PAUL ANDERSON

Paul Anderson, Chartist column, July-August 2001

The biggest surprise so far of Tony Blair’s second term has been the sacking of Robin Cook as foreign secretary and his replacement by Jack Straw. In the run-up to the election, all the supposedly informed press commentators had it that Cook would stay in place and Straw would get the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions.

Unsurprisingly, the move provoked a rash of speculation – not least because Straw has a reputation as a hard-line Eurosceptic. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was one of the most prominent rising stars in Labour’s anti-European wing, a protégé of Barbara Castle and Peter Shore (in whose two unsuccessful campaigns for the Labour leadership Straw played a key role). He was privately opposed to Britain signing the Maastricht treaty in 1991 and ever since, along with Margaret Beckett and David Blunkett, has been one of the strongest voices in the Labour leadership – albeit behind closed doors – for staying out of the single European currency. Notably, unlike Cook and most other currently senior Labour figures who were anti-European in the early 1980s, Straw has never publicly renounced his Eurosceptic views.

So why is he now foreign secretary – the position that carries most responsibility for our relations with Europe? One reason, undoubtedly, is that Gordon Brown wanted Cook, an enthusiast for early entry into the euro, out of the way.

As Cook’s former adviser, David Clark, made clear in a biting polemic in the Guardian immediately after the reshuffle, the chancellor could not bear Cook straying on to his territory by making warmly pro-euro speeches. Insiders say Brown made his feelings clear to Blair on several occasions, though it is not clear whether he actually demanded that Cook be replaced. Whatever, once Cook went, Straw was the only politician around of sufficient seniority who wanted the job.

Of course, it is just possible that this is all there is to the story – that Straw’s appointment is significant only in so far as it minimises the chances of public disagreements between the Foreign Office and the Treasury while the government assesses Brown’s “five economic tests” for euro membership.

In line with this, it is certainly true that Straw has not made public statements dissociating himself from the government’s “wait-and-see” position on the euro. And it is at least plausible that he has decided to abandon his erstwhile anti-Europeanism to the point of recommending euro membership when the time comes – even if it is rather difficult to imagine such a turnaround being convincingly executed.

But, particularly in the wake of Brown’s Mansion House speech, in which the chancellor declared for “pro-euro realism” — with the emphasis on the “realism” – it is difficult to believe that Blair did not intend Straw’s elevation to signal a markedly more cautious approach to the euro. There has been no explicit statement from the government that Britain will not join the euro this parliament. Everything now suggests, however, that this is the government’s plan. It is hardly surprising that both the reshuffle – which also involved the appointment of another former Eurosceptic, Peter Hain, as Europe minister and the removal of the pro-euro Stephen Byers from the Department of Trade and Industry – and Brown’s speech have set alarm bells ringing throughout the euro-zone and won warm praise from the Murdoch press.

(They have also, incidentally, made a mess of the plans of the pro-euro lobby in Britain. After six months of masterful inactivity, the main organisation in it, Britain in Europe, largely funded by business but with some trade union support, had intended to relaunch itself with a big splash in the immediate wake of the election. The sacking of Cook and Brown’s hyper-cautious speech eclipsed its efforts, and it is now desperately trying to find out what exactly the government is up to.)

Europe is not, of course, the whole of the FO’s brief, and nor does Europe appear to be the only reason Cook was fired. Although he had a good working relationship with Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, he was an opponent of the American National Missile Defence scheme. As soon as it became clear that the Bush administration saw NMD as a central element of policy and was not prepared to listen to European concerns about its impact on the arms control regime, Cook’s position came into conflict with Blair’s determination to sustain the “special relationship” come what may (a determination shared, incidentally, by Brown, as he made clear in some little-noticed passages at the Mansion House).

Other things being equal, it is unlikely that this would have led to Cook’s demise: he would simply have had to buckle under when Blair insisted that Britain was backing NMD, just as he did on arms sales to Indonesia and on several other issues in the first term. But other things were not equal, and Cook went.

What Straw will be like as foreign secretary remains to be seen. His first weeks in post have been unremarkable apart from a shouting match with a television journalist – off camera – who accused him of being evasive during an interview on the fringes of the June European Council meeting in Gothenburg. That meeting hit the headlines because of rioting in the streets, but it was significant too for confirming an ambitious timetable for EU enlargement despite the Irish referendum rejecting the treaty of Nice.

Although it has been a major priority of the Blair government, enlargement has barely figured in the European debate in Britain – but it has the potential to become even more controversial than the euro. If all goes according to schedule (admittedly a big if), within three years the first applicant countries from east-central Europe will be admitted to the EU. That means several million people keen to share in western Europe’s riches, many of them prepared to come to work in the west – and many western governments are nervous about the prospect of a flood of economic migration and desperate to put major constraints on the EU’s new citizens’ freedom of movement.

As it happens, immigration and policing are the only aspects of EU policy in which Straw had significant experience as home secretary. Given his record, it is unlikely that he will be playing a very liberal role in the two years of gruelling negotiations that must take place if enlargement is to go ahead as planned. But then perhaps that is another reason Blair gave him the job.

Paul Anderson, review of The End of Parliamentary Socialism by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (Verso, £14.99), Tribune, 22 June 2001

Can it really be 20 years since the Labour deputy leadership battle between Tony Benn and Denis Healey? It seems like only yesterday that this great movement of ours tore itself to pieces over the rival claims of two former Cabinet Ministers – the Left-wing populist aristo and the Right-wing Atlanticist bruiser – to a non-job that really wasn’t worth having.

At the time, although many of my Leftie friends thought Benn was the saviour of socialism, I couldn’t see what was so marvellous about him or the movement of which he was the figurehead. Greater democracy inside the Labour Party was all very well, but it was no panacea. And the Bennite programme, though it contained lots of good things (such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and getting rid of the House of Lords), was undermined by an idiotic nationalist economic policy centred upon withdrawal from the Common Market. Most important, there was no way a Bennite Labour Party could ever win a general election.

As for municipal Left of the era – most visibly Ken Livingstone – well, it was great if you were part of it or had the oppressed-minority credentials to be deemed worthy of a generous grant for your pet project. But otherwise, cheap bus fares aside, forget it.

I’ve moved on politically since the early 1980s, but the Labour left of the early 1980s still leaves me cold. Not so Panitch and Leys, whose book, a history of Labour in the past 30 years from a critical left perspective (now in a second edition four years after its first appearance), is in essence a defence of the continuing relevance of the “new Labour left” – the Bennites, the local government Left and their supporters among ordinary Labour members – of two decades ago.

The authors enthuse about everything from mandatory reselection of MPs to the industrial strategy of the GLC. In line with this, every development since about 1981-82 has been a turn for the worse, from the expulsion of Militant to the record of the Blair government since 1997.

They tell their story well, and there is some sense to it. There were undoubtedly some bright ideas around on the left in the late 1970s and early 1980s about making the state more democratically accountable, and at least some of the Labour left took them seriously. And it’s true that New Labour, with its enthusiasm for deregulation and big business, is not simply the invention of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown but the product of a process of accommodation to the market that goes back at least to Neil Kinnock’s assumption of the Labour leadership in 1983.

But it is simplistic to argue, as Panitch and Leys do, that the “new Labour left” was beaten by a conspiracy of right-wingers. Its failure had as much to do with its incompetence, the unpopularity of its political alliance with Trotskyism and the unsustainability of its Little Englander position on Europe. The left of today needs to learn from the early 1980s – but it needs to do so critically and not look back nostalgically to a mythical golden age.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 8 June 2001

Trust Tony Blair to ruin it all. There I was last Friday, feeling a little tired after staying up most of the night watching the election but in an unusually upbeat mood – Tories routed, few Labour losses, Lib Dems up, Trots and Stalinists consigned to the dustbin of history. And then he makes David Blunkett Home Secretary and fires Robin Cook as Foreign Secretary, giving his job to Jack Straw.

Yes, it’s the nightmare scenario. Labour’s most instinctive authoritarian as guardian of our civil liberties and a former evangelist Europhobe running our relations with Europe.

It is Straw who scares me more. Blunkett’s populist rhetoric on law and order is more extreme than his predecessor’s. And his prejudices – particularly against homosexuality – are more markedly conservative. (He once famously outraged the readers of this paper with a column in which he described his “revulsion at the idea of touching another man”.) But, at risk of tempting fate, I can’t for the moment imagine how he can be any worse than Straw in terms of policy.

Straw, however, is almost certain to be much, much worse than Cook in the Foreign Office. And that’s not just because Straw was so uninspiring in the Home Office.

Some on the left have attacked Cook for hypocrisy, arguing that his promise of an ethical basis for foreign policy was broken by arms sales to Indonesia, sanctions against Iraq and military intervention in Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

I have some sympathy with these critics on arms-to-Indonesia, on which Cook’s opposition was over-ruled by Blair, and rather less on Iraq, where sanctions were (and are) a blunt instrument to deal with the real villain of the piece, Saddam Hussein.

But on the whole I think Cook did an excellent job in difficult circumstances. His roles in the Kosovo and Sierra Leone interventions were entirely honourable, particularly his part in persuading the West to issue the threat of invasion of Kosovo by ground troops, which did more than anything else to persuade Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw.

Equally important, in his four years in office Cook did more than any other politician to repair the damage done to Britain’s relations with the European Union by the Tories. Unlike Blair and Gordon Brown he was and is at ease in European politics. He did his best to persuade the other Governments of the EU that Britain was serious about signing up for the euro. He did not lecture them time and again on the supposed need for deregulation and flexible labour markets. And he did not side automatically with the US on every question. On “Son of Star Wars” in particular he was a voice for restraint.

It is in the conduct of our relations with Europe that Cook will be most missed. Straw comes to Foreign Office with no experience of European politics and, more important, carrying all the baggage of an unrepentant early-1980s Labour Little Englander.

Twenty years ago, of course, anti-Europeanism was dominant in the Labour Party. But few were quite so obsessively Europhobic as Straw. A founder of the notoriously anti-European Labour Common Market Safeguards Committee, he was a consistent propagandist for the anti-European cause (not least in the pages of Tribune). In 1980, he told a special Labour conference that “a central part of our manifesto must be a pledge to withdraw from the Common Market immediately”. He made his first moves up the greasy pole after becoming an MP as a protege of Peter Shore, Labour’s most ardent anti-European of the period.

All of which was a long time ago – and of course people change their minds. But, unlike most other current Labour leaders who were anti-European in the early 1980s, Straw has never given even the slightest hint that he thinks differently now. For the past four years he has been one of the Cabinet’s most consistent opponents of the euro.

So why is he now Foreign Secretary? The most straightforward explanation is that Blair and Brown have decided to give up on joining the euro for some time – which is more plausible than most commentators suggest. Otherwise, the only half-credible explanation I have heard is that it is part of an elaborate gambit to avoid press reports of a split between the publicly pro-euro Cook and the publicly agnostic Brown. According to this scenario, Straw has secretly abandoned Euroscepticism, but has agreed to play mum until Brown produces a report recommending euro entry. The Foreign Secretary then fakes a Damascene conversion and – hey presto! – the great British public votes for the single currency.

I can’t believe Blair is stupid enough to think that such a crude coup de theatre would possibly work. But then I didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to fire Robin Cook.

Paul Anderson, review of The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens (Verso, £12.99), Tribune 25 May 2001

In recent years, Christopher Hitchens has made a speciality of polemics that puncture the reputations of public figures — most notably, his books on Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Bill Clinton. The latter, No One Left To Lie To, caused outrage among American Democrats and their friends abroad.

Hitchens, they spluttered, had had the temerity to attack the president from the left when – horror of horrors — the right was also having a go. But no one ever convincingly answered his indictment of Clinton as a right-wing sleazebag, and the bOok remains the best short introduction to American politics in the 1990s.

Now Hitchens has turned his fire on Henry Kissinger, and it is the turn of American conservatives and their friends abroad to froth at the mouth. In the Spectator last week, Conrad Black, the magazine’s proprietor, described The Trial Of Henry Kissinger, whose subject was “one of the 20th century’s great statesmen”, as “so contemptible that it almost makes the case for judicial bookburning”. Similar sentiments have been expressed in several other reviews in the right-wing and liberal press.

It is not surprising that Kissinger’s friends and admirers are upset. Hitchens’s book is an extended argument for the prosecution of Kissinger for war crimes and the crimes against humanity that it says he committed when he was running the United States’s foreign policy in the late 1960s and 1970s.

This is not the sort of thing that should happen to “great statesmen”. What’s more, Hitchens makes his case with considerable verve, marshalling his evidence with skill and relentlessly piling on the invective. It is very easy to read this book in a single sitting and hard not to be swayed by it.

Many of the episodes described by Hitchens will be well known to Tribune readers, at least in outline — the mass killings of civilians by American bombing and other military action in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the US administration’s role in the murderous coup against Salvador Allende in Chile and its encouragement of the bloody Indonesian annexation of East Timor.

But there is plenty of telling new detail, much of it culled from recently released official documents, even where Hitchens is travelling a well-trodden path. And there are several points where he examines allegations that will be unfamiliar to anyone but aficionados of modern American history about Kissinger’s role in undermining a possible peace deal in Vietnam in 1968, for example, and about the American government’s part in assassinations in Bangladesh and Cyprus.

The book is not perfect. It could have done with footnotes so that anyone who wanted could check Hitchens’s sources independently.

And it doesn’t quite persuade on every single detailed charge. But it is wholly convincing in its central argument that, in crucial respects, US foreign policy during the Kissinger years was criminal, and that the chief architect and executor of that policy should be held responsible for his actions. Which is, of course, rather unlikely, but that is one reason that Hitchens was right to write this book.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 18 May 2001

Warning! This column is now the subject of a directive from Labour headquarters at Millbank instructing Labour activists to give it a complete ignoral. And just so no Tribune reader has any excuse to do otherwise, here is the memo in full:

“The Daily Mail are contacting candidates about Paul Anderson’s piece in Tribune exhorting Labour supporters to vote Lib Dem to keep out Tories.

“Line to take: We do not endorse a campaign of tactical voting. We have Labour candidates in every seat and urge all voters to vote Labour.

“Background: There is a mythology about tactical voting which would have us believe that we only won in 1997 because a lot of people voted for us who are really Liberal Democrats. In fact there are very few committed Lib Dems, their support has a huge turnover from one election to the next, and nor do Lib Dem supporters necessarily believe in Lib Dem policies like proportional representation. But often Lib Dems are very organised at a local level and people who are natural Labour supporters, but believe they don’t live in a ‘Labour’ area, think it’s best to keep the Tories out. But it should never be an option.

“Probably less tactical voting took place in 1997 than it ever had before and to our gain — we won eleven seats from being in third place. So our task is to make sure all our supporters know it’s worth voting Labour wherever they live.”

My first thought on reading this was that it was quite an honour to be taken seriously enough by the powers-that-be to warrant an official (though not very rapid) rebuttal. My second was that the directive was what a spin doctor would call a load of bollocks.

And I’m not just talking about the tortured syntax or the strangely (and I think unintentionally) Orwellian undertones of the statement that “it should never be an option” to “think it’s best to keep the Tories out”. The truth is that every single survey shows that there was more tactical voting in 1997 than ever before — and that it benefited both Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Throughout the country, voters who wanted to get rid of a sitting Tory decided not to vote for their first-preference candidate but for another who was better-placed to win. Indeed, so marked was the phenomenon that the Liberal Democrats won 46 seats, up from 20 in 1992, despite winning a percentage point less of the popular vote in the country as a whole. Nearly all the professional psephologists agree that Labour won at least 40 more seats in 1997 than it would have done had voters not voted tactically for Labour whose first-preference party was the Lib Dems.

It is utterly barmy for Labour to make a big thing about how bad tactical voting is on principle – for the simple reason that it needs all the tactical votes it can get itself. And that means tactical votes not just from Lib Dem supporters but from loads of others as well – from voters whose first preference is the Greens or the Socialist Alliance and, just as important, from those whose lack of enthusiasm for the government is tempting them to abstain.

Tactical voting is nothing more or less than voting for the lesser evil – and, as a regular Labour voter who has more often than not voted in the belief that the party is the best of a bad bunch, I don’t have any problem with that. Nor will the millions who vote Labour on June 7 thinking “Well, they’re dreadful, but at least they’re better than the Tories” – who will include, I guess, most readers of Tribune who are not standing as candidates.

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Finally, a riposte to Steve Platt, who argued last week that the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Socialist Party will be irrevocably converted to pluralism and democracy by their experience of working together and with non-aligned socialists in the Socialist Alliance.

I’m sorry to disagree with an old pal — well, actually I’m not — but I simply don’t see why the Trots can’t revert to authoritarian revolutionary sectarianism whenever they choose. After all, it is what has happened every time before when Leninists have adopted the tactic of setting up “fronts” with democratic socialists, from the old Communist Party’s flirtation with the TUC in the 1920s through to the Anti-Nazi League and the anti-poll tax movement.

Of course, individual members of the Leninist sects will undoubtedly have their eyes opened by the Socialist Alliance experience. But the organisations are a different matter altogether. They remain undemocratic in their internal organisation, in their methods and in their ideology. And until they renounce all that, democratic socialists should keep a wide berth.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 4 May 2001

I seem to be making a habit of stepping on Tribune readers’ toes. After a couple of months of being slagged off by correspondents for my columns in favour of anti-Tory tactical voting, I’m now getting the flak for having a go at the Socialist Alliance. The deputy editor tells me that this week’s letters page includes several more assaults on me for dismissing the Trots and their allies’ chances at the general election.

Well, once again I regret nothing. In fact, I can’t resist the temptation to wind up my critics even more. Because the truth is that I didn’t go half as far as I could have on the Socialist Alliance. For the Trots and the other Leninists that dominate the Alliance are not just quixotic in their electoral challenge to New Labour, as I argued in my last piece. They are also the enemies of all that democratic socialists should hold dear.

First, though, it’s important to be clear about what the Alliance is. In the pub last week, a couple of Alliance-supporting friends – I do have some, honest – complained that I’d misrepresented it by describing it as essentially Leninist, a coalition of the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Socialist Party (formerly Militant), with only a handful of other participants. It was true, they admitted, that the SWP and the Socialist Party were the biggest groups involved and that most Alliance parliamentary candidates belonged to one of them. But, they went on, simply by agreeing to work together and with non-aligned leftists, the two parties were de facto abandoning Leninism and embracing a pluralist approach to politics.

Now, I wish this were true: nothing would please me more than for the Trots to see the error of Lenin’s ways and recant. But there is absolutely no evidence that it is. The decision of the SWP and the Socialist Party to work together and with other socialists is purely tactical and utterly cynical. Unless I’ve missed something – and I’ve spent several mind-numbing hours searching through their recent publications to check – neither has ever even considered renouncing the elitist, manipulative, anti-democratic politics that is the essence of Leninism. Both retain the long-term goal of establishing, as the Bolsheviks did in Russia, a revolutionary single-party dictatorship that ruthlessly suppresses free elections, independent trade unions and media and “bourgeois” freedoms of speech and assembly. And both still believe that any means is justifiable in pursuit of this goal and that history dictates they must prevail.

Today, they have decided it is “necessary” to pretend to be pluralist and democratic and cosy up to other socialists. But after the election one or other could decide – no, probably will decide – that it is “necessary” to split the Alliance in order to create a purer revolutionary party. And in the distant future, one or other might conclude that it is “necessary” to murder or imprison and torture those who stand in the way of the revolution (including socialists) just as Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, did in Russia.

Of course, the last scenario is rather difficult to imagine. Revolutionary civil war does not appear to be on the cards in Britain. And it is hard to conceive of the Trots you meet selling papers on the high street every Saturday – a bunch of hectoring students and past-it beardie bores – ever setting up a vicious secret police. Over the past 80 years, Britain’s Leninists have been laughably unsuccessful by any criterion, let alone in establishing themselves as they would wish as the directors of a murderous single-party state, and it is implausible to suggest that their luck is about to turn.

So, say some democratic socialists, why make such a fuss about their long-term goal? If you forget about their daft dream of emulating the Bolsheviks, they go on, Britain’s Leninists are nothing more than socialists of a slightly more left-wing bent than most – and valuable allies in the struggle against the depredations of New Labour.

Call me a sectarian all you want, but this argument sucks. It amounts to: “Sure, they have an evil plan, but we’ll hold hands with them because they’ve no chance of ever putting it into practice.” Apart from being a hostage to fortune – don’t forget that people used to say that Hitler had no chance of ever gaining power – it ignores the extent to which the Leninists’ every action in the here and now is corrupted by their belief that the establishment of a terrorist dictatorship justifies any means. Even unsuccessful Leninists are required by their ideology to be mendacious, manipulative, authoritarian and cynically contemptuous of democracy. Rather than embracing them as allies, democratic socialists should shun them.

Paul Anderson, Chartist column, May-June 2001

This general election campaign has a strange feel to it. It’s taken for granted by just about everyone that Labour will win another handsome victory. Indeed, for the past month, the broadsheet newspapers have been so sure of the result that they’ve been concentrating their political coverage on speculation about who leads the Tories after their inevitable defeat.

At the same time, however, there seems to be no great enthusiasm for New Labour wherever you look. Even Tony Blair’s most loyal supporters in the press can summon up only the faintest of praise. Out in the real world, all the anecdotal evidence suggests that Labour Party members and supporters are less motivated than at any time since 1979. The Labour camp is extremely nervous about the likely level of abstention among its core working-class voters.

Loyal Blairites — of whom there are remarkably few — complain that this just isn’t fair. For the first time, they say, a Labour government is set to win a full second term. For the first time, a Labour government hasn’t been brought to its knees by a major economic crisis. For the first time, a Labour government has done pretty much what it came to power promising to do.

All of which is true. So why is there so little admiration for the government either in the Labour Party or among the population at large? One reason is undoubtedly that people judge it less on its record vis a vis its policy promises than on its overall standards of behaviour and its handling of unforeseen events. Even before the cash-for-passports scandal and the foot and mouth epidemic, it was difficult to be greatly impressed on either score — witness the Bernie Ecclestone, Derek Draper and Geoffrey Robinson affairs, the repeated reports of feuding in the cabinet, the London mayor fiasco, the David Shayler scandal, the Dome, the fuel crisis et cetera. New Labour in government might not be as sleazy, incompetent and prone to panic as the Tories, but it doesn’t have too much to boast about.

But this is not the crux of the matter. More important by far is the widespread sense of disappointment that Labour in power has not made more of a difference in policy terms. Despite Labour’s best efforts to dampen expectations in the run-up to 1997, epitomised by the minimal promises in the party’s manifesto, Blair came to power on the crest of a wave of popular hope.

Although Labour, in its desperation to pre-empt accusations of betrayal, had made it as clear as it could that it would not put right every wrong in its first term, even its most sceptical supporters felt that it would be able to do much more than it said it would. And as it became obvious that, in fact, there was no chance of Labour deviating from its chosen ‘safety first’ strategy, disillusion set in big time.

This has been particularly apparent among political activists of different kinds, both inside the Labour Party and outside it, and among the left-leaning intelligentsia. For most of these people, even those on the traditional Labour right, the great hope of 1997 was that Labour in government would prove more recognisably social democratic than it had appeared in opposition. That hope still exists — just — but it is now much deflated.

The government’s embrace of privatisation and deregulation has been unconditional, and its expansion of workers’ rights minimal. Its measures to redistribute by stealth have failed to stop the continuing growth of income and wealth inequalities. Most important, Gordon Brown’s decision to stick to Tory spending plans for two years means that public services are as bad today as they were four years ago. Things might get better in the second term as the spending spree begun by Brown in 1999-2000 starts to take effect, but with an economic downturn in the offing it would be foolish to count chickens.

For constitutional reformers, the 1997 Labour victory held out the prospect of a root-and-branch transformation of the British political system. Electoral reform for the Commons, a democratically accountable House of Lords and devolution to the English regions would rapidly follow the introduction of devolution to Scotland and Wales and first-stage Lords reform. Within a couple of years, however, it was evident that the government had no intention of doing more than the bare minimum promised in the manifesto — and it now seems that the constitutional reform programme is as good as dead for the second term.

The story is much the same in other spheres. Pro-Europeans have seen their hopes of early British entry into the single European currency cruelly dashed. Freedom-of-information campaigners’ optimism at the government’s initial efforts disappeared by the time its final legislation was passed. Environmentalists, the anti-hunting lobby and opponents of the arms trade feel just as let down.

Of course, Blair and the rest of the Labour leadership couldn’t care less what activists and intellectuals think, believing them to be unrepresentative of the public as a whole and out of touch with the views of the all-important swing voters of Middle England. And to some extent they are right: Labour members’ concerns about single parents’ benefits and Charter 88’s complaints about the lack of momentum behind Lords reform are not, unfortunately, widely shared.

But the disillusion of activists and intellectuals does find an echo in the wider population insofar as the focus of popular disenchantment with the government is its failure to do more to improve Britain’s schools, hospitals, transport system and public housing. This hardly counts as an upsurge of radical socialist sentiment: just getting our public services up to the level taken for granted in continental Europe would be quite enough for most people. It is a mark of how far Labour has shifted politically in the past 10 years that even this modest goal now seems strangely utopian. But unless the government starts to deliver tangible improvements to public services in the next couple of years, it’s a safe bet that there will be no third term.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 20 April 2001

On the face of it, it’s difficult to see why everyone is making such a fuss about the day of anti-capitalist action planned for 1 May in London. So 1,000 anarchists, radical leftists, Turkish Stalinists and assorted crusties turn up in Oxford Street, a few of them have a punch-up with the cops, a McDonald’s gets trashed and a statue defaced? Well, unless someone is badly injured or killed – OK, it’s a serious unless – big deal.

There is, I guess, a chance that a mini-riot will have an impact on the election campaign, though I’m not sure what that might be: I can’t see Jack Straw being skewered by Ann Widdecombe because the police were too soft. And I suppose it won’t do the tourism industry much good if television pictures of fighting on the streets are beamed across the world, though it’s a moot point whether they’ll do any more damage than pictures of burning animal carcasses and wrecked trains.

A few broken windows and bruised bodies will not, however, shake capitalism to its foundations or bring the country to the brink of revolution. Come 2 May, it’s safe to say, it will be business as usual.

So why do the anti-capitalists bother? Of course, they’re angry – with varying degrees of justification – about injustice and meat-eating and multinationals. They’re alienated from traditional politics. And some of them get a buzz from chucking stuff at the police. But the crucial motivation is simply that it’s great fun to outrage respectable opinion. If the press and the political class didn’t get into such a lather about the threat they posed, most of the anti-capitalists would stay at home.

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Meanwhile, the Trots are limbering up for what they say will be the most concerted ever left-wing electoral challenge to Labour. The Socialist Alliance – essentially a coalition of the Socialist Party (formerly Militant) and the Socialist Workers’ Party, though there are a couple of other small Leninoid fractions involved and a handful of independent lefties – is running candidates in 100 seats in England and Wales. In Scotland, the Scottish Socialist Party (the core of which is Militant’s Scottish organisation) is contesting all 72 seats.

I’m not remotely tempted to vote Socialist Alliance, and wouldn’t be even if it had a chance of winning seats – but that’s not my point here. Rather, it’s to remind readers of just how quixotic the Trot challenge actually is.

Even though no single far-left grouping has ever put up as many as 172 candidates in a general election before, there have several elections in which one of them has contested 50 or more seats. The Communist Party put up 100 candidates in 1950, 57 in 1966 and 58 in 1970, and the Trotskyist Workers’ Revolutionary Party stood 60 in 1979.

But although the CP won two seats in 1945, not a single far-left MP has been elected since. And in terms of share of the vote, the far left’s record has been risible. Even in 1950, the CP managed to take an average of just 2 per cent of the vote in the seats it fought; by 1970, the last time it attempted a substantial nation-wide election campaign, it was down to an average of just over 1 per cent. (The CP’s figures for share of the national vote were even more pathetic.) The WRP in 1979 took an average of just 0.5 per cent in the seats it contested.

Needless to say, everything could be different this time around: an optimistic Trot would say that the CP was never able fully to mobilise left-wing opposition to Labour because it was compromised by its Stalinism, while the WRP was incapacitated by its lunacy. Somehow, however, I doubt the Socialist Alliance will do any better than previous far-left challengers. There is of course a great deal of left-wing dissatisfaction with the Blair government – but it is trifling by comparison with the disillusionment felt by the left in 1979 or even 1970. If the Trots get more than an average of 2 per cent of the vote, I promise I’ll shave every hair off my head.

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Finally,  two simple questions to all those Tribune contributors and correspondents in the past few weeks who have sung the praises of Castro’s Cuba. If it’s so bloody marvellous, why doesn’t the regime allow free multi-party elections? If the Cuban people really do support Castro, wouldn’t they give him a landslide victory and prove that whingeing democrats like me don’t know what we’re talking about?

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 21 March 2001

I seem to have upset a few readers with my last column advocating anti-Tory tactical voting in the general election. But I’m afraid I’m not taking any of it back. Not one of the correspondents who has denounced me has come up with a convincing argument against Labour supporters voting Liberal Democrat wherever the Lib Dem candidate won or came second to a Tory in 1997.

Apart from a few who seem to think vulgar abuse is the way to win political arguments, my critics fall into two categories: those who say that Labour supporters should vote Labour everywhere on principle, and those who say that my list of places where they should vote Lib Dem is wrong for some reason.

The first group rest their case on the assertion that there is a fundamental political difference between Labour and the Lib Dems. The problem is that not a single letter-writer has been able to identify it. Of course, there was a chasm on policy between Labour and the SDP-Liberal Alliance back in the 1980s. But – for better or worse – those disagreements are now ancient history. Since 1995, moreover, it has not even been possible to argue credibly that Labour is at root a socialist party while the Lib Dems are not: the abandonment of Clause Four saw to that. Like it or not, both parties these days are pro-European, pro-nuclear in defence policy and in favour of much the same sort of social capitalism.

What, though, of the accusations that my list is inaccurate? Leaving aside those who offer merely anecdotal evidence – I’m sorry, chums, but feeling in your bones that the Lib Dems have peaked in constituency X or constituency Y isn’t good enough – my critics say I didn’t take into account recent local or European elections in which Labour did better than in 1997.

Well, I didn’t, and the reason is that the local and European election results are a poor guide to the parties’ chances in the general election. Turnout was very low – and the Euro-election was conducted using proportional representation. The fact that Labour did better than the Lib Dems in a particular constituency in the Euro-election where the Lib Dem was second in 1997 shows only that many people who voted tactically for the Lib Dem in 1997 – Green supporters as well as Labour supporters – voted for their first-choice party because they knew their votes would not be wasted under PR. In the general election, those voters will revert to tactical voting, and most will do so, sensibly, on the basis of the 1997 general election result.

So, as Norman Lamont put it so memorably, “Je ne regrette rien.” The case for voting tactically remains as strong as ever – and I couldn’t care less if I’m chucked out of the Labour Party for ­making it.

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Like a lot of other people, I’ll be spending this Saturday afternoon in the pub watching England play football. But unlike most of them, I’ll find it difficult to enjoy it much, regardless of the result – and the same is true of everyone with whom I’ll be watching. The reason is simple: the occasion is a wake for a fine man who has died suddenly and tragically young, Denis Rees.

Many Tribune contributors who wrote for the New Statesman when Steve Platt and I worked there will remember Denis. He was the affable, sports-mad landlord of the Red Lion in Hoxton Street, Shoreditch, which we used almost as an extension of the Statesman office in the years before Geoffrey Robinson bought the magazine. The pub was a tiny place, and when Denis ran it with his wife Brenda it was the best boozer imaginable, with a clientele that was a microcosm of local society.

We spent far too much time there – thrashing out editorial policy, lunching contributors, conspiring to prevent the board firing Steve, arguing politics with the other regulars, watching football and, of course, just drinking. Denis and Brenda, though by no means sympathetic to the Statesman’s politics, became our good friends. The Red Lion was where we celebrated John Major dropping his libel action against the magazine and where we drowned our sorrows after Robinson’s new regime unceremoniously fired us all. It was where we caroused long into election night in 1997, with the door locked and the curtains drawn tight.

It was a sad day when Denis and Brenda sold up and moved up to the Midlands. The pub soon became just another trendy Hoxton bar packed out with wannabe artists. But it was infinitely sadder to hear of Denis’s inexplicable collapse and death a fortnight ago. Everyone who knew him liked him. Here’s to his memory.

Paul Anderson, Chartist column, March-April 2001

If you believed the press, when Tony Blair announced in the House of Commons last month that a second-term Labour government would decide within two years whether it was right to join the euro, he was making a stunning change of policy.

According to the Sun the next day, Blair had “sensationally vowed to kill the pound and adopt the euro within two years”. The front-page headline in The Times declared: “Blair sets 2003 euro deadline.” The Daily Mail confidently reported that “the battle for the pound” had been “thrust dramatically into the heart of the election campaign”.

Yet all that Blair had done was to clarify a small point of detail of Labour’s policy as it has stood since 1997, when chancellor Gordon Brown effectively ruled out euro membership for the duration of this parliament and announced that “five economic tests” would have to be passed before the government decided whether to join the single European currency.

Labour’s line since then has been that, early in the next parliament, a Labour government would make its assessment of whether its criteria for British membership of the euro had been met. What Blair said last month was merely that “early in the next parliament” means “within two years” — and that is hardly a big deal.

Blair’s statement does not mean that the government will decide that the “five economic tests” have been passed, let alone that there will be a referendum on joining the euro during the next parliament. There is still every chance that the result of the government’s assessment will be an announcement that the criteria have not been met.

This is not because the British economy is no shape to join the euro. It meets all the criteria laid down in the Maastricht treaty for euro membership apart from participation in the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System. Although there is some room for argument on the first of Brown’s “five tests” — whether there is a sustainable convergence between the economies of Britain and the euro-zone — there is growing evidence that the British and continental economic cycles are more in step than for many years. (Brown’s other four tests are so vague they could be passed or failed on the whim of the tester.)

Rather, the reasons that the government might decide the time is not right to join euro-land are political. Labour is committed to holding a referendum on joining the euro if the government decides the time is right — and British public opinion is hostile to euro membership. Unless this changes decisively in the next couple of years, it is extremely unlikely that the government will risk holding the referendum.

This is partly because no government will ever hold a referendum that it stands a high chance of losing unless it really has no option. But this particular government is particularly wary of losing this particular referendum. New Labour is notoriously unwilling to do anything that goes against the grain of focus group opinion; and it is hyper-sensitive to criticism from the Murdoch press — of which there is bound to be a flood if it decides to ditch the pound. It is also worth remembering that Brown, who has effectively run Labour’s euro policy single-handed since 1997, cut his teeth in grown-up politics in the failed “yes” campaign before the 1979 Scottish devolution referendum.

If in spring 2003 there is the slightest doubt of victory in a euro referendum later that year or in 2004, the chances are that the chancellor will discover that the five economic tests have been failed.

It is, of course, a moot point how immutable public hostility to the euro really is, and some in the pro-euro camp say that a concerted two-year campaign emphasising the benefits of the single currency could turn public opinion in its favour.

They might be right — but only if such a campaign has serious backing from the government, and only if it makes the case for the euro in terms radically different from those in which the pro-euro camp has so far argued.

Up to now, the best the euro-enthusiasts have come up with are the arguments that joining the euro would mean greater exchange-rate stability, cheaper goods as a result of increased price transparency, and reduced transaction costs for businesses and holiday-makers.

These are all relevant points. But against the anti-euro camp’s emotionally charged denunciations of surrendering control of economic policy to faceless foreigners they do not amount to much.

The pro-euro camp desperately needs a simple populist argument — and the only one that has any resonance is the case for Britain committing itself to the European social model of capitalism rather than attempting to emulate the US laissez-faire version. The key argument for joining the euro is explicitly social democratic: it locks us into a bloc characterised by strong state welfare systems, well funded public transport networks and tough environmental regulations, along with a social partnership model of industrial relations. In other words, it offers a degree of protection against the ravages of capitalism red in tooth and claw.

This, however, is anathema to the leading lights in the government, who believe that what Europe needs is a large dose of US-style deregulation and privatisation. What’s more, their reluctance to put the case for the European social model is shared by the main pro-euro pressure group, Britain in Europe, which is largely business-funded.

The upshot is that, unless the pro-euro unions and what there is of a pro-European left in the Labour Party and elsewhere get their act together (which experience says is unlikely), the most convincing argument for British participation in the single currency will remain largely unheard and public opinion will remain hostile. The smart money is still on Britain being outside the euro-zone at the end of the next parliament.