PAUL ANDERSON

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, November 26 2004

Say what you like about the government, the state of British football or the weather, it has been a marvellous couple of weeks for observers of the ludicrous antics of the British far left.

The biggest spectacle, of course, has been George Galloway’s libel action against the Telegraph in the High Court — unresolved as I write — which has been remarkable for the forthright way in which Gorgeous George explained his famous greeting to Saddam Hussein: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.”

The MP for Glasgow Kelvin — and soon-to-be Respect Coalition (George Galloway) parliamentary candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow in London’s East End — said he was merely conveying the solidarity of the Palestinian people, whom he’d just met, to the Iraqi people, who would be informed of his salutation by Saddam — aka “Sir”. And the Telegraph’s headline, “Saddam’s little helper”, was, he told the court, losing his calm momentarily, nothing less than “a dagger, a sword right through the heart of my political life”. Ooo-er.

To be honest, though, more heat than light emerged from the Galloway-Telegraph show — and for much of the past fortnight it has been almost eclipsed by the shenanigans surrounding another Scottish charmer of the left, Tommy Sheridan, member of the Scottish Parliament and perma-tanned figurehead of the Scottish Socialist Party, which Galloway refused to join after being expelled by Labour.

The story that did the rounds was that Galloway refused to accept the SSP policy of parliamentary representatives taking only an average worker’s wage from their salary: I am happy to report that Galloway says this was down to Sheridan misunderstanding a joke.

Anyway, Sheridan hit the headlines for resigning from the SSP leadership amid tabloid allegations that he had engaged in rumpy-pumpy with a woman other than his wife, Gail, who is pregnant. Sheridan, who came to prominence as the public face in Scotland of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency’s anti-poll-tax campaign in the late 1980s, denied the scurrilous allegations, said he simply wanted to spend more time with his family-to-be and promised he’d sue.

It seemed like end of story. But then it emerged that the SSP executive had forced him to resign for reasons that were at least in part related to his personal life — if not the story that had been splashed over the Sunday newspaper — and there were reports that he had been stitched up by his enemies in the SSP, who had not only conspired to evict him but had also fed the bourgeois media with various sex-romp claims. All the contenders for Mr Sheridan’s coveted position as leader of the SSP are, incidentally, former members of the Militant Tendency.

Phew! And that was before the return of the Redgraves, glory be, to the political fray, with two members of the famous acting family, Vanessa and Corin, announcing a new political party, Peace and Progress (click here), to fight the next general election.

Younger readers of Tribune might think that Vanessa and Corin Redgrave are no more than distinguished thespians with vaguely leftist views — that’s certainly the picture you’d get from the fawning pieces on their new initiiative in the Guardian (click here) and the Observer (click here) — but in fact it ain’t so.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the pair were leading lights in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, a mad Trostskyist cult, led by the psychopathic Gerry Healy, that was revealed in the mid-1980s to have solicited and taken substantial sums of cash from Arab nationalist dictatorships, including Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya and, yup, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in return for favours that included grassing up exiles to their secret police forces (click here, here and here).

The scandal of the WRP’s Middle East pimping came to light after Healy’s sexual abuse of young women members of the WRP was exposed — and it destroyed the party. Yet the Redgraves remained loyal to their leader even after his disgrace. However inspiring they are on the stage, they have a record of political lunacy matched by no one else alive. There is no evidence whatsoever that they regret anything they have ever done.

And the moral of the story? Sorry, but it’s very simple. These people are at best comedians and at worst mountebanks of the worst kind. There is no credible left challenge to Labour at the next election anywhere in Britain. Vote tactically for the Lib Dems, for sure, but don’t waste your time on the candidates of the far left. They are, without exception, a very bad joke.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, October 29 2004

Like most readers of Tribune, I’m hoping John Kerry wins the US presidential election next week.

I don’t like what George W Bush has done at home — massive tax cuts for the rich, a big squeeze on America’s already inadequate welfare state, favours to big business on every front — and I don’t like his foreign policy. The way the Bush administration has gone about its “war on terror” since 9/11 fills me with despair. Cosying up to the Israeli right; the extraordinary failure to prepare for the “morning after” in Afghanistan and, particularly, Iraq; the vile abuses of human rights in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib — time and again the Bush administration has proved itself irresponsibly short-sighted, incompetent and brutal. It’s time for a change.

Yet although I’m rooting for Kerry, I’m doing so in a manner so low-key it’s barely perceptible. OK, I’m writing this column, which of course will sway opinion throughout the world thanks to Tribune’s amazing syndication deals — aka me posting it on this weblog after the paper went to press.

Otherwise, however, I’ve done sweet FA. I’ve followed the US election campaign in the British newspapers and on TV, but far from obsessively. I’ve been to see Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 and was underwhelmed. And I’ve continued the boycott of American fast-food chains I began immediately after visiting Kentucky Fried Chicken for the first time in the 1970s. Well, they back the Republicans, don’t they?

But I’ve done nothing so bold as sport a Kerry campaign badge, let alone contact an American voter in a swing state urging support for Kerry. The Guardian set up a scheme to do just this last week, encouraging readers to write letters to 14,000 voters in Clark County, Ohio, putting the case for removing Dubya. The stunt has, er, certainly had an impact: it was picked up big-time by the US media, and for a while last week the Guardian’s website was one of the most visted on the planet.

But all publicity is not good publicity. Rather a lot of the American response to my favourite daily’s initiative was elegantly summed up by the disgruntled recipient of a letter who wrote back: “Hey, England, Scotland and Wales, mind your own business. We don’t need weenie-spined limeys meddling in our presidential election. If it wasn’t for America, you’d all be speaking German.”

One reason for my inactivity is that I take the point: we limeys — weenie-spined or otherwise — have no more right to intervene in US elections than have Americans to intervene in elections over here. More important, I can’t think of anything I could do that would make a blind bit of difference to the result on November 2.

But if I’m going to be completely honest, the biggest reason for my atrophy isn’t political realism. I’m as game for hopeless causes as the next dreamer — anyone for socialism, European federalism or proportional representation? The truth is that I don’t believe that the outcome of this election is quite as important — at least for anyone living outside the US — as most commentators seem to think.

Now, I’m not arguing here, as some Leninist crazies do, that there is no difference between Bush and Kerry because they’re both capitalist imperialists. There is a gulf between them on domestic policy — on healthcare, on education, on workers’ rights, on pensions, on taxation. And there are at least grounds for believing that a Kerry White House would be rather more Realpolitik-oriented than a Bush White House — less adventurist and more enthusiastic about working through international consensus.

But the differences between Kerry and Bush on foreign policy (except on the environment) are not huge.

On one hand, Kerry is no dove: as Edward Luttwak argued cogently in the Sunday Telegraph last weekend, those peaceniks who think he would adopt a policy of non-interventionism simply haven’t examined his record, which is consistently hawkish (including voting for war in Iraq). Certainly, a Kerry victory would not – thankfully – mean a rapid withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

On the other hand, it’s at least plausible – I would say likely — that a second-term Bush administration would be much more cautious on foreign affairs than the first-term Bush administration has been. The neo-conservatives who lobbied successfully for the invasion of Iraq have also been responsible for everything that has gone wrong since, and their star is on the wane. What’s more, the scale of the US commitment in Iraq — and the likelihood that it will not be brought swiftly to an end — makes it extremely unlikely that any administration will seek out further targets for pre-emptive action.

Maybe I’m complacent, but I just don’t buy the scenario that has Bush marching into Iran or North Korea. Sorry if this sounds like heresy, but I think the world could live with a Dubya victory.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 15 October 2004

Welcome, comrades, to the European Social Forum in England’s London! On this weekend, the activists from all over the Europe and total globe involve and celebrate wildly in a festival of talks and actions against the capitalism and the globalisation. You can meet all progressives of the continent, no kidding — every tendency left on the shelf, pretty much 57 varieties like the Heinz company say! As delegate from the Slavka Movement of the Oppressed Minorities and member of the Slavka Revolutionary Workers’ Party central committee, I salute you!

It is naturally minus the imperialist pro-war social democracy, the opportunist poodler Blair and his co. But it is naturally also embracing the comrades semi-detached from any serious tendency but in struggle against what in the German it calls “the real politics”. I think here of the Red Pepper, Mrs Wainwright’s magazine, in forefront of anti-reality left here, with links to same currents in Brazil and elsewhere, with international circulation and many readers in proletariat!

As well there are — of course! — the Muslim brothers, in historic new alliance against the imperialism. Perhaps they can hook up with the lesbian sisters and come together for peace, like John Lennon sings in Beatles? It is festival against the war and the racist hate — solidarity with the martyrs against criminal Zionists and illegal occupiers of Iraq!

Make no mistake about it, we are one in struggle against imperialism. It is one struggle, one fight against mad dictator Bush and the corporate cronies who bring capitalist “civilisation” in ruins of Iraq.

We salute Respect coaltion, which is rocking the bourgeois politics to foundations in Hartlepool, Leicester and Aldgate East, all famous battles in this year of struggle, followed by comrades worldwide.

We salute also Comrade Scargill, leader of the struggling National Miners’ Union, in headlines this week for famous proletarian unity move. The knees of Blair and fellow scum are trembling in their bed!

The comrades you can listen this weekend are also the most famous top dogs in Britain for struggle.

Biggest dog of all is Comrade Galloway, partisan of anti-imperialist struggle and staunch friend of Iraqi people. He is leader of British proletariat against the lying so-called Labour Government! So what if bourgeois press say he takes shilling of Saddam Hussein? We say there is one solution only, death to bourgeois press scum!

Almost equal supreme dog is Ken Livingstone, leader of London workers. He too is the great anti-imperialist fighter. Many years, he backed the late Comrade Healy against the Pabloite revisionists and degeneration of workers’ international; now he struggles with class-fighters of Socialist Action who are staff of the revolution at City Hall!

But let us not forget the lesser dogs! Comrade Murray, leader of innumerate masses who march against Iraq war last year and rigid member of the mass-party, Communist Party of Britain. Mrs Comrade Chairman, second-in-command of the mass peace movement, militant of the mass-party, Social Workers’ Party. And many other dogs of other mass proletarian tendencies too numerous to mention!

+++

Aaargh! OK, I can’t keep this nonsense up for the whole of a column. I’m no Craig Brown. I admit defeat. And I apologise if it’s not very funny. But seriously — how can anyone take this beano as in any sense politically important?

The participants represent no one but themselves. The overwhelmingly dominant factions on the British organising committee, who stitched up the agenda for the big plenaries, are the dinosaur sects of cretino-Leninism — the SWP, the CPB, Socialist Action. They couldn’t save a deposit in a general election and their politics stinks. The Respect Coalition, the nearest thing they have to a political project, is a principle-free alliance of leftist posturing and Islamist reaction fronted by a charismatic egomaniac.

OK, Ken Livingstone has given the shindig his backing — but that is the London mayor at his most Machiavellian, making sure he never has a challenger from the left however long he continues to pursue the boring gradualist social-democratic capitalist politics that are his (and our) only hope in the real world.

Perhaps if 50,000 people turn up to the ESF, as the organsiers initially predicted, the sheer weight of numbers will give it an unpredictable dynamism. But that is looking rather unlikely: even the organisers are now predicting only 20,000, and the best intelligence is that the actual number will be half that.

But I’ve got better things to do even if 100,000 arrive. Ipswich are playing at home, and I can’t stand Leninist bores.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 1 October 2004

Like Ian Aitken in last week’s Tribune, I’m amazed at how little has been made of the Daily Telegraph’s revelations the week before last that Tony Blair was warned long before the invasion of Iraq — by none other than Jack Straw — that the US had done little or nothing to plan for the “morning after”, and that as a result there was a serious risk of replacing Saddam Hussein with something just as bad or even worse.

For Straw’s warning was and is the most convincing argument against the war — that its aftermath was irresponsibly ill-thought-through.

There were and are other anti-war arguments, to be sure. In the months before the invasion took place, the most potent (lest we forget) was that it was dangerously reckless to take on a mad dictator who was probably armed with chemical and biological weapons and had previously been prepared to use them.

If the American and British governments were right about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction — and nearly everyone at the time thought they were, including Dr David Kelly, whatever his doubts about the presentation of the evidence — taking Saddam on in battle was crazy. It wasn’t quite as bonkers as, say, responding to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 with an ultimatum to the Kremlin, but it wasn’t far off. Even a last-ditch use by Saddam of “battlefield” sarin nerve gas weapons against civilian targets would wreak terrible damage, the peacenik Cassandras warned (myself among them).

In fact, of course, it turned out that we were wrong — and so were the US and UK governments. The invasion was easily accomplished by the American-led coalition. Saddam’s army crumbled away, and he didn’t use those feared WMD. Indeed, it transpired that his chemical and biological weapons didn’t exist (or at least couldn’t be found).

Subsequently, the anti-war lobby changed track. It plugged away relentlessly with two claims: one, that the US and the UK went to war against Saddam on a premise they knew was false, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and lied to us all; and two, that the invasion was illegal in the absence of a new UN resolution supporting it.

This line of argument is still very much alive — it was restated last week by Tribune’s leader column, and I’m sure it was very much to the fore in the minds of anti-war delegates at the Labour conference as they prepared for this week’s debate on Iraq in Brighton (still to take place as I write).

There’s no doubt that this case against the war is superficially strong. It has been clear all along that Saddam’s supposed possession of WMD — or more accurately his refusal to co-operate with the UN inspectors charged with ensuring that he had given up the WMD he once had — was not the real reason the Bush administration decided to take Saddam out but was rather the pretext it chose to clothe with legitimacy its goal of regime change. It is certainly true that WMD was central to Blair’s public case for backing Bush. No one can deny that the WMD have not so far been discovered. And the second UN resolution was not passed.

But so what? It doesn’t follow from all this either that Bush and Blair knowingly deceived us about WMD or that they went to war illegally. It’s far more plausible that the US and British governments simply put the best gloss they could on the evidence available at the time — which with the benefit of hindsight turns out to have been shonky, but, well, no one knew that then. And the invasion of Iraq is at very least defensible in terms of international law because of the UN resolutions on WMD that Saddam blatantly defied, even if the WMD didn’t actually exist.

More fundamentally, there’s the problem that international law is an ass. It makes the sovereignty of any state — no matter how unjust, undemocratic or bloody — pretty much inviolable so long as it stays just the right side of genocide or invading its neighbours. Even if the invasion of Iraq was against international law (and I don’t think it was), that in itself wouldn’t make it wrong. Regime change, as long as it resulted in a free democratic Iraq and was achieved with minimal casualties, was a worthy goal.

What the documents leaked to the Telegraph show, however, is that Blair backed Bush even though he was warned by Straw that the US administration simply hadn’t thought through what regime change should entail beyond smashing up Saddam’s state machine, and that the result of this lack of “morning after” planning could be chaos or a new dictatorship. In ignoring his foriegn secretary’s advice, Blair showed himself to be an extraordinarily rash gambler who is blind to the consequences of his actions. It’s for this reason rather than any other that we should question his fitness for office.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, September 17 2004

I was supposed to spend last weekend decorating the hall, but I got sidetracked by reading Andrew Marr’s new book on journalism, My Trade. It’s an odd confection, part hilarious anecdote, part history, part “how to” guide. But it’s strangely addictive, not least because it contains some of the best sustained critical thinking by a practitioner that I’ve read for a long time on the state of British journalism.

Marr, currently the BBC’s political editor, has been consistently ribbed by Tribune in recent years because he was a bearded badge-wearing paper-selling Trot when he was a student at Cambridge University a quarter-of-a-century ago. (I think he was there at the same time as Martin Rowson, cartoonist and Tribune columnist, but I could be wrong.)

Now, I’m all for reminding the great-and-good of their youthful leftist foibles. I have enjoyed the recent spate of recycled anecdotes about Alan Milburn, in years gone by one of the mainstays of the Newcastle far-left bookshop Days of Hope (aka Haze of Dope), and Kim Howells, who might or might not take a sympathetic view of student occupations of campuses against top-up fees given his role in the famous Hornsey art-school sit-in in 1968.

But, hey, we all move on, and the real saddos today are the 40- and 50- and 60-somethings who have learned nothing in the past 20 or 30 years and are still peddling the same Leninist snake-oil — the Tariq Alis and George Galloways, the Andrew Murrays and Lindsay Germans.

By comparison, Marr’s journey — if not Milburn’s or Howells’s — has been one from darkness into light. These days, he is meticulous about keeping his politics to himself for professional reasons (just as he should be). But before he joined the BBC he was, both in his newspaper columns and in his book Ruling Britannia, published in 1995, an enthusiast for all the causes espoused by the thinking democratic left (or what remains of it): Europeanism, redistribution, the welfare state, devolution, proportional representation for the House of Commons, radical reform of the House of Lords.

Whatever, his new book has more than its fair share of moments. It is worth reading just for his hilarious account of his time at the helm of the Independent in the mid-1990s, which should be studied by every wannabe editor. He was pitched into it even though he had no experience as an editor since his school magazine. And he struggled from the start against almost impossible odds. His proprietors were clueless about the nature of the business they were running and, despite promises, cut his budgets (which meant job losses, which meant he lost it with the journalistic staff). Eventually he was sacked after one too many run-ins with the chief incompetent megalomaniac among his bosses, David Montgomery.

There’s also some well-told history here (albeit with a few sloppy factual mistakes). And some of Marr’s descriptions of how journalism works today are as good as any. But what’s best in My Trade is his take on the state of British journalism.

Like other left-of-centre practitioner-critics of the recent past — notably John Lloyd of the Financial Times and Martin Kettle of the Guardian — Marr is less than impressed by what he reads, hears and sees every day. He makes well directed swipes at the hackneyed emotionalism that has crept into every newspaper, the cult of celebrity and, particularly, the decline of reporting of politics and serious discussion of policy.

Unlike Lloyd and Kettle, however, Marr doesn’t consider that the problem is simply (or even largely) that journalists have been overcome by an all-pervading cynicism about the political class that renders them incapable of doing the job required of them in a democratic polity. Although he says that politcal journalists “have become too powerful, too much the interpreters” and that “the political story has become degraded”, he argues that the reasons “have as much to do with politics as with journalism”. The Labour government’s current troubles with the media are as much a deserved reaction to its strict news management regime as they are of hacks acquiring a permanent anti-politician sneer. “Central control and manipulation created, within a few years, some of the worst press coverage any government in modern times has suffered,” he writes of Alastair Campbell.

Marr identifies the real enemy as an “idle, office-bound, marketing-directed copycat culture in modern news which is turning off readers and viewers”. What journalism needs now, he says, is fewer columnists and more reporters getting out of the office and talking to real people. At the risk of giving Tribune’s new editor, Chris McLaughlin, a good excuse to get rid of me, amen to that.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, September 3 2004

Like every other leftie teenager of my generation I had that poster of Che stuck on my bedroom wall — in my case taking pride of place in a collage that included an International Socialists placard demanding “Defend the Portuguese workers’ revolution!”, some arty French shots of girls with not much on, bills for gigs I’d peeled off boards in town and assorted beer mats.

I was very proud of the overall effect, which I thought compared very well with the efforts of the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, but my mum and dad redecorated the room when I went to university.

I protested, but to be honest by then I’d moved on. Most of the bands whose promotional materials I’d artfully arranged had become unfashionable with the arrival of punk, and I was no longer at all enamoured of the International Socialists, who had become the Socialist Workers Party and chucked me out. But I was particularly embarassed by the poster of Che, based on Alexander Korda’s famous photograph of him taken in 1960.

I know the image is always talked about reverentially by media studies types as iconic and everlasting — but in late-1970s Britain it became about as cool as flared trousers, for one simple reason: Wolfie Smith, the ludicrous bedsit revolutionary in the BBC sitcom Citizen Smith, who looked just like the Che in the poster. Wolfie, played by Robert Lindsay, was, to put it mildly, not the sort of character any serious (or fashion-conscious) socialist would ever wish to emulate, particularly if he had younger sisters.

More seriously, I’d also started to have big doubts about Guevara’s politics. When I put the poster up, I hadn’t known a lot about him. I knew he’d been a guerrilla leader with Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution, and I knew he’d subsequently worked tirelessly to foment revolution elsewhere and had been killed while leading an armed guerrilla uprising in Bolivia in 1967. All very romantic. But that was about it.

As I read more about the Cuban revolution and Latin America in the 1960s and the 1970s, however, it became clear that Che wasn’t quite the revolutionary hero I’d assumed him to be. Yes, he was personally courageous, single-minded and ascetic. But the guerrilla strategy he expounded and epitomised had been a miserable failure everywhere in Latin America except Cuba — and was roundly (and convincingly) condemned as suicidal adventurism by most thinking Latin American leftists.

Worse, Guevara, from the mid-1950s until his death, was an out-and-out dogmatic Stalinist — show trials, gulag and all — who was such an admirer of the Soviet dictator that he insisted on putting flowers on his tomb when he visited Moscow in 1960, fully four years after Khruschev’s “secret speech”.

If this Stalinism had simply been a matter of opinion with no effect on others, it might have been forgivable. But Guevara put his worldview into brutal practice. As a senior figure in Castro’s administration, he played a leading role in creating a single-party police state, throwing opponents into jail and banning free trade unions. And although he broke with Moscow in 1964, it was not because he had given up on Stalinism but because he thought the Soviet leadership was, unlike his hero Stalin, insufficiently committed to world revolution and crumbling in the face of petty-bourgeois deviationism.

And so it was, 25 years ago, that I came to the conclusion that Guevara was even less of a role-model than Wolfie Smith. Big deal, you might well think, but this rambling reminiscence does have some contemporary relevance. It was brought on by seeing The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles’s movie about Guevara’s trip around Latin America in 1952 with his friend Alberto Granado on a battered Norton motorbike, long before he became a Stalinist.

I loved the film: it’s not quite in the class of Kings of the Road or Easy Rider or Thelma and Louise, but it’s an accomplished cinematic spectacle, as good a road movie as I’ve seen for a long time. One of the main reasons it works so well is that it doesn’t preach politics — all we see is the young Che and his mate coming up against appalling poverty and squalor and, well, being moved to do something about it.

Paradoxically, however, this is also the film’s greatest failing. What matters most about Guevara as a real historical figure is not that he was horrified by poverty and exploitation and decided to “do something” but that (after a brief flirtation with Gandhianism) he specifically and tragically chose the dead-end of armed struggle Stalinism as his mode of action — rather than, say, trade union organising or reformist democratic socialism.

It’s difficult to see how The Motorcycle Diaries could have gone into any of this and kept its coherence as a film, but the effect of its keeping the politics vague is to breathe new life into a myth that should have been buried long ago.

Yes, it’s that time of the electoral cycle again. There’s probably nine months to go until the next general election, so we all need to work out how to vote.

As I’ve argued before in this column, for more than a decade the differences between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats have been nugatory by comparison with the differences between either of them and the Tories. On some issues, Labour is more egalitarian, more liberal or more democratic than the Lib Dems; on others it’s the other way round. But both are parties of the democratic Centre-Left — and either is infinitely better than the Tories. So the priority at the next election, just as at the last one and the one before that, is to vote tactically for whichever candidate, Labour or Lib Dem, has the best chance of keeping the Tory out.

In most constituencies — those where Labour won at the last election or came second to a Tory — that means voting Labour. But in quite a few constituencies, the Liberal Democrat either won or came second to a Tory in 2001. In those constituencies, the best way to beat the Tory candidate next time round is to vote Lib Dem.

What follows is a list, in alphabetcial order, of: those constituencies in England and Wales where a Lib Dem came second to a Tory in 2001; and those in Scotland — where there have been boundary changes — where the Lib Dem would have won in 2001 if the new constituency boundaries had been in place. I have shamelessly pinched the latter from the excellent website Election Prediction.

But on with the fun. Lib Dem and Labour supporters should vote Lib Dem in England and Wales where a Lib Dem won in 2001 and in:

Aberdeenshire West and Kincardine
Aldershot
Argyll and Bute
Arundel
Aylesbury
Berwickshire, Roxburghshire and Selkirk
Bexhill and Battle
Bournemouth East
Bridgwater
Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross
Cambridgeshire South
Cambridgeshire South East
Chesham and Amersham
Chichester
Christchurch
Cotswold
Devon East
Dorset North
Dorset West
Eastbourne
Edinburgh West
Fife North East
Folkestone and Hythe
Gordon
Haltemprice and Howden
Hampshire East
Hampshire North East
Harborough
Henley
Horsham
Huntingdon
Isle of Wight
Leominster
Maidenhead
Mid Sussex
Mole Valley
New Forest East
New Forest West
Norfolk South
Orkney and Shetland
Orpington
Penrith and The Border
Ribble Valley
Ross, Skye and Lochaber
Ryedale
Saffron Walden
Salisbury
Skipton and Ripon
Solihull
Stratford-on-Avon
Surrey East
Surrey Heath
Surrey South West
Taunton
Tiverton and Honiton
Totnes
Tunbridge Wells
Wealden
Wells
Westbury
Westmorland and Lonsdale
Wiltshire North
Windsor
Woking
Wokingham
Worcestershire West
Worthing West

Everywhere else, Lib Dem and Labour supporters should vote Labour.

Note that, just as when I did a similar column to this before the 2001 general election, I have carefully written it so that the Liberal Democrats can use it in election material to make it look as if Tribune, the Labour weekly, backs their candidate in each individual constituency. I have of course sent a copy to their headquarters in Cowley Street.

More seriously, there are a couple of things to note about my advice. The list doesn’t include Brentwood and Ongar, where Martin Bell stood as an independent against Eric Pickles in 2001 and came second, with the Lib Dem dropping to third from second in 1997: maybe it should. And, more importantly, I’m not sure what to recommend in seats held by Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party. The Tories are rank outsiders in all Plaid’s seats, so anti-Tory tactical voting is irrelevant in them. But in three constituencies the SNP would have won on the 2001 figures with the Tory second — Angus, Banff and Buchan, and Perth and North Perthshire. So maybe Labour and Lib Dem supporters there should vote tactically for the SNP.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, July 23 2004

It might seem the height of perversity to most readers of Tribune, but in the past few weeks I’ve felt more than the odd pang of sympathy for Tony Blair.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never been a fan of the man or his politics. Sure, before he became prime minister, I interviewed him a few times for Tribune and the New Statesman, and found him personable and charming. And yes, I voted for him in the 1994 Labour leadership contest.

But I was never a Blairite. I voted for him 10 years ago only because Robin Cook decided not to stand and the other candidates were not credible. My hopes of Blair (electoral success apart) were modest in the extreme — that he’d prove more of a constitutional reformer than he’d indicated previously, and that he’d be consistently pro-European.

From there, it was downhill all the way, even before he got to Number Ten. I found the “New Labour” rebranding of the Labour Party asinine and banal, its culture of spin and intolerance of dissent nauseating. Within a year of his becoming Labour leader, I was appalled by Blair’s extreme caution on everything apart from kow-towing to big business and law-and-order populism.

After 1997, with Labour in government, even my modest hopes evaporated. Far from embracing radical constitutional change, Blair did the bare minimum he could get away with. Devolution to Scotland and Wales and regional government for London went ahead — but reform of the House of Lords stalled after the removal of the hereditary peers, the long-awaited Freedom of Information Act was a damp squib, and the promised referendum on changing the electoral system for the House of Commons was postponed indefinitely.

On Europe, Blair blew his chance of securing early British entry into the euro, then stood in the way of developing a social-democratic bloc in the European Union with France, Germany and Italy by pressing a hard deregulationist position at every opportunity in every EU forum. Long before his capitulation to the Eurosceptics with his promise of a referendum, I’d given up on anything worthwhile coming from Blair’s supposed pro-Europeanism. As for the rest of the government’s record — well, there are certainly plenty of good things about it, including sustained economic growth, low unemployment and, at least in the past few years, serious increases in public spending (particularly on the health service and schools), but, as everyone knows, they have largely been down to Gordon Brown as Chancellor.

On those areas of domestic policy in which Blair has taken the lead — public service reform, crime, asylum — the government’s record has been at best uninspiring and at worst miserably illiberal. On foreign affairs, Blair’s real enthusiasm, his administration started surprisingly well, but since 2001 its unstinting support for the adventurism of George W Bush has been has been dangerously reckless and seriously damaging to Britian’s relations with Europe.

So why, you may well ask, have I started to feel some sympathy for Blair? Believe it or not, it’s because of Iraq. It’s not that I’ve come round to thinking that the war was right after all and that Blair deserves plaudits for his stance. Far from it: the decision to remove Saddam Hussein by force was irresponsibly risky and the US and Britain went ahead without adequate thought for what happened afterwards in both Iraq and the wider Middle East.

But I’m increasingly irked by the way the argument about the war has got stuck in a groove. Ever since Andrew Gilligan’s infamous broadcast more than a year ago, the media and most British opponents of the war have focused obsessively on a single issue — whether Blair lied about the threat of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in order to bounce parliament and public opinion into backing war.

This is of course an important question. If he did lie — or, rather, if he could be proved to have lied — that would be very serious indeed, and he would be deservedly hounded from office in disgrace. Yet precisely because the consequences of being found out telling such a big lie would be so devastating, it was always implausible that Blair had gambled on any such thing. And with each inquiry and report, culminating in the publication last week of Lord Butler’s findings on the uses of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, it has become ever more clear that, whatever else Blair and his circle did wrong, he genuinely believed the intelligence reports that said Iraqi WMD were a threat, and he acted on them, as he put it, “in good faith”.

Of course, the intelligence was dodgy and the weapons have not been found. But that isn’t the point. On the main charge levelled against him, Blair is not guilty, and no amount of invective can secure a conviction. On this, he has been absolutely right to face down the pack that is baying for his blood. There are plenty of reasons he should go — but not for deliberately misleading us about WMD. Like it or not, he didn’t.

Paul Anderson, review of Stalin’s British Victims by Francis Beckett (Sutton, £20), Tribune, July 9 2004

Harold Evans, the legendary former editor of the Sunday Times and The Times, is famous for many things, but for journalists of my generation he will always be primarily remembered as the author of a series of “how-to” books on the crafts of journalism. I still can’t get out of my head his injunction to would-be reporters (I think adapted from Beaverbrook or Northcliffe): “Always, always, always, tell the story through people.”

I was reminded of it again this week as I read a fascinating book by Francis Beckett, Stalin’s British Victims, which, as the introduction puts it, “tells the stories of four remarkable British women whose lives were scorched by Stalin’s purges”.

Beckett is a veteran left-wing journalist whose by-line will be familiar to Tribune readers, but in recent years he has also carved out something of a niche for himself as a popular historian.

In 1995, he published a marvellously racy account of the rise and fall of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Enemy Within. Four years later came a biography of his father John Beckett, a Left-wing Labour MP in the 1920s who became Oswald Mosley’s propaganda chief and a vocal supporter of Nazism.

Stalin’s British Victims is a by-product of his research for his history of the Communist Party. While writing that book, Beckett came across the cases of Rose Cohen and Rosa Rust. Rose Cohen was a bright young middle-class London Jewish woman who joined the CP at its foundation, married the leading Bolshevik sent by Lenin to sort out the fledgling British party, moved to Moscow and spent more than a decade there as a propagandist for the communist regime before being arrested in 1937 and shot.

Rosa Rust was the daughter of William Rust, a prominent British communist (best known as editor of the Daily Worker, precursor of the Morning Star) who — to cut a very long and complex story short — abandoned her as a girl in the Soviet Union. She nearly died as a slave labourer in wartime Kazakhstan before being rescued and sent back to Britain.

Neither woman’s story was exactly secret. Rose Cohen’s arrest had been reported at the time, and by 1956 it was clear at least to her friends — among them Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the CP, who had been a long-time admirer — that she had perished. Rosa Rust’s extraordinary tale was also known to the British communist leaders. What Beckett found disturbing and fascinating, however, was the extent to which Pollitt and the rest of the British communist leadership kept completely quiet about what they knew and did their utmost to draw a veil over the women’s stories.

Beckett started digging, tracking down Rosa Rust in Redcar and Rose Cohen’s niece in London and searching through archives in Britain and Russia — and in the process discovered two other extraordinary stories of British women caught up in the madness of the purges, Freda Utley and Pearl Rimel, both of whom “saw their husbands taken away to the gulag and had to spirit their small children out of the country”. Utley, a journalist who became a prominent anti-communist polemicist in cold-war America, told her own story in a memoir published in the late 1940s but long forgotten. Rimel’s harrowing tale was unearthed by her husband’s great-nephew, a Dutch journalist.

The result of Beckett’s efforts is an absolutely riveting book that once and for all scotches the excuse used for years by British communists and fellow-travellers for their failure to speak out about Stalin’s terror — that they didn’t know what was going on until 1956, when Khruschev denounced Stalin in his famous “secret speech”. Pollitt, William Rust et al clearly had at very least a good idea of what Stalin was up to — and they decided to do nothing about it, in part because they felt that speaking out would damage the anti-fascist cause but also because they were intellectually and emotionally incapable of confronting the fact that the revolution in which they had invested all their hopes for the future had brought forth a totalitarian police state.

Beckett’s case studies do not constitute a comprehensive account of Stalin’s British victims — as he makes clear, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of other stories to be told — let alone an overview of the purges and the gulag. But by telling the story through people, he vividly brings home how Stalinism blighted and destroyed people’s lives — and why it still matters today.

The Guardian excerpted Stalin’s British Victims a couple of weeks ago: click here

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, June 11 2004

I have no desire to speak ill of the dead, but I’m afraid some of the gushing obituaries of US President Ronald Reagan, who died last Saturday aged 93, have been too much to stomach.

I accept that the man was not the buffoon of leftist mythology. I’ll concede that he was good company and personally generous. I even acknowledge that his brand of right-wing anti-tax populism changed the face of American politics and indeed that the American economy and American society were irreversibly transformed (for better or worse) during his presidency, at least partly because of his policies.

But was he really the great statesman whose brilliant foreign policy won the cold war? Sorry, but Reagan’s role in the events that led to the collapse of communism in east-central Europe and then the Soviet Union was less than decisive.

True, the Reagan administration’s single-minded pursuit of the arms race during his first term made it clear at least to the more percipient members of the Soviet elite that there was not a lot of point in their trying to compete on warhead numbers and firepower because there was no way the Soviet Union could match either the level of US military spending or US technology.

True, this made much of the Soviet elite much keener on negotiating arms control treaties and settling for a new detente — so when in his second term Reagan changed track and offered the Kremlin jaw-jaw rather than war-war, he found a ready taker in Mikhail Gorbachev.

True, US funding of the resistance to Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan played an important role in forcing an unmanageable military crisis on the Soviet military that had a dramatic impact on morale in the upper echelons of the regime.

But the bigger truth is that the Soviet system collapsed and brought the cold war to a definitive end not because of anything America did but from within. “Actually existing socialism” had lost the plot long before Reagan came to power. By the time he won his first presidential election in 1980, it was profoundly sick.

In the Soviet Union itself, the optimistic expectations of prosperity and gradual political liberalisation that had characterised the late 1950s and early 1960s had long since been dashed. The economy was in a disastrous state: the only part of it that was remotely efficient was the military. Everything else was technologically backward and bureaucratically stifled. Even basic consumer needs for food, clothing and housing could barely be met. Politics was the exclusive preserve of a totalitarian gerontocracy.

In the Soviet empire, meanwhile, there was crisis. In Poland, Solidarnosc was posing the greatest challenge to Soviet hegemony in east-central Europe since the Hungarian revolution of 1956. In Afghanistan, the Red Army had marched in to save a crumbling client regime — and was already up against far more serious resistance than the US and Britain now face in Iraq.

Soviet relations with the West were at their worst since the Cuban missile crisis, partly because of Afghanistan and Poland but also because of the arms race. In Europe, Nato had responded to Soviet deployments of new medium-range nuclear missiles by promising its own nuclear modernisation.

What Reagan memorably described as the “Evil Empire” was vulnerable, and the time was ripe for a Western initiative to end the cold war by offering the Soviets aid in return for verfiable disarmament and political liberalisation — a point made by most of the European centre-left in the early 1980s.

Yet the Reagan administration rejected any such thing. It pumped cash into new nuclear arms, adopted new aggressive military strategies (including the Strategic Defence Initiative, otherwise known as Star Wars) and, most notoriously, supported the most unsavoury anti-Soviet forces in the developing world, including death squads and military dictators in Latin America, apartheid South Africa, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the most extremist Islamist opponents of the Soviet client regime in Afghanistan.

Of course, it’s possible that the Kremlin in the early 1980s would have rejected western overtures of any kind; but the option was never even tried. It is certainly to Reagan’s credit that, after five years of upping the cold war stakes, he agreed to parley with Gorbachev and signed the intermediate nuclear forces treaty.

But the preceding years of relentless confrontation were wasted years of cruelty, and their shadow still hangs over the world. In particular, al-Qaida was at least partly the product of the Reagan administration’s decision to back the extremist Islamists in Afghanistan. And you don’t get grimmer unintended consequences of your actions than that.