PAUL ANDERSON

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 17 August 2007

What did you do this summer? I spent the Saturday on the beach at Felixstowe and the Sunday working.

OK, weak joke – but it’s true. So far in Suffolk we’ve had just one weekend of temperatures soaring into the 80s (that’s above 27C for younger readers) and not a single day to prompt the East Anglian Daily Times to run a “Phew! What a scorcher!” headline. Just about the only thing to feel smug about is that it hasn’t been quite as wet here as it has Yorkshire and Middle England.

But the worst of it is that I spent one of the two properly sunny days we’ve had stuck in an office staring at a screen. Ever since I left university, I’ve had a vague sense every year that I’ve missed half the summer working – and this year I know I have.

To which you might reply: “Stop whingeing” – and you’d have a point. What I do for a living is hardly onerous: I’m an academic and journalist, which means that I spend summer marking exams, preparing lectures, doing odd newspaper shifts, grinding through dull academic administration et cetera. And it’s partly my own stupid fault that I do as much work as I do. If I organised my time better, if I delegated more, if I switched off the mobile phone, if I said “no” more often, I’d get a lot more time off.

The thing is, though, that I currently just want it to stop – and it never does. Twenty years ago I had academic friends who seemed to spend a good 10 or 12 weeks every summer away from the office in the library doing research or in the south of France dossing about, and the main reason I went for an academic job seven years ago was that I wanted a bit of the same. In my dreams!

The truth is that I’ve never seen work as a massively good thing. When I was an anarchist student, I was very impressed by various Italian and French Marxist theorists who saw a growing “refusal of work” on the part of the proletariat as prefiguring the revolutionary transcendence of capital – and although that particularly daft idea lost its appeal for me not long after the grant cheques stopped coming, I’ve never reconciled myself to the idea that work is anything but a more or less unpleasant necessity.

My favourite work of classical Marxism remains The Right to be Lazy by Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in -law, first published in 1883, with its ringing declaration: “In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy.” And the one public pronouncement by US President Ronald Reagan with which I have some sympathy is his gag: “It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?”

Now, I know this line of argument winds up a lot of Tribune readers. Last time I used it the paper got lots of angry letters, most of them arguing that I wouldn’t have such an anti-work attitude if I’d ever tasted serious unemployment. Fair enough: if there’s one thing worse than the tedium of wage labour, it’s being involuntarily deprived of it and condemned to hopeless poverty. I’d accept, too, that some sorts of work, in moderate quantities, can be genuinely fulfilling.

But, leaving aside the fact that many if not most jobs are anything but fulfilling, you can have too much of any job – and most of us in Britain do. We work some of the longest hours in Europe and take the fewest days holiday. We commute longer distances than anyone else and suffer more work-stress-related disease.

Why? The main reason is that we need the money. Particularly in southern England but increasingly elsewhere, housing is prohibitively expensive. There is a shocking shortage of social housing, private rented housing is a gigantic rip-off, and the extraordinary inflation of house prices has put first-time buying beyond the reach of all but workaholics on fat salaries and the offspring of rich parents. And once you’ve managed to get somewhere to live at exorbitant cost – almost certainly miles from where you work — you’ve then got to add the punitive costs of commuting and child care and all the rest.

Building more affordable homes, particularly in the south-east, as promised by Gordon Brown as he became prime minister, is part of the solution, but it will not be enough on its own. We also need faster and cheaper commuting, incentives to encourage companies to introduce electronic homeworking, more public holidays and enhanced rights for workers to allow them to resist employers’ demands for overtime and to reduce their own working hours as they choose. Oh, and summers that last more than a weekend so we can enjoy our more leisurely lives. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

Paul Anderson, Tribune, 6 July 2007

Douglas Hill, the reviews editor of Tribune from 1971 to 1983, has died after being run over by a double-decker bus as he walked over a pedestrian crossing in north London. He was 72.

A charming Canadian polymath with a razor-sharp but self-deprecating wit, he was a prolific author. The best-selling of his 50-odd books were children’s science fiction and fantasy titles: before the arrival of Harry Potter he was the most popular children’s author in Britain. But he also wrote science fiction for adults and several non-fiction titles, among them an anthology-cum-history of this newspaper to mark its 40th birthday 30 years ago, Tribune 40: Forty years of a socialist newspaper, which remains the only book-length account of the first half of its life.

Born in Manitoba and educated at the universities of Saskatchewan and Toronto, he arrived in Britain in 1959 with his then wife Gail Robinson, becoming an editor at a publishing company. He joined Tribune as reviews editor in 1971, taking over from Elizabeth Thomas. “My intention was to carry on, in my way, what she and others before her had established as the proper roles and obligations of the reviews section of a socialist paper,” he wrote modestly in 1977, but it is no insult to Thomas, herself a great reviews editor, to say that he did much more than that.

Under his stewardship, the reviews pages started to fizz, just as the rest of the paper became increasingly worthy-and-dull in its obsession with the arguments against Britain joining (and then remaining in) the Common Market. His choice of reviewers was inspired in its eclecticism, and the column he wrote most weeks, “Platform”, was the closest the paper has come to emulating George Orwell’s “As I Please” column of the 1940s in its intellectual range and in its humour. Many of the people he recruited as writers are still valued contributors more than 20 years on.

He remained in touch with Tribune long after he left: he wrote reviews until well into the 1990s and was a regular at the editorial lunches organised by Sheila Noble, the paper’s production editor, chief sub and unofficial social secretary. Although he joked about being past-it when I last saw him a few months ago, he looked as spry as he was in the 1980s – and his repartee was as dazzling and as mischievous as ever. His sudden death is a shock, and everyone lucky enough to have known him will miss him. He is survived by his son and his former wife.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 22 June 2007

At least it’s nearly over. Labour’s deputy leadership contest has been even more uneventful than I expected when I wrote about it last month. It hasn’t set off a serious debate about the future of British social democracy inside the Labour Party — let alone among the voters as a whole. In fact, it has barely engaged even my most political friends. I don’t remember a single discussion of it lasting more than two minutes that went beyond speculation about who will win.

Which of course is the only interesting thing about it, not least because it may well highlight the absurdities of the electoral college Labour uses for leadership and deputy leadership elections.

Labour headquarters and lazy political commentators always describe the party’s means of choosing its leaders as “one member, one vote”, but it’s a bit more complex than that. Every member does have a vote. But, because the electorate is divided into a three-section electoral college, each section with one-third of the total vote, some members have more than one vote because they belong to more than one section. And, more important, the weight of your vote depends on what sort of member you are.

In the first section are Labour MPs and MEPs; in the second individual Labour Party members; and in the third members of affiliated organisations (mainly trade unions). So, because there are 371 MPs and MEPs, 180,000 ordinary members and a little more than 3 million members of affiliated organisations, the vote of each MP and MEP is worth nearly the same as 485 ordinary members’ votes and more than 8,000 affiliated trade unionists’ votes. (These figures are based on the assumption that everyone entitled to vote does so, which of course isn’t so, but you get the picture.)

I’ll accept that this system, adopted in 1993, is less of a dog’s breakfast than the electoral college that preceded it, introduced in 1981. In that electoral college, the unions had 40 per cent of votes, MPs 30 per cent and constituency Labour parties 30 per cent — and neither the unions nor the CLPs were under any compulsion to ballot their members before casting block votes at Labour conference. At least the current electoral college involves the counting of individual votes rather than an aggregation of decisions taken by various committees behind closed doors.

The current system is a dog’s breakfast all the same, however. The only time it has been used before this deputy leadership election was in 1994, when Tony Blair swept to victory in the leadership election and John Prescott won the deputy leadership, with both securing more than 50 per cent of first-preference votes in each of the three sections of the college. But this sort of clear, unequivocal result is by no means guaranteed. The electoral college could also produce a winner who has — say — little support among MPs but strong support among individual members and trade unionists. And in a six-candidate contest the winner could be the fourth on first preferences who picks up a large proportion of second preferences. And so on.

I’m not saying that this weekend will see a messy result, just that it might. And if it does … look forward to 18 months of Labour doing what it used to do best: arguing about its leadership election procedures. I don’t really want to go there, but if pushed I’d back the leader being elected by MPs alone, with the deputy elected by ordinary members alone — and mandatory annual parliamentary selections. (Just kidding about the last one.)

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OK, it’s last week’s news, but I’d like to add my tuppence-worth to the controversy over Tony Blair’s assault on the “feral beasts” of the media last week. Having been at the receiving end of the Blairite spin machine during the 1990s, I’m not inclined to sympathy with the man or his way of operating. It was cowardly of him to pick on the poor old Independent and the BBC as his only examples of how the media have dropped the habit of straight reporting: he should at least have fingered the Mail. And he should have made it clear that Rupert Murdoch’s policy of editorial support in return for relaxed media regulation (and no euro) is an outrageous affront to democracy.

But Blair has got a point. The arrogance, cynicism, pack mentality, superficiality, sensationalism and sheer ignorance of much British media coverage of politics are not new, but their ubiquity is. Twenty years ago you could avoid them by shunning the popular national press, local radio and William Rees-Mogg: if you stuck to the qualities, the weeklies, the BBC and ITN you could get your politics straight and in depth. No longer. There is plenty of good political journalism out there, but the smart-arsed, the asinine and the hysterical now crop up pretty much everywhere — and far too much goes unreported. As to why this is so — well, that’s another column.

Footnotes: Gordon Brown is brilliant on Newsnight here. And Hitchens, C does us all proud on Question Time here. Maybe there’s some hope after all.

Paul Anderson, review of The Offbeat Radicals by Geoffrey Ashe (Methuen, £17.99), Tribune 22 June 2007

The Offbeat Radicals is a book I can imagine being published in the 1930s. It is an erudite introduction for the general reader to a vast swathe of English radical writers from the French revolution to the early years of the 20^th century who would once have been labelled “romantic”. It’s rather like what H. N. Brailsford or G. D. H. Cole used to do.

Footnotes are sparse; précis is the norm. The autodidact who reads it from cover to cover will get a very good idea of what a large number of (broadly speaking) 19^th-century polemicists and poets had to say – some of them, such as Blake and Shelley, read widely today but rarely put into context; others, such as Godwin, Carlyle and Bradlaugh, very much forgotten; still others, such as Morris, acknowledged but largely ignored.

Ashe is a specialist in Arthurian myth and a great enthusiast for G. K. Chesterton. His theme here is the persistence with which, after the French revolution went sour for English radicals, the latter adopted a rhetoric and a way of looking at life that were borrowed from dissident Christian myths of a pre-capitalist world of co-operation, equality and social cohesion. They were alternative medievalists, precursors of “small is beautiful” and dead keen on tradition.

Some Tribune readers will recognise this as an old anti-socialist tune. And indeed Ashe’s target, if there is one, is those who would subsume the Godwins, the Blakes, the Shelleys and so on, right up to William Morris, into a narrative of class struggle and proto-Marxism. My hunch is that he wants to capture them for something mistily and nostalgically Eurosceptic.

If you, like me, are still there with Edward Thompson in your reading of the 19^th century, you will have a problem with this. Although Ashe is right when he argues that there is a tradition of radicalism that goes beyond left and right as we now know them, he underplays the extent to which it influenced working-class culture in the early and mid-19th century and socialism (and indeed modernism) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His calling it “offbeat radicalism” is also annoying: the old tag “romantic radicalism” works much better, not least because it is familiar. (It is also as flexible, if not more so, than his clumsy coinage.)

But these are small points. There is no better recent introduction to the radical writers of 19th-century England than this. It is beautifully written, difficult to put down, and more books like this should be published.

During his years as literary editor and columnist on the left-wing weekly Tribune George Orwell wrote, in addition to his journalism, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Tribune suited him very well, letting him do as he pleased, offering a measure of political agreement but also a background against which his boldness and oddity stood out very clearly.

The bold and odd Orwell is in the news at present: a memoir has been published describing his friendship with a young girl back in 1914, when he was eleven and she thirteen. They met when Jacintha, wandering around her father’s estate, came upon Eric Blair (to give him his true name) standing on his head in a field. Asked why he was doing so, he explained that it was a good way to get noticed. So it proved, and a close friendship developed. Whenever Eric was home from school (Eton) they would take long walks, or go fishing, or discuss poetry and the occult. He gave her a copy of Dracula, a crucifix, and a clove of garlic. Happy days, in an idyllic setting that will recur in the “Golden Country” of Nineteen Eighty-Four!

Orwell’s biographers knew about this youthful affair, but it now appears that Jacintha broke it off when Eric, aged eighteen, tried to rape her. When he went off to be an imperial policeman in Burma she did not reply to his sad letters, and on his return in 1927 she still did not relent. Years later, in 1949, when he was desperately ill, a widower with a young adopted son, he appealed to her to come and see him. Apparently Nineteen Eighty-Four had so shocked her that she decided against it, but she attended his funeral in 1950. Orwell never mentions her in his published work.

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The sexual manners of eighteen-year-old boys are rarely polished, and it may be that Eric was a rough rather than a criminal suitor, but Orwell’s biographer Gordon Bowker thinks otherwise: “The sudden pounce…remained his preferred mode of seduction.”[1] Either way the entire episode is suggestive. By all accounts Orwell’s normal demeanor was perfectly civil, just what could be expected of a man of his class and education, but there were occasions when it must have seemed, not least to other members of that class, to be as odd as standing on one’s head to attract attention.

As to the allegation of violence, it is true that it had inevitably been part of his job in Burma; and in later life this quiet man did express violent political opinions and spoke of his own “intellectual brutality.” He condemned the English public (i.e., private boarding) school system, but not the almost universal practice in such schools of corporal punishment, which he thought a useful preparation for adult life. He defended the bombing of civilian populations. And so on. Yet he had unusually strong sympathy with the destitute and the suffering and could imagine extremes of desolation, as in the famous essay on a hanging, where he remembers how the condemned man stepped aside to avoid a puddle on his way to the gallows; in that act Orwell “saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.”

Leonard Woolf describes how, as a young colonial administrator in Ceylon, he supervised the hanging of four men. The event itself was more horrible than the one Orwell witnessed, and Woolf was sickened by it, but the account we remember is Orwell’s, because of its imaginative participation in the victim’s humanity. A lesser-known instance of this imaginative power can be found in an essay of 1940, in which he says that nothing in the First World War moved him as deeply as the sinking of the Titanic had done: the ship suddenly up-ended and sank bow-foremost, so that the people clinging to the stern were lifted no less than three hundred feet into the air before they plunged into the abyss. It gave me a sinking sensation in the belly which I can still all but feel.

(He was ten years old when the Titanic sank.)

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Orwell’s experiences as a police officer in Burma had much to do with his revulsion from imperial rule and the exploitation of colonial populations. He was himself born in India into a ruling-class family, but he was soon committed politically to the left; the evolution of his political beliefs is still a matter of argument, but it was obviously related to his unillusioned sympathy with the poor and the outcast, and to his need to break free of his own class and speak his own mind. A believer in socialist democracy, he found little evidence of a desire for it on the British left.

Except for a brief spell in the Independent Labour Party (a dwindling minority party, usually at odds with the Labour Party, the main hope of the left), he preferred independence, his freedom to criticize all parties. For example, the trade unions, the main financial supporters of Labour, naturally saw it as their first duty to better the condition of their members. But Orwell reminded them that simply by doing so they inadvertently helped increase the poverty of vast colonial populations. He was the enemy of all forms of privilege, oppression, racism, and totalitarianism.

As Britain and France refused to intervene in the Spanish civil war (which in the opinion of many made them pro-Franco and pro-Hitler), Orwell, along with two thousand other British volunteers, fought on the Republican side, believing that the inevitable struggle with fascism should take place then and there, in Spain. He was wounded in support of the working-class cause, but his Spanish experiences reinforced his dislike of communism. He wanted his own brand of revolutionary war, and in 1939 hoped that the one which was obviously just about to begin might be it. Meanwhile the palpable danger of that moment stimulated his own patriotic feelings. He ceased to oppose the war but without ceasing to detest the British ruling class. He wanted it to be recognized that capitalism didn’t work; that capitalists were indeed as odious as Nazis; that in his admittedly beloved country gross disparities of income between the callous rich and the near destitute made a joke of the precious idea of equality. There had been a moment in revolutionary Barcelona when that idea seemed to have become thrillingly real, but almost at once the gap between rich and poor widened again.

Born a member of a highly privileged class, Orwell had lived with the poorest of the poor in London and Paris. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) gave an account of the period during which he experienced the poverty of the depressed industrial north. It was published by Victor Gollancz, a fellow traveler whose Left Book Club had attracted astonishing numbers of subscribers. Orwell’s book sold 40,000 copies, but Gollancz, always nervous, insisted on adding a foreword to reduce its political force. Later on, fearing the reaction of the Russians, he refused to publish Homage to Catalonia, and later still turned down Animal Farm for similar reasons. Since Orwell was bound to him by contract Gollancz was able to hinder its publication by anyone else.[2]

The manuscript survived the German flying bomb and rocket attacks on London in the summer of 1944, and appeared after a year of delay, just as the war ended. Britain had a “Russophile” period when the Soviet armies were beating the Germans in the East, and Stalin was for a while thought rather lovable. Failing to agree, Orwell, who had joined a foreign republican army and got himself shot, was again standing on his head, concerning himself more with the terrible destruction of working-class homes in London’s East End than with the advances of the Allied armies in Europe.

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By this time he was writing his Tribune column, “As I Please,” normally produced weekly. He was known to be a remarkably productive writer, much admired for the vigor and clarity of his prose. He reviewed a great many books, including novels and poetry, but probably most of his energy went into political journalism. Though surely to be counted as one of them himself, he had a certain prejudice against other left-wing intellectuals, “fashionable pansies” whose education had cut them off from the real world of work. “The left-wing opinions of the average ‘intellectual’ are mainly spurious,” he asserted, calling the poet Stephen Spender “a parlor Bolshevik”; though he admitted that when he met Spender he quite liked him, and confessed himself liable to these episodes of “intellectual brutality.”

His relationship with W.H. Auden is more interesting. This “gutless Kipling” wrote in his poem “Spain” (“one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war”) of a need for “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.” To Orwell this is a good example of what is to be expected from the “utterly irresponsible intelligentsia.” Speaking as a man who has seen murder done, and who thinks it ought to be avoided, he scorns “a brand of amoralism” that “is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.” Auden changed the line (“the deliberate acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder”) but thought Orwell’s comment “densely unjust”; for unless you are a pacifist this is indeed what you must consciously accept when fighting a war.

Although he wanted on principle to dislike Auden, Orwell (who had once known A.E. Housman’s poems by heart) found some of his verse hard to resist. He quotes with approval the concluding lines of “Spain” –

History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon

– lines Auden himself came to regard as a blatant lie, a lapse into a false rhetoric. Elsewhere he quotes a stanza from “September 1, 1939,” again without mentioning that Auden had disowned that poem. He also picked up more innocent lines that may have stuck in his memory like Housman’s: in “A Hanging” the guards hold the prisoner in “careful caressing grip,” an expression that echoes Auden –

Now through night’s caressing grip
Earth and all her oceans slip…

– though it isn’t clear whether, in this case, Auden was not the borrower.

What should not be overlooked is the fact that this political journalist took an informed though tough and idiosyncratic interest in literature. He defended Kipling and praised Jack London. He wrote well about Dickens when that writer was out of fashion. He took on Tolstoy in a perverse and stimulating essay about King Lear. He thought T.S. Eliot a once-good poet who had fatally ceased to write memorable lines, perhaps because he had accepted a religion that forced him “to believe the incredible.” He wrote about No Orchids for Miss Blandish and Vogue magazine, about boys’ school stories; about the vulgar seaside cartoonist Donald McGill and the Surrealist Salvador Dalì. He made something of a hero out of Henry Miller. His great exemplar was Jonathan Swift, though he did not agree with Swift that happiness was impossible to human beings. He would spend much time deciding what was right and what was not in the theories of James Burnham, which left a mark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

One of his most enduring interests was in the cultivation of pure and direct English, where his concern almost matched the intensity of Swift’s. Sixty years later I remember resolving that the essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946) should be a kind of touchstone (allowing for some Orwellian quirks) for my own writing, a memory clouded by the necessary admission that I have not used it often enough.

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Evidently Orwell was well equipped, in 1943, to take on the literary editorship of Tribune. He could write interestingly about pretty much anything, and had often appeared in its pages already. When Tribune got started in 1937 Orwell was in Spain. He returned wounded and sick and in a bad time. Homage to Catalonia, his book about the Spanish civil war, failed; the Spanish Republic was defeated, and the Hitler-Stalin Pact was the immediate cause of his abandoning his antiwar position. Rejected for military service on medical grounds, he celebrated his restored patriotism in the great essay “England Your England,” written in February 1941: “As I write,” it begins, “highly civilized beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” In this essay he celebrates what he always insisted on, often against the evidence – a certain gentleness and decency (a favorite word) in the texture of English life. Only a month earlier he had, as it were, stood on his head in praise of Henry Miller’s complete indifference to conventional morality and nationalist sentiment. His interests were fascinatingly various.

He had been writing occasionally for Tribune, along with other papers, as well as working in the Indian service of the BBC – trying to project a favorable image of Britain and keep the Indians happy with their standing in the Empire, which German propaganda was trying to undermine. It was when he grew tired of what seemed to him a futile job in a disagreeably bureaucratic organization that he joined Tribune.

The relevant history of the journal is sketched with authority by Paul Anderson in his introduction to this book. Tribune was more important than its circulation (at its peak around 40,000) might suggest. In his new job Orwell was dealing with persons of present and potential power. The paper was partly financed by Stafford Cripps, who had been Churchill’s ambassador to Moscow; after the landslide election of 1945, he was close to the center of the Labour government and virtual controller of the austere postwar economy. Aneurin Bevan, who as minister of health in the postwar Labour administration was to be the godfather of the National Health Service, was for a time editor of Tribune. When Orwell left to work as a war correspondent in Europe his Tribune column was taken over by Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, who was elected to Parliament in 1945 and was later famous for her generosity and charm when serving as arts minister under Harold Wilson. And Orwell would have had everyday encounters with other important left-wingers like Michael Foot, later the leader, and now the grand old man, of the modern Labour Party.

He still disapproved of much that orthodox Labour stood for, and in certain respects he also disagreed with Tribune, not least in his unrelenting opposition to Stalinist Russia. But he could work and be valued there simply because, as Foot has said, he was the sharpest thorn in the side of editorial complacency, the greatest of modern iconoclasts, a new and much more humane Swift with a deadly lash for all hypocrisies, including socialist hypocrisies.

He could write things in Tribune that would have had difficulty achieving print elsewhere; and sometimes he even agreed with the policy of the paper, as when it attacked Churchill (something Bevan was always willing to do) or, in 1943, demanded a second front in Europe. He also agreed with Tribune‘s opposition to the notion that a defeated Germany must be punished and dismembered, and on the need or duty of Britain to liberate India with all possible speed. “Tribune is not perfect,” he wrote,

but I do think it is the only existing paper that makes a genuine effort to be both progressive and humane – that is, to combine a radical socialist policy with a respect for freedom of speech and a civilised attitude towards literature and the arts.

Such was the atmosphere at Tribune when he joined it. The paper survives, but its greatest years probably coincided roughly with Orwell’s tenure.

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In the column “As I Please” he could, as the title indicates, say whatever he liked, whether political or not. He contributed eighty columns, starting in 1943, breaking off early in 1945, and resuming at the end of that year. The last “As I Please” appeared in April 1947. During the four years when he was, with intervals, writing his column, the world of which he was to take such note as he pleased changed considerably: the war in Europe ended, the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, India and Pakistan were liberated. The American armies went home and the British settled in for several years of economic crisis, discomfort, and rationing in excess of what they had suffered in the six years of war. The cold war began.

Orwell was busy. Besides writing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four he contributed his “London Letters” to Partisan Review, and occasionally wrote for Dwight Macdonald’s Politics. The column must almost have seemed a way of relaxing. To read through the eighty items as they are now presented is to get some insight into a writer of restless, unclassifiable intellect. Some pages vividly recall wartime London. The first column describes the behavior of two drunken GIs in a London tobacconist’s shop.

Their conduct was not exceptional. Even if you steer clear of Piccadilly with its seething swarms of drunks and whores, it is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes. On the other hand the Americans have their own justifiable complaints— in particular, they complain of the children who follow them night and day, cadging sweets.

Trivia, but such encounters really mattered because Anglo-American relations mattered. These issues were rarely discussed in print. Most people in Britain, says Orwell, don’t even know that American servicemen are not liable in the British courts for offenses against British citizens; and most are also quite unaware of the extent of anti-British feeling in the US. He also notes, correctly, that British soldiers resented the fact that American soldiers were paid five times as much as they were, and suggests remedies for this dangerous imbalance. (They didn’t work.) White American soldiers, he discovered, were horrified to discover that white English girls danced with their black comrades, and succeeded in getting a dancehall proprietor to start a “whites only” policy.

Injustices large and small attracted his attention. An Indian journalist living in England needs support when he protests against being drafted into the British army. The iron railings that had protected the communal gardens of well-to-do London squares until requisitioned and torn down for munitions were now being replaced by wooden palings; so bits of London that had been liberated for the use of all were, as the war progressed, ominously returning to private use.
He would comment on the quality of radio programs, on price rises, on the inadequacy of British houses, on the rudeness of shop assistants who seem to enjoy having nothing to sell, on the mysterious shortage of clocks and watches. But it’s not all complaining: a rosebush from Woolworth’s that years before cost sixpence, the price of ten cigarettes, still blooms abundantly; a Regency church in North London is worth getting off the bus for another look.

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Much of the charm of these columns obviously depends on their variety and their nearness to home. The writer finds a good book in a pile outside a bookseller’s shop, or describes his own pamphlet collection, or wanders off in another direction and thinks about London’s Victorian sewage system.

Some of his reactions are unpredictable. As one would expect, he detests anti-Semitism and Sir Oswald Mosley, whose fascist movement was strongly anti-Semitic. Mosley was interned in 1940 but let out in 1943. Orwell thought it right that he should have been locked up when there was a threat of invasion – and shot if the Germans actually landed – but he defended Mosley’s release in 1943, for he could no longer do any harm, and anti-Mosley demonstrations had become protests against habeas corpus.

He pays some attention to complaining letters to the editor. Two subjects guarantee indignant responses from readers: any hostile comment on the Catholic Church (much disliked by Orwell), and any expression of friendliness to Jews. Readers write to complain that his attitudes are generally too negative, that he is always running things down. He replies that in the England of 1944 there’s not much around to praise, Woolworth roses apart. Or he will give his views, always simple and intelligible, on some current argument – the case of Ezra Pound, for instance – before describing how he tested a barmaid’s theory that dipping your mustache in your beer makes the beer go flat.

One week he reports that he’s reading a life of Tolstoy, a book on Dickens, Harry Levin’s on Joyce, and the autobiography of Dalì. As the months pass and the Normandy landings are more obviously about to occur, he says very little about the fighting but comments on the uselessness of flimsy surface air-raid shelters. Never a man to complain of austerity, he explains that he would like clothes rationing to continue long after the war, indeed “till the moths have devoured the last dinner-jacket.”

In one contentious column he refuses to condemn civilian casualties in mass air raids on German cities:

Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? Obviously one must not kill children if it is in any way avoidable, but it is only in propaganda pamphlets that every bomb drops on a school or an orphanage. A bomb kills a cross-section of the population; but not quite a representative selection, because the children and expectant mothers are usually the first to be evacuated, and some of the young men will be away in the army. Probably a disproportionately large number of bomb victims will be middle-aged. (Up to date, German bombs have killed between six and seven thousand children in this country. This is, I believe, less than the number killed in road accidents in the same period).

On the other hand, “normal” or “legitimate” warfare picks out and slaughters all the healthiest and bravest of the young male population. Every time a German submarine goes to the bottom about fifty young men of fine physique and good nerves are suffocated. …Heaven knows how many people our blitz on Germany and the occupied countries has killed and will kill, but you can be quite certain it will never come anywhere near the slaughter that has happened on the Russian front.

It took Orwell to say such things in May 1944, and a journal as tough as Tribune to publish them.

In lighter moments he identifies herbs on London bomb-sites or inquires whether melons were grown in seventeenth-century England. Now and again he sets his readers a “brain-tickler.” Spot three errors in this passage from Timon of Athens:

Come not to me again, but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.

+++

Not being obsessed by the war, he had time and space for other topics. The invasion of June 6 is not mentioned in the issue of June 9, which was probably written before the news broke, though that hardly applies to the column for June 16, which is mostly about a radio program called The Brains Trust, along with a plug for Dwight Macdonald’s Politics. June 23 has a long piece on the centennial of the birth of Anatole France, a complaint about the work of two detested Catholic humorists, plus a bit about a book on the voting record of members of Parliament.

When the first comment on the progress of the war comes on June 30, it concerns the flying bombs launched by the Germans soon after the Normandy landings – a nasty business, but relatively domestic in scale. Orwell does note the absurdity of complaints that they were “an indiscriminate attack on civilians,” considering what the Allied air forces were doing in Germany.

However, he also records his personal reactions: the flying bombs were exceptionally disquieting because unlike other projectiles, they gave you time to think before their bombs went off. When you heard the drone of the approaching bomb your first reaction was to want it not to stop, but to pass over you before the motor cut out. “You are hoping that it will fall on somebody else.” This is “the bottomless selfishness of the human being.”

The V2 rockets which replaced the flying bombs were also interestingly eerie, but in a different way: you heard them coming after they had struck. These relatively local issues concerned Orwell, while the Battle of the Bulge, the desperate German offensive of the last winter of the war, escaped notice. His silence on the liberation of the camps is also rather puzzling. There are references to the campaigns in Burma, a war zone that had special interest for him. In February 1945 he does speculate about the fate of Japan when the European war is over, though of course he did not foresee the atomic bombs. “There will be a peace of exhaustion,” he conjectures, “with only minor and unofficial wars raging all over the place.” In October he does consider the Bomb, pointing out that since its manufacture calls for so huge a technological effort only large states will be able to make it, and they will balance each other’s threat, so prolonging a “peace that is no peace.”

In the opinion of his present editor, the most controversial column was about the Warsaw Rising of 1944. Orwell attacks the British press and intellectuals for saying that when the Russians, instead of moving to support the rebels, held back, they were right to do so:

What I am concerned with is the attitude of the British intelligentsia, who cannot raise between them one single voice to question what they believe to be Russian policy, no matter what turn it takes, and in this case have had the unheard-of meanness to hint that our bombers ought not to be sent to the aid of our comrades fighting in Warsaw.

His solicitude about the English language is a recurring topic. He admires Samuel Butler’s style, of which Butler said he never thought about it, and believed that to do so would be a loss to himself and his readers. Orwell thought the best style would be as transparent as a windowpane. Then the thought could be unambiguously conveyed. The cliché smears the pane and is the enemy of truth. Secondhand language was dishonest, and honesty, he believed, was the best policy. “The advantage of a lie is always short-lived.”

At his most combative, even when you think him wrong, he is honest. He hates hearing that something must not be said because to say it would “play into the hands” of some supposedly sinister influence or opponent. Propagandists might try to browbeat critics into silence by calling them “objectively reactionary,” and “it is a tempting maneuver…but it is dishonest,” and “the speaker loses touch with reality.” The Germans and Japanese lost the war because they avoided reality, could not admit what was plain to the dispassionate eye.

Many of the problems Orwell wrote about are still unsolved: immigration, the low birthrate, Scottish separatism, inequitable arrangements for the selection of juries, and so on. In 1946 Orwell could say, in a particular powerful and gloomy column, that “when one considers how things have gone since 1930 or thereabouts, it is not easy to believe in the survival of civilisation.” It seems no easier now, and for the reasons he gives. But this excellent series of columns doesn’t end quite so solemnly. With a strange propriety it ends with a quiet chat about pidgin English in the South Pacific.

He went to Jura, a remote Scottish refuge, and began Nineteen Eighty-Four. The appendix on Newspeak, which resembles Swift’s painful collections of “polite conversation,” is the culmination of his distress at the loss of meaning in language; the book as a whole was called “terrible” (i.e., terrifying) by Orwell’s friend William Empson. Nevertheless on the World Book Day just past in the UK, it made the top ten in a list of “books the nation cannot live without,” putting Orwell after Austen, Tolkien, Charlotte Brontë, J.K. Rowling, Harper Lee, and Emily Brontë but ahead of Philip Pullman and Dickens. The Da Vinci Code came in forty-second. The domestication of such a book as Nineteen Eighty-Four would be a worthy topic for another “As I Please.”

Notes
[1] Gordon Bowker, “Blair Pounces,” Times Literary Supplement, February 23, 2007.
[2] Orwell’s death in 1950 did not end the political opposition. In a recent book, Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm (Penn State University Press, 2007), Daniel J. Leab writes about the part of the CIA in the making of the animated film version of Animal Farm, released in 1954. The CIA, then embarking on its cultural campaign against Soviet communism, partly financed the film, exerting constant pressure on its makers, so that the film became cold war propaganda. They imposed an entirely new ending on the story. Leab gives a full account of the matter, explaining how interference with the script affected the actual making of the film. With the techniques of animation then available the slightest change called for endless redrawing, and the changes to the end were an expensive nightmare.

In 1946, George Orwell described a man who is

…thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up and down the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income-tax demand printed in red.

Needless to say, this person is a writer. He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features, for all literary people are very much alike, but let us say that he is a book reviewer. Half hidden among the pile of papers is a bulky parcel containing five volumes which his editor has sent with a note suggesting that they ‘ought to go well together’. They arrived four days ago, but for forty-eight hours the reviewer was prevented by moral paralysis from opening the parcel. Yesterday in a resolute moment he ripped the string off it and found the five volumes to be Palestine at the Cross Roads, Scientific Dairy Farming, A Short History of European Democracy (this one 680 pages and weighs four pounds), Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa, and a novel, It’s Nicer Lying Down, probably included by mistake. His review — 800 words, say — has got to be ‘in’ by midday tomorrow.

This was self-portrait, but only a partial one. Orwell could invoke the wretchedness of the jobbing writer because he was churning out an astonishing amount of journalism for poor-paying magazines in the forties. But, and to an equally astonishingly degree, he wasn’t producing hack work but essays on a vast range of subjects at a literary and intellectual level so consistently high no one who writes for a living can look on them without a spasm of envy. Peter Davison’s The Complete Works of George Orwell runs to 20 volumes. While Orwell was writing his pieces for Tribune, he was also finishing Animal Farm, starting to think about Nineteen Eighty-Four, handing in arguments and reviews for British and American papers – and coping with a dying wife, an adopted son and his own TB while he was about it. [1]

Printing a writer’s every word isn’t always a kindness, and not all Orwell pieces stand the test of time – or even the test of his own time. But to read the Tribune articles in sequence, and see him taking up points from previous columns, arguing with correspondents and expanding on dozens of subjects is to raise him from the dead, as it were, and have him talking in your living room or – as Orwell would prefer – your local.

The easy explanation for the success of Paul Anderson’s intelligently edited and beautifully presented collection is that Orwell was a great writer. The Canadian anarchist George Woodcock, an occasional adversary but firm friend, said that ‘he could always find a subject on which there is something fresh to say in a prose that, for all its ease and apparent casualness, was penetrating and direct.’ Anderson adds that ‘it is difficult to think of a writer before or since’ who could move from toads spawning in spring to lonely hearts ads via the decline of English murder from the days of Crippen.

Yet Orwell’s talent flourished in a particular setting, that of a small journal with a tight group of readers. Little magazines usually appear and vanish without anyone beyond their unpaid contributors caring. The few whose names still reverberate captured a spirit of their time and stood for something bigger than their tiny circulations. Tribune was a magazine of the Labour left that for a few years in the forties broke the arguments that were to dominate British political life. (I say ‘Tribune was’ as if it were dead. The paper survives, but only in the sense that a geriatric in a coma survives.) Along with far more leftists than sympathetic historians like to remember, it went along with the Nazi-Soviet pact. When the second world war began, it was effectively on Germany’s side and endorsed Communist Party line that the real enemies were Winston Churchill and the Labour Party rather than Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The board purged the fellow travellers in 1940, and for the rest of the decade Tribune was free to discuss the radical ideas that would make up a part of the programme of the 1945 Labour government, while, unusually for mid-20th century socialists, retaining a well-warranted suspicion of Stalin and his apologists. Orwell had a natural home.

Conservative-minded readers attracted to this book by Orwell’s celebrations of Englishness or attacks on communism will learn that, despite everything, he was a man of the left, who believed that British socialism was desirable and inevitable. The idea that the world would turn against central planning and nationalisation was as beyond him as the idea that it would turn back to them is beyond us. The only definition of a great writer that makes sense is that readers of all temperaments can appreciate his or her work, so the admiration of conservatives is a compliment to Orwell. But however many multitudes he contained, and however loudly the Tribune circulation manager protested about the left-wing readers who cancelled their subscriptions in disgust, Orwell remained close to his audience. He shared their broad principles and they understood his references.

The common bonds of a small world helped Orwell. Writers and broadcasters in the mass media can never match his fluency, even if they had his talent, because they have to write at the pace of the slowest reader and break up their arguments with clunking explanations. (I fully expect to one day have an editor tell me that I can’t say ‘Shakespeare’ but must add in parenthesis ‘the famous 16th and 17th century playwright and poet for Stratford-upon-Avon near Coventry in Warwickshire’ in case someone somewhere doesn’t grasp the reference.) By contrast, writers tied to a small group of readers are like old friends, or at least old acquaintances, and can dispense with the formalities and get down to business, as Orwell did with relish.

The Tribune columns show that ‘St George,’ the patron saint of English decency, was nowhere near as saintly as John Major and Simon Schama like to imagine. He conducted a running row with the readers about their humanitarian objections to the RAF killing women and children in bombing campaign against German cities. ‘Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers?’ he asked.

Every time a German submarine goes to the bottom about fifty young men of fine physique and good nerves are suffocated. Yet people who would hold up their hands at the very words ‘civilian bombing’ will repeat with satisfaction such phrases as ‘We are winning the Battle of the Atlantic’. Heaven knows how many people our blitz on Germany and the occupied countries has killed and will kill, but you can be quite certain it will never come anywhere near the slaughter that has happened on the Russian front.

After receiving a ‘number of letters, some of them quite violent ones’ he continued:

Contrary to what some of my correspondents seem to think, I have no enthusiasm for air raids, either ours or the enemy’s. Like a lot of other people in this country, I am growing definitely tired of bombs. But I do object to the hypocrisy of accepting force as an instrument while squealing against this or that individual weapon, or of denouncing war while wanting to preserve the kind of society that makes war inevitable.

To which the only response is that different societies and ethical systems have usually held the deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime. They may be hypocritical, there may be no moral difference between killing a conscripted solider and defenceless woman, but the alternative is war without limit, which the 20th century saw enough of to know that it is worth ‘squealing against’.

Even when you instinctively know Orwell is wrong, you cannot deny his strengths, the chief of which is intellectual honesty. No English writer is less concerned about giving offence, as the above passages demonstrate. Not in the showy and superficial manner of bourgeois baiting modern hack – who merely bends the knee to the new establishment when he spatters his copy with obscenities – but in the way of all true radicals who think it their job to tackle comfortable illusions, and are faintly surprised when their readers complain rather than thank them. (In his biography, DJ Taylor describes how Orwell could never understand why authors whose books he had criticised resented him thereafter.) It’s not what you think but how you think, as they say, and dissidents facing systems and oppressions that Orwell never conceived have always admired his willingness to confront what he called the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of his day. If a believer in human freedom wants to make an argument that may send him to prison in a dictatorship, Orwell is on his side. If, in a democracy, a writer has an idea he knows his editors will hate, his colleagues will hate and his readers will hate, the ghost of Orwell will never urge caution.

Simultaneously opposing fascism, communism and colonialism required nerve, and although this isn’t a political collection in the main there’s one political essay on the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, which I’ve never seen reprinted, that shows him at his anti-totalitarian best and speaking to our time.

Whenever you protest today about the willingness of modern liberals to excuse, go along with or turn a blind eye to the Islamist far right, you are told, in outraged tones, by the BBC, Prospect and all the rest of them that it’s only a handful of Trotskyists around the Socialist Workers Party and Livingstone who have flipped across the political spectrum. Liberal politicians and intellectuals – such as themselves – remain as virtuous as always, and to say otherwise is a gross calumny. Much the same was said in the thirties and forties, only then the apologists for the liberal mainstream declared that treacheries of the age were the sole responsibility of the Communist Party.

Orwell would have none of that. When the Poles rose up on the orders of the exiled government in London to throw the Germans out and stop the Soviet Union taking the city he protested ‘against the mean and cowardly attitude’ of the liberal press, which urged that they should be left to die.

What I am concerned with is the attitude of the British intelligentsia, who cannot raise between them one single voice to question what they believe to be Russian policy, no matter what turn it takes, and in this case have had the unheard-of meanness to hint that our bombers ought not to be sent to the aid of our comrades fighting in Warsaw. The enormous majority of left-wingers who swallow the policy put out by the News Chronicle, etc., know no more about Poland than I do. All they know is that the Russians object to the London Government and have set up a rival organization, and so far as they are concerned that settles the matter. If tomorrow Stalin were to drop the Committee of Liberation and recognize the London Government, the whole British intelligentsia would flock after him like a troop of parrots. Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not ‘Is this policy right or wrong?’ but ‘This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?’ And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power.

Today, you don’t here a single voice raised in protest about what al Qaeda is doing to Iraq or against the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere in the world. If anything the duplicity is worse than during Stalinism. Then, leftish intellectuals could pretend to themselves that the Soviet Union was progressive and at some level shared their values. By contrast, Islamism makes no secret of its contempt for the left and for liberalism or its appropriation of Nazi conspiracy theory. From the Iranian revolution onwards, the first task of radical Islam has been to persecute Muslim socialists, liberals and freethinkers.

History is not repeating itself therefore, but taking a turn for the worse. Nevertheless, Orwell’s parting message from 1944 to English left-wing journalists and intellectuals remains as true then as now.

Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.’

Notes
[1] In 1981, Gore Vidal began a celebrated attack on New York Jews who went along with homophobic and misogynist conservatives with ‘George Orwell remarks somewhere that you cannot say anything for or against the Jews without getting into trouble.’ ‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,’ I felt when I read it, but have never been able to find the quote. (Vidal’s ‘George Orwell remarks somewhere’ was not a help.) However, writing in Tribune in 1944, Orwell said: ‘There are two journalistic activities that will always bring you a come-back. One is to attack the Catholics and the other is to defend the Jews,’ which is also true and well put, but not a sentiment likely to appeal to Mr Vidal.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 25 May 2007

I have never quite worked out why so many people who are involved in politics think that party leadership contests provide a marvellous opportunity for debate. Every time the top post falls vacant in any of our major political parties — and in Labour’s case when the deputy leader goes — the cry goes up that there must be a contest to ensure a debate on the party’s future. Then there’s either a lot of huffing and puffing about how the absence of a contest means that debate has been stifled, or else there’s a contest, in which all the candidates make a point of welcoming the chance for debate that the contest offers.

What rarely if ever happens, however, is any actual debate. Sure, the candidates produce vague personal manifestos, give interviews to the newspapers and the broadcast media, tour the country delivering anodyne speeches and — these days — make fools of themselves on the internet. Sometimes they even appear on hustings platforms with one another. But I can think of only one leadership or deputy leadership contest in any of the major political parties in the past 20 years in which candidates have engaged in substantive discussion of their party’s overall direction.

That was way back in 1988, when Tony Benn and Eric Heffer challenged Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley for Labour’s leadership and deputy leadership. (John Prescott also stood for deputy, but that’s another story.) Against the shift towards the political centre that Kinnock and Hattersley had started since 1983, Benn and Heffer offered a clear left alternative: renationalisation of everything the Tories had privatised, withdrawal from the European Community, no compromise on unilateral nuclear disarmament, no expulsions of Trotskyists from the Labour Party. Labour in those days had a system for electing its leaders in which unions and constituency parties did not have to ballot their members before casting their votes, so the official result showing Benn taking 11.4 per cent of the vote and Heffer 9.5 per cent needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt. But the scale of the left’s defeat was awesome — so awesome in fact that many on the left wondered afterwards whether it might not have been more sensible not to have mounted a challenge.

Since then, Labour has had two leadership and deputy leadership contests and is now having a leadership non-contest and deputy contest; the Tories have had six leadership contests and one non-contest; and the Lib Dems have had two leadership contests. But not one of them has sparked a serious internal debate about a party’s direction.

Although all but the last two of the Tories’ battles in the past 20 years have in the end been a pro-European versus an anti-European (or at least someone thought by supporters to be anti-European), none has been conducted in explicitly political terms: all have been about the personal qualities of the candidates.

Of course, that’s partly because the Tories always do politics that way — but the phenomenon is just as marked with Labour. There were real enough political differences between John Smith and Bryan Gould in 1992, particularly over Europe, but they spent most of their time during the contest (if indeed it should be described as such) agreeing with one another about how crucial it was to reform Labour’s internal structures. In 1994, Tony Blair was as much of a shoo-in as Smith had been two years earlier, with both John Prescott and Margaret Beckett interested only in which one of them became his deputy.

Maybe it would all have been different this time had John McDonnell made it on to the leadership ballot, but I have my doubts. Nothing he could have done or said would have changed his position as a hopeless outsider, and Gordon Brown would have found it easy to avoid giving hostages to fortune. In any case, McDonnell didn’t make it, so all we have is a deputy leadership contest with six candidates, all of whom know that the media will pounce on any hint of their differing with Brown.

I’m already sick of it, and we’ve still got four more weeks. For what it’s worth, as things stand I’m voting for Hilary Benn because I think he talks sense on foreign policy, but I’m also impressed by the things John Cruddas has been saying about Labour’s need to revitalise its appeal to working-class voters — and I’ve always liked Peter Hain. In fact, I’m not going to despair whoever wins.

What I’m not expecting any of them to do is add much to the discussion about what a Brown government should do by way of policy. Nor will any of them have any say in who gets which jobs in that government. The truth is that all the cards are now in Brown’s hands, and nothing forseeable of great importance will happen until he chooses to play them.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 27 April 2007

Small things can cheer you up sometimes, and this week’s small thing for me was that Segolene Royal came second in the first round of the French presidential election. I spent Sunday night feeling pleased.

I’m not entirely sure why it did the trick. It was only the first round, for heaven’s sake, and she has a lot to do to win. She won only 26 per cent of the vote, and only 11 per cent of voters chose far-left no-hopers in the first round and have nowhere else to go. (Note in passing here the pathetic showing by the candidate of the once mighty French Communist Party, who took less than 2 per cent of the vote.)

After that, it’s grim. Royal desperately needs suport from people who backed the centrist Francois Bayrou in the first round — 19 per cent of the extraordinary 85 per cent of voters who turned out — and from supporters of the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen (11 per cent). She’ll get few of the latter (though more than many expect) but her real problem is the people who voted for Bayrou. The opinion polls suggest that more than half of them will vote for the scary Nicolas Sarkocy, the right-wing candidate Royal has to beat in the second round, who got 31 per cent last weekend. As I write, Royal’s plea to Bayrou for a second-round alliance — a daring but desperate move — has not been answered.

At least, though, it isn’t a repeat of 2002, when self-indulgent leftists voting Trot, Stalinist and Green denied the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin a place in the second round, leaving Jacques Chirac to fight it out with Le Pen — with no choice for anyone decent but voting for Chirac as the lesser of two evils. Even if it looks as if Royal has too much ground to make up before the second round, she does have an outside chance, and that in itself is progress on five years ago.

+++

On another subject entirely, I was shocked and surprised by the news last week that the annual delegate meeting of the National Union of Journalists, of which I have been a member for nearly 25 years, has voted to boycott Israeli products.

I can see the rationale for the boycott: I’m no fan of the current Israeli administration, which has done nothing to promote a lasting peace deal with the Palestinians and a lot to reduce the likelihood of such a deal. And I think that it’s perfectly legitimate for the west to put pressure on Israel to return to the negotiating table, give up the West Bank settlements, tear down the wall and so on.

My problem is that I don’t think that the NUJ boycotting Israeli goods is a very clever way of putting pressure on the Israeli government to do these things. The NUJ is tiny, so there is no way that the boycott, even if observed by every one of its members, could have any significant impact on the Israeli economy. Politically, however, the boycott has a much greater impact — and it is entirely counterproductive if the goal is to get the Israeli government back to the negotiating table to talk about a workable two-state solution in Israel/Palestine.

If NUJ members (or indeed anyone else outside Israel/Palestine) are serious about doing their bit to facilitate a lasting peace deal, they should be encouraging dialogue and compromise between Israelis and Palestinians and discouraging confrontation. Boycotting Israeli goods can only do the opposite. On one hand, it gives succour — if only a thimbleful — to Hamas, Hizbullah and all the others who would like to see Israel destroyed and reject all compromise with “the Zionist entity”. On the other, it reinforces (if only a little) the defensive mindset of the Israeli diehards who see nothing but enemies in the outside world.

In my view, rather than boycotting Israel, we should be doing precisely the opposite: arguing for more trade with both Israel and the Occupied Territories, more cultural and educational exchanges, more tourism and so on.

So, much as I respect the role of the NUJ’s ADM in setting union policy, I have no intention of observing the boycott. Indeed, as I write I have a friend searching out a selection of kosher delicacies in Israel that I hope she will deliver when she gets back to Britain next week. I invite the NUJ executive to discipline me for my flagrant and wilful breach of union policy.

+++

The current London Review of Books is a very good one, with half-a-dozen must-read articles — one of them an elegaic review of recent books about the Communist Party of Great Britain by the eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, the only prominent intellectual who stuck with the CPGB to the bitter end.

It is a fascinating piece, nowhere more so than when Hobsbawm claims that during the second world war, British communists “would have gone underground if they had had to, as they did on the Continent …, and organised resistance to the German occupation”. Not in 1940 they wouldn’t, comrade. That was when the Hitler-Stalin pact was in operation. Remember?

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 2 March 2007

Sometimes even Alastair Campbell gets it right. The old bruiser was up to some new tricks in the Times last week, dispensing advice to the Tories about how to win the next election.

Not that his advice was particularly useful. It amounted to little more than the assertion that David Cameron needs to do a lot more solid policy work if he is to have a hope of emulating Tony Blair’s reinvention of Labour in 1994-97. The Tories are not as far ahead in the opinion polls as they need to be to win next time, the onetime spindoctor went on, and the government under a new prime minister has every chance of winning a fourth term.

I don’t buy all of this — not least because Blair didn’t have to change much policy from Labour’s early-1980s dog-days, for the simple reason that his predecessors, Neil Kinnock and John Smith, had already done it. (Don’t forget that Gordon Brown’s declaration of the end of “tax-and-spend” and Blair’s “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” soundbite both date from 1992-93, under Smith’s leadership, or that Blair’s abandonment of Clause Four, though obviously important symbolically, changed party policy not a jot.)

But Campbell is on the money when he says that the Cameron Tories are an empty vessel and that — as things stand — they are not well placed to beat a Brown government.

So far, Cameron has played his hand as well as anyone else in his party could have played it. He has done the casual nice-guy routine with some panache (certainly more than Gordon has managed so far) and there’s something about his media image that is attractive. He is saying the right things — from his party’s point of view — about how the Tories have learned from their mistakes, are no longer nasty or extreme, are concerned about poverty and all the rest. He’s bidding for the centre ground, in other words.

But he’s not doing so well as to induce panic. Open-neck-shirt visits to sink estates will not shake off the perception that he is a Etonian toff (as he is). The bike to work followed by the chauffeur was bad. The picture of him posing with the Bullingdon Club at Oxford is potentially disastrous, because it suggests that he has an inner arrogant-aristo arsehole struggling to get out. It should be used relentlessly in Labour propaganda.

And as Campbell says, there isn’t a lot of substance to Tory policy. What would a Tory government do about the big issues with which it would have to deal? All we get on the NHS, education, the environment, Europe, Britain’s relationship with the US and so on is mood music. They’re seriously embarrassed by their yet-to-be-jettisoned voter-unfriendly baggage. In Labour terms, they’re Mandelsonised Kinnock circa 1986.

As for the polls, the Tories are doing well, but not brilliantly.

On the standard “Which party would you vote for if there were a general election tomorrow?” test, the Tories are running at 37 per cent on average, with Labour on 32.5 and the Lib Dems on just under 20. It looks a commanding Tory lead, but even under the new constituency boundaries for the next general election it would be enough only to give the Tories roughly the same number of seats as Labour in a hung parliament, with a massively reduced number of Lib Dem MPs holding the balance of power. Again, it’s Kinnock circa 1986.

Which is another way of saying that opinion polls a long way from a general election don’t necessarily matter. Campbell is again right to point out that the government has had a torrid time for the past six months and that there is every reason to believe its poll fortunes are at or close to their nadir — particularly as there is a change of prime minister in the offing.

OK, so Gordon isn’t exactly inspiring, but he’s a lot better than John Major in 1990 when he replaced Margaret Thatcher — and Major’s succession gave a massive poll bounce to the Tories that carried them through to victory in 1992.

Here, the polls asking people how they would vote if Brown were PM now with Cameron as leader of the opposition need to be taken with a lorry-load of salt. Brown is not PM and has been keeping a low profile sticking to his brief while Blair takes the flak. We simply don’t know either what he’d be like in charge or how voters would respond.

There is plenty that can go wrong for Labour. The leadership and deputy leadership elections have the potential to turn into chaos — the first with no credible candidate but Brown, the second with too many candidates that have nothing to say apart from how proud they are to have served (with minor qualifications). Iraq and loans-for-peerages are not over yet. And then there’s the other stuff…

But as long as the succession is handled competently and hysteria over Iraq subsides — and as long as no one is nicked on loans-for-peerages — Brown should look a fresh enough start. And it needs just a tiny swing to Labour from the current polls for Brown to give Cameron a tonking in 2009 or 2010 and secure a clear majority for Labour. Don’t give up the fight. We’re still in the driving seat.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 19 January 2007

Well, the organ made it to three-score-years-and-ten. Tribune’s 70th birthday came and went the week before last with just a single mention in these pages noting the anniversary.

Not that this is the last you’ll hear of it: the editor and the staff deliberately played down the actual 70th because they’re planning a really big party later in the year after the seasonal affective disorder is out the way. It’s a sensible decision, and I have every confidence they’ll put together a real ball — unlike the real balls-up we managed for the 50th 20 years ago, when the highlight of the partying was one of the most tedious meetings I have ever witnessed, in a freezing Conway Hall.

But landmark birthdays are also times to reflect on what happens next — and here it’s hard to be too optimistic. Tribune certainly deserves not only to survive but to thrive long into the future. But it is going to have to cope with a very hostile climate.

I’m not talking politics here: with Tony Blair giving way to Gordon Brown this year and Labour casting around for ways to renew its programme and electoral appeal after a decade in power, there is a great opportunity for Tribune to play a big part in setting the political agenda. The problem is rather that the economics of small-circulation left-wing print periodical publishing are becoming ever more precarious.

The big distributors and wholesalers have increasingly decided in recent years that they don’t want the bother of handling minnows that make them little or no money — which has had the effect of squeezing Tribune’s newstrade sales and forcing it into ever-greater reliance on subscriptions. But that’s old stuff: a far bigger challenge is posed by the internet — which is steadily undermining the habit of paying for news and opinion, particularly among young people, and thereby threatening the very existence of an independent left press.

The economics of running a small-circulation print periodical are simple. You have to get enough revenue from newstrade sales, subscriptions, advertising and fundraising to cover the costs of printing, postage, staff, premises, equipment, promotion campaigns and so forth. Because small circulation means low advertising rates (unless you can persuade would-be advertisers that most of your readers are very rich), most income has to come from newstrade sales, subs and fundraising. OK, it’s hard to get it right, and unless you have a rich benefactor — which Tribune has had at various points in its history but doesn’t have now — it can be a real struggle. With a magazine that’s worth reading and a bit of luck, however, you can muddle through.

The big question is how long this will remain the case. Ten years ago, it was easy enough to dismiss as scare-mongers those pundits who said that the internet would soon render the newspaper and the magazine obsolete. Today, as readers turn from dead trees to online, with nearly every newspaper and many magazines losing circulation — some of them at white-knuckle-ride rates — the scenario looks a lot less implausible. All the major players are investing heavily in websites, nervously hoping that increased online advertising revenue at least makes up for lost income from sales and advertising as a result of declining circulation.

The headache facing all but the publishers of specialised commercial and financial news is that people won’t pay for online subscriptions or even for one-off access: they expect the internet to be free. But at least the big boys will get a piece of the cake as advertising migrates online, as it has begun to do. If you’re almost completely reliant on sales and subs for your income flow, you lose your main sources of income as readers abandon print for online.

This isn’t so much of a problem if your print publication is published as a hobby, relying entirely on voluntary labour, with income from subs and sales going to pay the printer’s bill, postage and a few odds and ends: you can simply drop print publication when it becomes unsustainable and publish solely online. The great thing about the internet for anyone who wants to get the message out is that it slashes production, distribution and promotion costs. Indeed, once you’ve got your website designed and hosted, there’s no cost equivalent to the printer’s or postal bills.

But if you’ve got wages to pay — as you must have if you are publishing with any regularity or making any attempt to break news stories, even if, like Tribune, you never or rarely pay for features — the prospect of losing sales and subs, in the absence of substantial ad revenue, is no fun at all.

Which is not to proclaim that the end is nigh — but it is to make it clear that it’s up to you as readers to ensure that Tribune survives, by continuing to subscribe and getting others to do the same. If you want serious left journalism, it cannot be free at the point of use.