro-Soviet lobby, based on the Communist Party’s industrial organisation, which was efficient at getting resolutions passed by Labour Party and union branches and union conferences.
Even those parts of the British left least prone to pro-Sovietism got caught up in the show after Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985 and initiated a reform programme that fleetingly promised a democratic socialist transformation of the Soviet police state. “Gorbymania” was an idiocy, but it was heartily embraced by Tribune, every Trot in town and the whole of the Labour leadership.
But back to James Lamond. I have no doubt that he was sincere in his belief that the Soviet Union wanted nothing other than peace. He told me once that he had been convinced of the pacific intentions of the Soviet people by a tour of Russia in the 1960s, when he met a veteran of Stalingrad. (He told the same story to the historian Darren Lilleker, whose book on the pro-Soviet left in the Labour Party, Against the Cold War, was published three years ago.)
But his sincerity is neither here nor there. At best, Lamond’s naivety was astounding. His and his comrades’ idiotic identification of the Soviet Union as the grand hope of the socialist movement, 60-plus years after Kronstadt, 40-plus after the Stalin show trials and 20-plus after the Hungarian revolution, did nothing but harm to the cause of democratic socialism in Britain.
James Lamond, the former Labour MP who died last month at the age of 78, was not someone I knew well. I interviewed him for news stories in the late 1980s and early 1990s and met him several times, mostly at meetings. He was, in my limited experience, a polite, witty and friendly man – and by all accounts he was an excellent constituency MP, first of all for Oldham East and then for Oldham Central and Royton, and an assiduous parliamentarian.
But in one crucial respect his politics reeked. He might not have made headlines in the London papers, but to the rest of the world he was the most prominent Soviet fellow-traveller in Labour’s parliamentary ranks during the 1970s and 1980s, serving for several years as vice-president of the World Peace Council, the Moscow-funded front organisation created early in the cold war to campaign for Soviet and against American foreign policy.
The reason I interviewed him was precisely to get the residual pro-Soviet Labour left line on events as the cold war first froze and then melted in the course of the 1980s. And he never failed to oblige. He echoed the official Soviet position on every issue, defending the invasion of Afghanistan, the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, the stationing of SS-20 missiles in eastern Europe and all the rest. The last time I saw him, I think in 1990, he admitted to being depressed by the fall of the Berlin wall.
Lamond was not a mainstream figure. His extraordinarily uncritical brand of pro-Sovietism was always at odds with official Labour policy, and by the early-to-mid 1980s was freakish even among the most hard-left Labour MPs, shared by a handful of veteran Stalinists whose careers were coming to an end (Frank Allaun, Joan Maynard) and a smattering of younger dupes (Ron Brown, George Galloway).
But Lamond’s politics had a colourful history. As Patrick Wright shows in his brilliant new book, Iron Curtain, the British left’s fascination with and delusions about Soviet Russia started as soon as the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917. Through the 1920s and 1930s, a string of British left-wing tourists -- most famously George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, but they were not alone -- declared that they had seen the future and that it worked. Much of the Labour Party leadership agreed.
Stalin’s betrayal of Spain, the show trials and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact immunised a generation of Labourites and left-wingers to the charms of the Soviet Union; the onset of the cold war did the same for another tranche. But in the 1950s, as the historian John Callaghan has related convincingly, the Labour left for the most part reverted to wishful thinking about the possibilities for democratic reform of what became known as “actually existing socialism”.
All that was distant by the 1980s -- Czechoslovakia 1968 and Poland 1981 had intervened, along with an increasingly apparent crisis in the Soviet economy. But pro-Sovietism retained a significant foothold in the left outside the parliamentary Labour Party. In the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament there was a strong pro-Soviet minority. The World Peace Council and its British affiliate, the British Peace Assembly, had sufficient support to be taken seriously by their opponents, and many people who should have known better accepted their bona fides. In several trade unions, particularly in Scotland, there was a well-organised pro-Soviet lobby, based on the Communist Party’s industrial organisation, which was efficient at getting resolutions passed by Labour Party and union branches and union conferences.
Even those parts of the British left least prone to pro-Sovietism got caught up in the show after Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985 and initiated a reform programme that fleetingly promised a democratic socialist transformation of the Soviet police state. “Gorbymania” was an idiocy, but it was heartily embraced by Tribune, every Trot in town and the whole of the Labour leadership.
But back to James Lamond. I have no doubt that he was sincere in his belief that the Soviet Union wanted nothing other than peace. He told me once that he had been convinced of the pacific intentions of the Soviet people by a tour of Russia in the 1960s, when he met a veteran of Stalingrad. (He told the same story to the historian Darren Lilleker, whose book on the pro-Soviet left in the Labour Party, Against the Cold War, was published three years ago.)
But his sincerity is neither here nor there. At best, Lamond’s naivety was astounding. His and his comrades’ idiotic identification of the Soviet Union as the grand hope of the socialist movement, 60-plus years after Kronstadt, 40-plus after the Stalin show trials and 20-plus after the Hungarian revolution, did nothing but harm to the cause of democratic socialism in Britain.
3 December 2007
SOME GOOD READING
The latest issue of Democratiya is a peach. Alan Johnson interviews my old boss Mary Kaldor, Nick Cohen contributes the afterword to the new edition of What's Left?, and Dick Howard enthuses about Claude Lefort. And that's just the people I know.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)