PAUL ANDERSON

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 24 January 2003

I learned long ago to treat anything I read in the Sunday Times as suspect in the extreme, but its story last weekend that most of the Cabinet had decided to support a wholly appointed second chamber as its preferred option for the next stage of House of Lords reform had a horrible whiff of veracity.

The paper reported a “highly placed source” saying that Tony Blair, John Prescott, Jack Straw and John Reid have all lined up behind “a chamber appointed by a commission with representatives from the regions, professional bodies, business, charities and retired members of the military”. It went on to quote “a senior MP close to the debate” who said that the feeling was that “an elected chamber would challenge the supremacy of the Commons and be a bulwark for electoral dissent because it would be elected mid-term. We could end up with opposing houses like the US Congress.”

This story could of course be baloney. The reason that the Government set up the Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform last summer was the widespread fury among MPs at the lack of democratic legitimacy of Lord Irvine’s recommendation of an 80 per cent appointed, 20 per cent elected second chamber. In the circumstances, it seems on first sight just a little strange if some of the most senior members of the Government are now leaning towards an option that is even less democratic.

Moreover, when the committee issued its report last month, all the newspapers quoted “senior sources” saying that the most likely of the seven options it outlined to be adopted was a part-elected, part-appointed second chamber – either 60-40, 40-60 or 50-50.

But there are good reasons to suspect that the Sunday Times story is accurate. The Commons and Lords will have free votes on Lords reform early next month – and there is widespread support among MPs for a largely elected second chamber. Given that no one now backs Lord Irvine’s 80-20 appointed-elected option, the options for Government opponents of election of a majority of peers are limited. The choice is essentially between voting for 60 per cent appointed, 40 per cent elected, which has little support in either the Commons or the Lords – or backing a wholly appointed second chamber, the option backed by a large swathe of Tory peers. Given that they have always been implacably against election of any but a small minority of peers, it would not be too surprising if Blair, Prescott, Straw and company have indeed decided to go for the latter.

That it would not be too surprising does not, however, make it in any way defensible. The reason for making the Lords wholly elected or – second best — at least largely elected is simple and compelling: it is only through election that a legislature in a democracy can be considered legitimate. An appointed chamber is an anti-democratic outrage, and the defenders of an appointed chamber in the current Lords are self-interested reactionaries. Without exception the arguments put up against election are entirely spurious.

An elected upper house need not undermine the authority or primacy of the lower house: legislation outlining their respective powers can see to that. Nor need an elected upper house necessarily be packed with superannuated politicians to the exclusion of anyone else: if the parties really want non-party people in the Lords, they can agree to stand down in certain seats to give independents a free run.

What an elected second chamber would be able to do, as an appointed one cannot now and could not if it were chosen by some independent committee of the great and good, is hold the executive to account – and it is this, rather than any concern for the primacy of the Commons, that is the real reason that many members of the Government are horrified at the prospect. They want a toothless House of Lords – a seraglio of eunuchs, in the memorable phrase of Michael Foot last time a Labour government tried to introduce a wholly appointed second chamber – because it makes for an easier life.

If next month they manage to sabotage the prospects of democratic reform of the Lords, they will throw away the best chance any government has ever had to rid Britain of a relic of feudalism that no other democracy in the world would tolerate. And they will deserve nothing but contempt from democrats of every political tendency.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 20 December 2002

Higher education has taken a long time to become a big issue for the Blair government – but now, thanks to the fiasco surrounding top-up fees, it’s as big as anything domestic apart from the firefighters and Cherie’s dodgy pals.

“Education, education, education” was the New Labour mantra for a long time, but until now that has meant “schools, schools, schools”. Labour came to power in 1997 without very much to say about Britain’s universities other than that they were dreadfully important and that loads more people ought to go to them.

In its first term, the new government’s only headline-grabbing actions on HE were its decisions to charge undergraduate students tuition fees and to abandon the (already much-reduced) system of student grants, in favour of loans all round.

These were both controversial measures, rightly opposed by most of the Left as disincentives to study for broke would-be students. But their effects were, at least as far as can be determined, marginal. A few wannabe students were put off, but not many.

Meanwhile, far more important changes were taking place in the universities. Most crucially, massive pressure was placed on higher education to continue to increase the number of undergraduates getting degrees without spending any more money – in other words, to run bigger classes. The universities duly obliged. Student numbers have rocketed.

At the same time, the government introduced several packages of measures, as Gordon Brown would put it, supposedly designed to make higher education more efficient and accountable – which have in fact only increased the already giant mass of bureaucratic management bullshit clogging up the whole system.

Here I must declare an interest. I am a lecturer in the journalism department at City University in London.

In the past two years, the number of students I teach at undergraduate level has increased by nearly 50 per cent, without a proportionate increase in staffing. That would be a challenge in itself – but it has been accompanied by an extraordinary explosion in idiotic government-inspired management-speak paperwork that threatens to take over my life.

At the insistence of the ministry, every tutorial I have done for the past two years has had to be recorded on a form that is saved in triplicate – to be read by precisely no one – to show that, er, I’m doing the tutorials I would have been doing anyway. This week, I got a questionnaire about a mentor scheme I didn’t know existed – I was apparently a participant – which of course I returned after judging it a great success in each tick-box on the form.

But the really stupid waste of time, imposed on colleagues in universities throughout the country, has been rewriting course descriptions to fit a template ordained by central government. The declared purpose is to make all courses comparable by introducing a standardised credit system, but I can’t see any outcome other than that I will have to fill in more unread forms next year.

Someone, somewhere thinks all this is rational. I imagine some latter-day Sidney Webb at the education ministry – well, actually, some jerk with an MBA who thinks educational success can be measured in the way you measure productivity in a call centre – getting a big kick from being able to sit at his computer and, after a little fiddling, reassure himself that Advanced Econometrics and The Poetics of John Milton are worth 30 points apiece at every university offering courses of those titles at undergraduate level.

Contemplating his satisfaction, I feel it almost petty to complain that vast amounts of my time, and my colleagues’ time, are being wasted to satisfy an anal-retentive desire to ensure that an apple equals a banana throughout the British university system.

None of it will make a blind bit of difference to anything we do in the lecture theatre or seminar room. None of it will have any effect on standards, except insofar as time spent on it could have been used to improve them. And it takes hours and hours . . .

Higher education needs to be set free, say the enthusiasts for top-up fees. I agree – and it’s true that money is a problem, though I’m a graduate-tax enthusiast myself. As well as more cash, however, and more important, the universities need freedom from the New Labour creed of pointless management intervention in pursuit of imagined market opportunities. But please, Mr Clarke, don’t send me a questionnaire about how it ought to be done.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 15 November 2002

Chartist, November-December 2002

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 1 November 2002

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 21 October 2002

The Convention on the Future of Europe is not, I have to admit, the sexiest of topics. Set up after last year’s Laeken European summit and chaired by former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, it has been deliberating in Brussels for nearly eight months now on the institutional arrangements for the soon-to-be-enlarged European Union — and it’s fair to say that it has yet to set the world alight. The British media have for the most part given it the wide berth they usually give to serious EU politics. But even on the Continent it has been a front-page story only when a senior government politician from one of the EU’s big member states has outlined his “vision” in a set-piece speech.

In a way, this isn’t too surprising. The Convention is a talking shop charged with an almost impossible task: reconciling the views of those who want a federal Europe with those for whom federalism is anathema — and then coming up with a coherent programme for reform. Everyone knows that, so far at least, there has been no sign that the Convention will thrash out a formula acceptable to all — and everyone knows that, in the end, any recommendations it makes can be blocked by any government that dislikes them.

Nevertheless, the issues the Convention is discussing are rather important. The institutional inadequacies of the EU have been clear for years — since long before it became the EU, in fact. But enlargement, now almost certain to happen in 2004, makes it a matter of urgency to deal with them.

The big problem, to put it simply, is that Europe has operated up to now largely by way of intergovernmental horse-trading behind closed doors in the string of meetings known as the Council of Ministers, augmented by initiatives from the European Commission (which is supranational but appointed by member states’ governments).

Although this set-up was never particularly democratic, it worked reasonably well while there were few governments doing the wheeler-dealering and appointing the commissioners. But as the number of member states and the responsibilities of the EU have increased, it has become not only more and more time-consuming and inefficient (despite various piecemeal reforms) but also less and less democratically accountable. With enlargement, there is a real danger that the EU’s decision-making processes will grind to a halt — and that they will do so amid a collapse of popular belief in their legitimacy in every member state.

In these circumstances, there is a prima facie case for a radical recasting of the way the EU operates, with a drastic reduction of the role of the Council of Ministers, a dramatic increase in the democratic accountability of the Commission, and a concomitant massive increase in the role and powers of the only key EU institution that is both supranational and directly answerable to the citizens of Europe, the European Parliament — including, most importantly, the right to initiate legislation. The argument here has been forcibly put by Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister.

Yet what is the British Government, in the person of Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, proposing? Well, according to his piece in the Economist last week, just the opposite: maintaining and strengthening the role of the Council of Ministers, with perhaps a nugatory increase in the powers of the Parliament to oversee the Commission. It’s difficult to imagine anything more timid, anything less likely to work in purely instrumental terms or anything more likely to exacerbate the EU’s democratic deficit.

***

On A different matter entirely, like many other readers of Eric Hobsbawm’s new autobiography I was intrigued by the veteran Marxist historian’s statement that he had been “unable to rediscover” a copy of a 1940 pamphlet on the 1939-40 Russo-Finnish war that he co-wrote with the late Raymond Williams when both were undergraduate communists in Cambridge.

It didn’t take me long to track it down: my old pal Kevin Davey had a copy, which he kindly lent me. Nor did it take long to realise that Hobsbawm might not have gone out of his way to dig it up. War on the USSR?, as it is called, is a shabby specimen of communist defeatism during the Hitler-Stalin pact (“With no chance of starving Germany of food or war materials and no front on which to achieve military victory, Britain and France cannot win this war . . .”) that shamelessly defends Stalin’s invasion of Finland.

OK, I know I’d squirm if anyone dug up stuff I wrote in my early twenties. But it’s not so easy to shrug off Hobsbawm’s diatribe as a youthful indiscretion. For all the sophistication and erudition of his later work, he remained a member of the party that commissioned this mendacious piece of propaganda to the bitter end.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 14 October 2002

Like most Tribune readers and contributors, I am against the United States waging a war to topple Saddam Hussein. I am, moreover, against it regardless of whether the US gets support from the United Nations Security Council. I am unconvinced that war will easily get rid of Saddam except at an unacceptable cost in casualties. I am not persuaded that the US has a credible strategy for replacing his regime with one that is civilised and democratic. And I am worried by the potentially disastrous knock-on effects of war elsewhere in the Middle East.

So, on the face of it, the big anti-war protest in London last weekend should have filled me with hope – or at least given me a warm feeling of solidarity. But it did nothing of the sort. Not for the first time, I came away from a giant leftie demo glummer than when I turned up.

Part of the reason is undoubtedly that I’ve had enough of demos and everything that goes with them: the hours of being serenaded by Leninist bores selling dire propagandist papers; the slow trudge through streets of unstaffed offices surrounded by morons shouting witless slogans; the interminable dull speeches at the end – and all for what? Well, we meet a few old friends and have a drink, get a bit of fresh air and (of course) make our point. It’s just a pity it’s only to ourselves and the cops . . .

But my sense of ennui after last weekend’s march wasn’t just the feeling of futility I usually get after such events. It also had a lot to do with the politics of the occasion.

To put it bluntly: where was there any acknowledgment that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous, vicious tyrant whose demise should be an urgent priority for every democrat, humanitarian and peace-lover in the world?

All right, I accept that most people in the anti-war movement have no doubt that Saddam runs a vile totalitarian police state. The problem, however, is that, in the cause of peace, they have conveniently forgotten what’s wrong with Iraq and have joined hands with all manner of dubious apologists for Saddam – the 57 varieties of Leninist “anti-imperialist” (both Stalinist and Trot); a significant section of anti-Israeli British Muslim opinion; the pacifists whose ideological forebears cringed before Hitler in the 1930s; a smattering of useful-idiot journalists and politicians who have travelled to Iraq as guests of the regime and haven’t twigged that “ordinary people” under police-state regimes have no choice but to be effusive to any foreigner about the wonders of their predicament. The horrible truth is that no one in the anti-war movement has raised a squeak about Saddam’s hideous crimes or considered what the Iraqi people themselves want.

Pretty much the same goes for the danger posed by Saddam to the rest of the world. OK, so Tony Blair’s dossier on Saddam’s programme for weapons of mass destruction contains little that is new – and there is certainly an argument to be had about how close Saddam is to reacquiring an arsenal that is an immediate threat to his neighbours or his own subjects.

But it is incontrovertible both that rearmament is his goal and that he has been pursuing it relentlessly in recent years. Has anyone in the anti-war movement even acknowledged that this is a legitimate cause for concerted international action against Iraq that falls short of war – such as (dare I say it?) properly policed sanctions and intrusive weapons inspections?

My point is simple. Saddam is the enemy of everything that democrats and humanitarians hold dear. The argument between proponents and opponents of war should not be about whether the world should act to undermine his despicable regime and deny it the means of waging war, but about how it can most effectively and decently hasten its downfall and its replacement with a pacific democratic polity.

Yet many on the left seems mesmerised by asinine arguments for letting Saddam be. He’s not the only evil dictator in the world, they say, nor even the only one who is developing weapons of mass destruction – as if his crimes were exonerated by those of others. The Americans wouldn’t care if Iraq didn’t have oil, they go on – as if that means that there’s no reason to give a toss ourselves, regardless of the nature of Saddam’s regime and regardless of the whole world’s material interest (lusty proletarians not excepted) in the maintenance of stable and secure energy supplies.

I’m not arguing for precipitate military action to bring down Saddam – honest. But the case against it is not strengthened by stupidity. Until the anti-war lobby accepts that Saddam is a problem and that the world would be a much better place without him, it’s a dead-cert loser.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 9 September 2002

It is rare for a political book to make quite as big a splash as Martin Amis’s new settling of accounts with Stalin and revolutionary socialism, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. In the US, where it was published a couple of months ago, it has been the most talked-about and reviewed work of non-fiction for a long time. Over here, the Guardian has excerpted it at length and discussion of its merits and demerits has spread from highbrow reviews pages into opinion columns and even leaders.

What makes this particularly surprising is that it is such a poor effort. Amis boasts of having yards of books on the Soviet Union on his shelves, but he hasn’t read them very thoroughly. His account of Stalin’s rule, riddled with factual errors, is based largely on half-a-dozen standard works, most of which have been around for years. Despite this, he gives the impression that he is the first person to discover the truth about Stalinism – “Everybody knows of the six million of the Holocaust,” he declares at one point. “Nobody knows of the six million of the Terror-Famine.”

Worse, his insistence on situating Stalin’s terror in the context of his personal experience – his father Kingsley’s membership of the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s, his best friend Christopher Hitchens’s Trotskyism in the 1970s and continued enthusiasm for Lenin, the way his baby daughter crying once made him think of a notorious 1930s Moscow prison – is almost laughably narcissistic. And his Big Idea, that liberal opinion indulged western supporters of the Soviet regime (by which Amis means anyone with the remotest sympathy for the October revolution) because the USSR was funny in a black-farce kind of way, barely deserves to be taken seriously.

Nevertheless, Amis is on to something. His lumping together of Stalinists, Trotskyists and everyone else on the left who ever expressed admiration for Lenin as culpable for Stalin’s crimes is certainly crude, even silly: on these grounds even Ramsay MacDonald and Bertrand Russell stand accused for hailing the Bolsheviks’ peace proposals in 1917-18. But he is right to argue that it’s not just the out-and-out followers of the Moscow line – members of the Communist Party and fellow-travellers – who deserve to be judged harshly by history.

How different the Soviet Union would have been if Stalin had not won control in the 1920s remains one of the great unanswerable questions of 20th-century history. But the idea that there was a golden age of Bolshevik rule before Stalin’s rise to power, a theme common to Trotskyism and every other variety of Leninism, is not borne out by the brutal facts. Embrace Bolshevism, and you embrace terror – however reluctantly or abstractly. As Amis puts it of Lenin and Trotsky: “These two men did not just precede Stalin. They created a fully functioning police state for his later use. And they showed him a remarkable thing: that it was possible to run a country with a formula of dead freedom, lies and violence . . . October 1917 was not a political revolution riding on the back of a popular revolution. It was a counter-revolution.”

Of course, most western democratic socialists never fell for the myth of the Stalinist betrayal of October: their delusions were different. From the very earliest years of the Bolshevik regime, they were prone to hope against the evidence that the Soviet model of socialism was evolving towards democracy. The New Economic Policy, the Popular Front, Stalin’s 1936 constitution, Khruschev’s “secret speech”, Imre Nagy’s liberalisation in Hungary, “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia, Solidarnosc in Poland, Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika – all were heralded by western socialists as steps on the road to utopia or at least signs of democratic change. Even since the collapse of “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet bloc in 1989-91, a large section of the left in the west has remained nostalgic for what might have been, if only. That Soviet-type socialism’s supposed potential for democratic evolution was a chimera is still unthinkable for much of the left.

Does any of this matter any more? I think it does, and not just because history is important in itself. The Soviet Union might be no more, but its association with the left lives on in the popular imagination. Leninists remain the most visible leftists in our political culture, their manipulative practices still too often tolerated by democratic socialists. And the temptation to see faraway brutal police states as progressive is still with us – witness the way that much of the left still fawns before Castro’s Cuba and communist China.

For all its faults, Amis’s book poses awkward questions that the whole of the left needs to address.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 26 July 2002

This paper has made dicing with death something of a way of life. It has rarely if ever made a profit in the conventional sense, relying for most of its 65 years on fund-raising and subventions from rich benefactors and trade unions to compensate for trading losses. And it has come perilously close to closure at least six times.

Two of these close encounters with the grim reaper were in my time on the staff. In 1988, the board decided to cease publication the next week unless a large sum of money was raised at once. So we ran a front page bare apart from the words “DON’T LET THIS BE THE LAST ISSUE OF TRIBUNE” and launched an emergency appeal – which rescued the paper by raising nearly £40,000 from readers and the unions.

Even that was not enough to keep the wolf from the door for long, however. Within three years, we were so short of money that we had to reduce pagination from 12 to eight tabloid pages a week for several months – and even this would have been unsustainable had we not managed to slash our typesetting costs by introducing desktop publishing.

So I had a feeling of deja vu all over again when I read in last week’s leader that Tribune was again running out of money, and that the board had decided to seek a buyer or launch another emergency appeal.

Of course, some would say that Tribune’s repeated crises show that its allegiance to the Labour Party, its policy prescriptions or even its democratic socialism are irrelevant or outmoded. Others would go further, as the political journalist Julia Langdon does in the current British Journalism Review, arguing that there is little space in today’s media world for political weeklies and that the days of even the New Statesman and the Spectator are numbered.

In my gloomier moments, I admit, I am at least tempted by such views. The massive expansion of the comment, features and reviews sections of the national press – to say nothing of the impact of the internet – has put immense pressure on the weeklies to find niches of their own. (This is a particular problem for Tribune and the Statesman because of the extent to which the Guardian and in recent months the Mirror have encroached on their territory.) I also often despair of the way parts of the Tribune left hang on to political nostrums that should by now be languishing in the dustbin of history – anti-Europeanism, scepticism about constitutional reform, nostalgia for Soviet communism and so on.

But at heart I remain convinced not only that the reinvigoration of egalitarian democratic socialism inside the Labour Party is the best hope we have – but also that there is room for well-written, well-edited political weeklies in Britain, particularly on the left. There is plenty the Guardian and Mirror don’t do that can and should be done, and plenty they do badly that can and should be done better. The Observer has dumbed down its political coverage and the Independent titles have lost the plot. The Morning Star’s Stalinism is risible and the Trot papers are moronic. Add the declining standard of politics and current affairs broadcasting, the patchiness of foreign coverage everywhere except the Financial Times and the Economist, and the failure of most reviews sections to notice most politics and history books – and the space for Tribune and the Statesman is very much there to be taken.

That the Statesman, with Geoffrey Robinson’s millions behind it, has failed to carve out a niche cannot be put down to lack of cash. But Tribune can justifiably claim that its current difficulties are the consequence of chronic under-investment. To make money in publishing, you need to spend money, on promoting your publication and on improving editorial quality. This in turn increases circulation, which in turn increases revenue both directly, through newsagent sales and subscriptions, and indirectly, by making your publication more attractive to advertisers. If you get it right – and OK, it’s a big “if” – you end up with a virtuous circle of growth and financial security.

Tribune, however, has never had the money to mount substantial promotion campaigns or to maintain more than the bare minimum level of editorial staffing. For several years, its operating margins have been so tight that the smallest downturn in advertising revenue pushes it into danger – which is what has happened in the past year, just as it happened in 1986-87 and 1990-91.

As before, the sums required to plug the gap are not huge, though they are large enough to necessitate urgent action. And, as before, just plugging the gap won’t be enough to secure Tribune’s long-term future. To have a chance of escaping the cycle of dependency and crisis, it needs an injection of investment large enough for a sustained push for growth. Of course, even that is not a sufficient condition for success – but it is a necessary one. Anyone out there prepared to gamble a quarter of a million quid?

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 12 July 2002

The maxim that all publicity is good publicity has long had its advocates on the fringes of politics: those who have no other means of making a mark – harmless radical provocateurs as well as murderous terrorists – often come to revel in notoriety.

What I’ve never seen until now is the principle taken up by a mainstream political campaign that is attempting not to shock or terrorise but to convince the public of the justice of its cause.

Yet what else can explain the extraordinary cinema ad by the campaign against British membership of the single European currency, in which the comedian Rik Mayall, humorously dressed as Adolf Hitler, rants “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Euro!” at the camera?

The no campaign and Mayall himself have rather half-heartedly claimed that the vignette is merely a joky way of highlighting the Nazis’ enthusiasm for a single European currency – and as such is a legitimate point to make in the debate on British membership of the euro.

If you believe that you’ll believe anything. It is true that Hitler imposed an economic union of sorts on occupied Europe during the 1940s – but that’s about it. The postwar European project, of which the euro is part, never had anything whatsoever to do with the Nazis’ dream of a German empire subjugating the peoples of Europe through genocide, terror and never-ending war.

Indeed, it was from the start explicitly framed as a means of preventing anything like Nazi Germany ever happening again.

The big idea of Jean Monnet and the other forefathers of what is now the European Union was that if the states of Europe pooled their sovereignty, slowly building common institutions and a common political culture, it would become impossible for an expansionist militarist Germany ever to rise again. And – so far at least – it seems to have worked rather well.

These anti-Nazi roots of the EU are so well documented that it almost beggars belief that the no campaign could even suggest that the euro was originally Hitler’s idea. Almost – but not quite.

Ignorance about the history and institutions of the EU is endemic in Britain. Postwar continental European history is taught in few schools, and continental European politics is covered superficially by the British media.

Add the national obsession with the second world war, the constant drip of anti-EU propaganda in the press and the endurance of xenophobic stereotyping of continental Europeans in the popular imagination – also consistently reinforced by the media – and it’s just about possible to credit that some cretin in the no campaign decided that a little bit of historical falsification might make the headlines without putting off the punters.

The no campaign’s crass appeal to stupidity and prejudice deserves to fail miserably, and if “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Euro!” is the best it can come up with, it will undoubtedly do so. The near-universal condemnation of the Mayall ad in the past week has left the no campaign looking very silly indeed.

But it would be a mistake to bank on it continuing to score spectacular own goals. A vigorous and intelligent yes campaign is still needed to see it off – and as yet there is no sign of any such thing. The yes campaign has barely raised its head, and when it has it has appeared unconfident and timid.

It has advanced no populist argument for the euro apart from saying that lots of jobs will disappear if we don’t join – and that if we do we won’t have to pay to change money when we go on continental holidays.

What’s almost entirely missing from the yes campaign’s case is the strongest argument for joining the euro – that it locks Britain into a European model of welfare capitalism that is far more egalitarian, more socially responsible and more tightly environmentally regulated than the free-market capitalism of the United States.

Of course, Britain would have to go into the euro at the right exchange rate to reap the benefits, and there is a strong case for reforming the way that the European Central Bank operates, in particular by making employment creation one of its objectives.

In the longer term, there is also a need for co-ordinated Europe-wide redistributive fiscal policies to counter the effects of a “one-size-fits-all” interest rate.

But none of this invalidates the fundamental social democratic case for joining up. When is the Government going to make it?