PAUL ANDERSON

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 23 July 1999

I’m afraid I came away from last Saturday’s Tribune-sponsored conference, “Democratic socialism or 19th century liberalism?”, feeling rather depressed.

It would have been the same whatever had been said. After more than two decades of going to left-wing conferences of one kind or another, I can no longer spend more than a couple of hours listening to even the best speeches without getting the blues. And it’s always worse if it’s a beautiful summer’s day outside or if the speakers drone on or if most of the contributors from the floor are nutters.

Last Saturday was relatively nutter-free, and not too many people droned on, at least in the bits I caught. But it was a beautiful summer’s day outside, which meant that the main hall in Congress House was stiflingly hot and stuffy. At one point during the morning, I dozed off — to be awoken with a start by a speaker demanding that the left take seriously “the nudist position on Ireland”. “Hey,” I thought, “naturism as the key to unlocking the peace process. That’s novel.” But then he mentioned the “new disposition” a second time and I drifted into slumber again.

My problem with left-wing conferences is that I find them for the most part brain-numbingly predictable. I’m pretty familiar with the British left. I’ve been around it for a while, and I read all its main magazines and newspapers. I don’t want to come across as a know-all, but most of the things people say at left-wing conferences I’ve heard or read already.

So why do I persist in turning up to them? Well, it’s always good to see old friends and have a natter during breaks, then down a few beers in the evening before going off for a curry. I suppose my ideal left-wing conference would have 15-minute opening and closing plenary sessions, 30-minute workshops, one-hour coffee and tea breaks and two hours for lunch, with a really massive party in the evening.

Of course, such an event would be useless as a means of attracting new people to the cause, forging new alliances and doing all the other serious things that left-wing conferences are supposed to do. But I’m not sure that the traditional-format talk fest is much better.

Last Saturday’s do, for instance, was intended as a consolidation exercise for the Labour left. The organisers’ idea was to bring together the constituency activists involved in the Grassroots Alliance’s successful National Executive Committee campaign along with MPs and trade unionists critical of the Government’s direction. And indeed, they all turned up — the stalwarts of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Briefing and Labour Reform, Barbara Castle, Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn, John Edmonds, Jimmy Knapp and a load more — and they all agreed that they didn’t much like new Labour’s control freakery and obsession with appeasing the Daily Mail-reading middle classes.

But what beyond this do they have in common? Enthusiasm for more union-friendly labour laws and opposition to various aspects of the Government’s welfare reform programme, certainly — which is fair enough. But even on these issues there are massive differences over what should happen instead of what new Labour is actually doing.

Otherwise, there really isn’t much to unite the disparate band that came along last Saturday. People pushing positive alternatives to new Labour policies were conspicuous by their absence. A lot of speakers expressed hostility to the Liberal Democrats and proportional representation, and there was a virulently anti-European tone to several contributions. Nearly everyone cheered wildly at Tony Benn’s closing speech, reasserting the eternal verities of the old Labour left just as he did in the early 1980s.

But the truth is that these days the Lib Dems, PR and Europe divide the Labour left — particularly PR and Europe. ‘Unity’ on a platform of first-past-the-post and anti-Europeanism would be the unity of an impotent rump. And although Benn remains an impressive orator, sentimentality for the good old days when the left was a power in the Labour Party will not make it vigorous again.

So although the organisers did a great job, and although it was great to see everyone again, I don’t think we’re now on the brink of a great left revival. What last Saturday showed was that as much still divides the Labour left as unites it, and that it will be some time yet before it is able to offer a serious comprehensive project to rival New Labour’s. Which is roughly where we’ve been since the late 1980s.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 9 July 1999

I suppose I shouldn’t go back to the Euro-elections after all this time, but everyone I know is still talking about them — and I still have an overwhelming urge to have my say.

The reason is simple. The 1999 European Parliament election was a disaster for Labour. It saw the party running its most risibly incompetent campaign in a UK-wide election since 1983. All that was lacking was an election broadcast featuring a swaying Denzil Davies in a kipper tie, valiantly attempting to put his point to camera in a force ten gale.

Labour has come up with all sorts of pathetic excuses for its failure. The official line, it seems, is that the voters were simply too content to bother to turn out. Radical dissidents from the line — well, actually, Margaret Beckett and Pauline Green — have blamed the crisis in Kosovo. The first-past-the-post mob have had the temerity to claim that no one understood the new electoral system, which in fact was easier to grasp than the national lottery. It’s only a matter of time before someone blames the miserable performances of various national sporting teams.

The truth, however, is that Labour dug its own grave. Everything it did from the point at which it started to think about the 1999 Euro-elections might have been designed to undermine the enthusiasm of its activists and supporters.

First, it arranged an electoral system for the European elections that gave voters no option but to choose among lists dictated by parties, with no possibility of discriminating among individual candidates. Then it ensured that Labour Party members were given only the most nugatory role in choosing their candidates – and no role whatsoever in ranking them on the party’s lists. The result was Labour lists in which independent-minded candidates, whatever their support in the party, had at best an outside chance of winning. What a brilliant way to enthuse the members!

Next, to put the icing on the cake, Labour decided to run a Euro-election campaign that was low-key and – insofar as it existed – entirely concentrated on domestic political concerns as divined by the focus group ‘experts’.

The party put next to no effort into the campaign. It did little to mobilise its core working-class voters. It did little to persuade its middle-class voters not to vote Liberal Democrat, Green, Plaid or Scottish National Party. It did little even to persuade its members that the elections mattered.

I’m not saying that everything would have been OK if Labour had been a bit more traditionalist. PR means that every vote counts, so it’s necessary to bring out the core vote. But by the same measure it’s crucially important to hang on to Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman. Tony Blair is right to reject calls to adopt a “class against class” politics.

But something has to change. The Euro-elections showed the Millbank apparatus utterly incapable of handling its most basic task, of getting the party to mobilise for an election. It is amazing that heads have not rolled.

It is almost as incredible that the “solution” most touted for Labour’s failure is the return of Peter Mandelson to overseeing the party’s election campaigns. Party members know his role in instituting the regime of control-freakery and focus-group fetishism that led to the debacle.

As for the calls of the first-past-the-post lobby to ditch any thought of PR for the Commons, they are laughable. Labour’s haul of seats in the Euro-elections would have been no better under FPTP than it actually was under PR, so dismal was the party’s showing. The principle that you shouldn’t win a majority of seats even when you don’t have a majority of votes still applies as much as in Margaret Thatcher’s pomp.

And it would be daft for Blair now to recoil from putting the case for British participation in the single European currency. Euro-sceptic parties did relatively well in the Euro-elections, but they managed to secure the votes of less than 10 per cent of the electorate. Rather than suggesting that the case for joining the euro faces is necessarily doomed to defeat, this should encourage supporters of British participation to increase their efforts to persuade the people.

The one heartening thing about the Euro-elections was the performance of the Greens. I am of course sad that they beat Carole Tongue and Shaun Spiers in London and Anita Pollack in the South East. They are three of the best MEPs Labour has ever had. But I have hopes that Jean Lambert and Caroline Lucas, the Greens who won in London and the South East respectively, will prove themselves just as forthright and just as independent-minded. And they’d better make sure they keep a finger on the Labour heartbeat. I voted Labour for Tongue and Spiers, but nearly everyone else I know, including Labour Party members, sneaked out to vote Green. The new Green MEPs have a lot of Labour hopes riding on them.

New Times, July 1999

Mary Kaldor talks to Paul Anderson about the implications of what happened in Kosovo

‘It would be a big mistake to see what has happened in Kosovo as a success for bombing,’ says Mary Kaldor, looking out of the window of her office at the London School of Economics. ‘Nato has been presenting the Serbs’ withdrawal as a vindication of all its actions. What we need to remember is that the bombing failed to prevent the ethnic cleansing in the first place. Indeed, it accelerated it.

‘I’m not trying to be wise after the event, but there really were options that could have been taken before the bombing started that would have prevented the ethnic cleansing. No one can say that we didn’t know long ago what Slobodan Milosevic wanted to do in Kosovo. If the international community had been committed to a policy of humanitarian intervention to protect civilians on the ground, he could have been stopped long ago without Nato bombing.’

Even as late as the beginning of the year, she says, it would have been feasible for there to have been a limited intervention on the ground in Kosovo organised by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe to give protection to the Kosovo Albanians. This OSCE force could have been supported by a Nato deterrent force in Macedonia which would threaten ground invasion in the event that the OSCE couldn’t carry out its job.

‘The problem was that the Americans were intent on bombing to teach Milosevic a lesson — a position that Milosevic was quite happy with because it would give him the excuse to expel the Albanians from Kosovo. So nothing was done to organise a limited military operation to set up safe zones in Kosovo, and when the Rambouillet talks broke down, there simply wasn’t the capacity for ground intervention. To cap it all, Nato then made the huge mistake of ruling out ground forces when it started to bomb. The British government realised the mistake and started pressing for ground troops – I think sincerely – but the damage had been done.’

Kaldor has been a critic of western foreign and military policy, as academic and activist, for a long time. The daughter of Nicholas Kaldor, the eminent Keynesian economist and adviser to Harold Wilson, she first established a reputation for hard-hitting work on the military-industrial complex in the late 1960s as a young researcher on the arms trade at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which she joined after reading PPE at Oxford.

In the 1970s, back in Britain working at Sussex University, she was a key figure in the Labour Party’s defence study group, which in 1977 (to the embarrassment of the then Labour government) put forward detailed proposal for radical defence spending cuts. The next year, she published The Disintegrating West, a path-breaking and prescient analysis of the transatlantic tensions over economic and foreign policy that exploded in the 1980s. During the 1980s, as well as publishing a string of books and articles, most notably her account of the military’s fixation with technology, The Baroque Arsenal, she was one of the leading lights in European Nuclear Disarmament. (END was the pressure group that gave the movement against nuclear arms its intellectual dynamic and, more importantly, inoculated it against apologists for Soviet militarism.) Since 1990, while continuing to write prodigiously, she has played a major role in END’s successor organisation, European Dialogue, the British affiliate to the Helsinki Citizen’s Assembly, the transnational movement for democracy and human rights.

Until Kosovo, however, Kaldor was always a critic of western foreign and military policy from a perspective that emphasised the pursuit of policy by peaceful, political means rather than by military means. On Kosovo, her argument has been that Nato used the wrong military means – bombing not ground troops. Some of her former allies from the 1980s peace movement accuse her of abandoning her principles and becoming an armchair general.

She dismisses such criticism emphatically. ‘I’m not a pacifist. I respect people who are, but a lot of the people who oppose intervention really don’t seem to care very much about ethnic cleansing. They have been exclusively concerned with the effects of Nato bombing. I was at a big peace movement conference in the Hague in May where there were passionate demands for an end to the bombing – but people were nothing like as energetic in condemning what had been done to the Kosovo Albanians. The rest of the world could not have stood by and watched. Military intervention was essential. The problem was that the Americans were insistent on bombing, and the rest of Nato allowed itself to be pushed by the Americans.

‘What I proposed in any case was humanitarian intervention, which is quite different from war-fighting even though it may involve use of troops. A weak version of it was UNPROFOR in Bosnia, which imposed safe havens and humanitarian corridors which were backed by the UN Security Council but not negotiated with the Bosnian Serbs. The mistake in Bosnia was that the troops were poorly armed and ordered not to use force even though they had a mandate to do so, and their lives were privileged over those they were meant to protect.’

So what should happen now that Milosevic has withdrawn from Kosovo and the province is under the control of foreign armed forces? ‘The first thing is that it is essential to come up with a settlement for the whole Balkans region,’ says Kaldor. ‘The international community should recognise that it was a great mistake to deal with each of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia one by one. Every partial agreement covering one area has led to a war in the next one. The partial agreement on Slovenia was followed by the war in Croatia. The agreement on Croatia in early 1992 was followed by the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And the Dayton agreement on Bosnia was followed after a brief respite by the eruption of conflict in Kosovo. There’s now a real danger of wars in Macedonia and Montenegro – and who knows where’ they might spread to?’ Some of the ideas for south-east European integration envisaged in German foreign minister Joschka Fischer’s proposal for a stability pact are very relevant, she says.

‘Secondly, as everyone now admits, it was a terrible mistake to negotiate with Milosevic. He should be totally sidelined. As long as he remains in power, the violence is bound to spread because sooner or later he will need an international emergency – that’s the way he rules. He is at the apex of a system involving extreme nationalists and a mafia who have a vested interest in continued violence. There is an urgent need to provide assistance for democracy in Serbia: there should be support for independent media to counter official propaganda and also support for bottom-up political initiatives – non-governmental organisations, city twinning and so on. And a way has to be found of giving economic aid to Serbia without dealing with Milosevic.’

In the long run, however, what is required is nothing less than a complete reorientation of foreign and military policy to take account of the changing nature of warfare. Kaldor’s most recent book, New and Old Wars, gives a panoramic overview of the way that war has changed in the second half of the 20th century. Her thesis is that war in the sense of large-scale organised violence between states is becoming an anachronism. Instead, armed conflicts today are likely to be fuelled by ethnic hatreds and be fought by paramilitary groups, mercenaries and warlords as well as regular forces.

‘What I call “new wars” are in practice a mixture of war, organised crime and human rights violations,’ she says. ‘In all of them, it’s possible to identify islands of civility where local groups have defended an inclusive set of social arrangements. Any international effort to solve these wars has to build on these islands of civility. Politically the aim has to be to strengthen those groups offering a real alternative to the politics of exclusive identity. Militarily, peacekeeping has to be rethought as international law enforcement, as the protection of civilians.’

New Times, June 1999

Paul Anderson assesses Nato’s war over Kosovo and looks at the options for what happens next

The war over Kosovo has not turned out as Nato’s political leaders expected or wanted. Their assumption was that Slobodan Milosevic’s assault on the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo could be stopped quickly with air strikes and air strikes alone. So far – nine weeks into the air strikes as we went to press – there has been no sign that he has any intention of backing down.

Milosevic was given a look at Nato’s hand when, at the same time as announcing the bombing raids, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton made it clear that deployment of ground troops was not planned as part of the Nato intervention.

The Serbian dictator then upped the stakes. Instead of pulling back his forces from Kosovo, as Nato demanded, he unleashed a ferocious pogrom against the ethnic Albanian population of the province – a pogrom that appears to have been eagerly executed and widely supported by ordinary Serbs. Within a week of the air strikes starting, more than half the 1.9 million Kosovo Albanians had been forced from their homes.

Nato responded to this brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing by increasing the scope of its aerial bombardment. But in doing so it started to kill civilians, including Kosovo Albanians, in significant numbers. Pictures from Serbian television showing casualties and bomb damage were beamed around the world. What little there was of a democratic opposition in Serbia rallied to Milosevic’s side.

Now, after two months, a substantial part of Serbia’s military capacity and much of its communications and industrial infrastructure have been ‘degraded’, as the Nato jargon has it. Yet Milosevic has not yielded. There are currently 1.6 million Kosovo Albanians in exile or ‘displaced’. Thousands have been massacred. Milosevic’s support at home – insofar as it is possible to measure it – has apparently remained solid. Ethnic cleansing has continued unabated in Kosovo. The number of refugees has risen inexorably. Ethnic tensions in the main countries the refugees have fled to, particularly Macedonia and Greece, are at crisis point.

Russia, which was from the start opposed to the Nato action, is now so antipathetic that serious commentators are talking about the danger of a new cold war. China, after the bombing of its embassy in Belgrade, is more strongly set against the Nato intervention than ever.

All in all, it is an extraordinary mess. It is tempting to respond simply by saying that Nato should not have acted as it has done – that the intervention should have been organised by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe rather than Nato, that more time should have been given to diplomatic efforts, that Nato should have planned from the beginning to deploy ground troops in some role or other.

The trouble with such arguments, however, is that they are wholly counterfactual. They might be useful as contributions to general debates about the sort of security structures that should exist in Europe, about the purposes of foreign policy and about the legitimacy and efficacy of military force. But they are not much use in helping to determine what should happen next over Kosovo. Like it or not, what has been done has been done.

So what should happen next? For Nato, there are three options.

The first is to continue the ‘air strikes alone’ strategy in the hope that it will eventually have the effect of forcing Milosevic to stop the military assault on Kosovo, let the refugees return and allow a Nato-led peace-keeping force into Kosovo. The second is to stop the air strikes and reopen negotiations with Milosevic, with a key role for the Russians. The third is to escalate the use of military force.

Each has implications. Sticking to ‘air strikes alone’ – until now the position of the US government and most of its west European allies, though support for it is much more fragile than hitherto – has two advantages for western politicians. It does not appear to be a capitulation to Milosevic, and it does not involve major western casualties.

The problem, of course, is that it has not worked so far, and it is questionable whether it will ever work except at an unacceptable cost in Serbian civilian lives, economic devastation and environmental damage. As the strategy is currently conceived, no ground deployments will take place until after Milosevic sues for peace – which he does not appear likely to do, not least because an admission of defeat would be the end of him politically.

Stopping the air strikes and reopening negotiations before Milosevic is defeated would certainly mean fewer dead and maimed Serbian civilians. And it would have the advantage for western politicians of repairing diplomatic relations with the Russians and Chinese, as well as placating domestic anti-war opinion and providing a way out of a quagmire.

But it would also amount to conceding victory to Milosevic, who would not only survive in power but, at least in the first instance, would be left in control of a depopulated Kosovo.

On previous form, it is extremely unlikely that he would subsequently make meaningful concessions from this position of strength. In particular, it is likely that he would try to block introduction of the substantial and effective peace-keeping force that is essential if the refugees are to be persuaded to return. He might change his mind in certain circumstances, for example if there were a deal on the table favourable to Serbia on partitioning Kosovo. At present, such a partition is unacceptable to the west because it would reward Milosevic for his aggression, but it might suddenly become an option if the Americans get cold feet.

The third option, escalating the use of military force, could take two forms: a Nato ground invasion or concerted support for the Kosovo Liberation Army. Although Nato ruled out a ground invasion at the start of the campaign and again early last month – when Clinton effectively over-ruled Blair’s case for keeping open the option – the signs are that it is again being seriously considered.

The argument for a ground invasion is simple: if successful – and few doubt that, in military terms, it would be a success – it would force Serbia out of Kosovo and allow the institution of a protectorate. It would also be a decisive defeat for Milosevic that he would be unlikely to survive.

It is also, however, the most difficult option for western governments to sanction. It would mean brushing aside Russian and Chinese objections and ignoring opposition among west European Nato governments. Most important, it would mean risking substantial western casualties – which is why the US has blocked it so far. How many casualties there would be is necessarily a matter of conjecture. Opponents of ground invasion say that the Yugoslav army is well dug-in, well armed and highly motivated and that an invasion would be bloody and protracted. Supporters claim the opposite. Either way, there is no doubt that a ground invasion would take time to organise. A decision to go ahead would have to be made soon to avoid the danger of a campaign being bogged down by the onset of winter. The first snows in Kosovo fall in September, and a ground invasion would take six weeks at least to prepapre.

As for supporting the KLA, the advantage for western politicians is that it would not involve the body bags coming home. The disadvantages are that backing the KLA would mean loss of face – only last year, the west was denouncing it as a terrorist organisation – and, more importantly, loss of any control over the outcome of the war. Western backing for the KLA would almost certainly mean the end of any hope (already slim) of recreating a multi-ethnic Kosovo and would further destabilise already unstable Macedonia.

At present, it is difficult to work out what the western powers will do. The final decisions will inevitably be made in Washington, for the simple reason that only the US has the hardware and service personnel to sustain a prolonged military campaign. Which way the decisions will go is impossible to tell. Clinton has been extraordinarily inconsistent during the Kosovo crisis – sometimes comparing Milosevic with Hitler, at others appearing willing to talk on Milosevic’s terms – and his administration is divided.

The line from the US administration in the week before New Times press day appeared to be that combat deployment of ground troops is unthinkable, which suggests that the most likely scenario is that Clinton will try to fix a deal with Milosevic to extract the US from the mess. But the British government was reported to be urging on him the option of at least threatening a ground invasion. All that is certain is that this show is set to run and run.

New Times, June 1999

Paul Anderson talks to Pam Giddy, the new director of Charter 88

Pam Giddy is a girl who has gone back to her first love.

Nearly 10 years ago, straight out of university, she got a job with Charter 88, the constitutional reform pressure group, working as a dogsbody in its offices in Panther House near Holborn – one of the scuzziest low-rent blocks in London, notorious as a home for lost radical causes. She stuck it for four years, moving up the Charter hierarchy to run its publications and events [ch] as the organisation grew (and moved to more salubrious premises). In 1994 she split for the greener pastures of Cosmpolitan and then went to Newsnight, where she worked as a producer for four years.

Now, just 31, she is back with Charter 88 as its director, taking a big pay cut to run one of the biggest and best-organised pressure groups in Britain. ‘It’s really good to be here again,’ she says. ‘It’s an exciting time.’

Charter 88 was set up in a different political era. Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government was rampant, Labour appeared unelectable and constitutional reform was the last hope of a beleaguered centre-left intelligentsia. Today, Labour is in power, and much of the original Charter 88 agenda – a freedom of information act, devolution, proportional representation, Lords reform – is either on the statute book or promised.

So what’s the point of Charter 88 any more? Giddy laughs. ‘That’s what they asked me at my interview. What I said then, and it’s true, is that there’s as much to do now as ever before. The point about Charter originally was that the rules of the political game needed to be changed. We now have a government now that is at least open to change. But the rules have not yet changed. New Labour’s attitude to change is either begrudging or half-hearted.’

She praises the government’s introduction of devolution, she is enthusiastic about the proposals of the Jenkins commission on electoral reform and she acknowledges the importance of new Labour’s moves towards getting rid of hereditary peers from the House of Lords. But, she says, there is no sense of an overall settlement in the government’s actions. ‘It’s simply not joined-up. We need to work out what sort of Britain we want. And at the moment the government is not being much help.’

She is particularly critical of Labour’s decision to go for an appointed second chamber. ‘A new second chamber has got to be wholly democratic — in other words, it’s got to be directly elected. It’s almost as if the government is afraid of the people. I’m all in favour of the old-fashioned idea that, if people are making laws, we should be able to vote them in and vote them out. It’s that simple.’

On the prospects for proportional representation for general elections, however, she is optimistic. She says that the proposals of the Jenkins commission for a mix of constituency MPs elected by the alternative vote and ‘top-up’ MPs elected by city or county is not perfect – but it is at least a ‘clever piece of work’ that could secure widespread support across the political spectrum. ‘PR for local government is the key to unlocking PR for the Commons,’ she says. ‘There’s a real mood in local government, particularly among Labour councils that have had no opposition, that PR could be a way of revitalising local democracy.’

Nevertheless, she goes on, supporters of PR need to get their act together to push their case. ‘The media have not understood that PR is about a new type of politics: we saw the journalists talking about Labour “winning” the Scottish parliament elections, which is a ridiculous misunderstanding of what PR is all about.’

Giddy is scathing about the government’s delay in implementing the introduction into British law of the European Convention on Human Rights. ‘If too many of our laws are in contravention of the convention, let’s deal with them at once,’ she says. ‘What’s the excuse? The legislation is there to be implemented. Why not start a huge campaign of public education to make sure that people can take ownership of their rights?’

Charter 88 is in good shape. It now has 80,000 signatories. More important, there are some 6,000 to 7,000 activists out there pledged to put their efforts into democratic transformation of the British polity – and as new Labour has appeared to shy away from a radical constitutional agenda on PR and Lords reform, they have been stirring again. ‘Our message is simple,’ says Giddy. ‘We need to put more power in more hands. We need to take power out of the hands of the executive and spread it around. Insofar as the government doesn’t want to let that happen, we are the opposition. We’re not going to be oppositionist, we’re going to work constructively. But we’ve got to join it all up.’

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 14 May 1999

There! It wasn’t so bad really, was it? OK, I admit, Labour doesn’t have a majority in either the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly. OK, Plaid Cymru did much better than anyone expected, winning in Rhondda, Islwyn and Llanelli. And OK, two wild leftists – Dennis Canavan and Tommy Sheridan – made it into the Scottish Parliament, along with a Green.

In truth, however, Great Britain’s first elections using a system of proportional representation were nothing like the disaster that Labour supporters of first past the post thought they would be.

The voters in Scotland and Wales confounded everyone who had predicted that they would be too stupid to understand how the additional member system works. Most voters found it simple to pick a constituency candidate and then to vote for a party’s regional list – and a significant minority decided to use their list votes to send a shot across the bows of the big party machines.

In Scotland, although Labour did not do as well as it would have done under first past the post– at least in terms of seats – the party proved itself well adapted to fighting a PR election and emerged with a haul of seats beyond the wildest dreams of party strategists even two months ago. The Scottish National Party was emphatically defeated. In Wales, a campaign designed more for damage-limitation than anything else came close to winning an overall Assembly majority. In neither country did the far-right win anything – and the success of the far Left in Scotland was token.

At the same time, it has done Labour no lasting harm to have its weaknesses exposed by the new electoral system. To put it in plain English, the Labour establishment in south Wales deserved a boot up the arse for its complacency, incompetence and nepotism – and it got it. The Millbank machine deserved the same for using union block votes to fix the party leadership in Wales for Alun Michael – and it got it. The effect can only be beneficial for Labour. It is clear that the party cannot remain a fiefdom of fat late-middle-aged male fixers if it is to retain its dominance of the country’s politics. It has to reconnect with Welsh society, and urgently. In Scotland, the victory of Canavan is a timely reminder to the Labour machine that there is a price to be paid for barring dissidents and eccentrics from standing for public office.

As for the supposedly inevitable horrors of coalition politics, well, they now seem little more than chimerical. In both Scotland and Wales, it is apparent that the smaller parties on which Labour will have to rely for support when push comes to shove – the Lib Dems and, in Wales, Plaid Cymru – are not interested in extracting maximum short-term advantage out of their position. Rather they want to establish themselves as dependable, if on occasion critical, partners with Labour. Labour will not be held to ransom, even if it will have to take into account other points of view, for example on tuition fees.

Other things being equal, then, the experience of the Scottish and Welsh elections should strengthen the case for using PR to elect the Commons. The problem is that other things are not equal. Strangely enough, given the scale of its first-term constitutional programme, new Labour has never been more than a reluctant convert to the cause of constitutional reform. All the measures promised in its 1997 manifesto – devolution to Scotland and Wales, abolition of hereditary peers, PR for Europe, a referendum on electoral reform for Commons elections, incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights – were inherited from the Labour Party of Neil Kinnock and John Smith. And now that they are largely in place (with the exception of Lords reform), all the signs are that the government has no enthusiasm for taking things further.

The Jenkins Commission’s recommendations for changing the electoral system are gathering dust, and the promised referendum on them is unlikely to take place before the next general election. The prospects for elected regional assemblies in England and an elected second chamber are even more distant, if they can be said to exist at all.

Which is not to knock what the government has done so far. Britain’s creaking constitution needed a radical overhaul, and New Labour has made a start on it. The problem is that the job is only half-finished – and looks likely to stay that way. What a wasted opportunity.

Red Pepper, May 1999

A coalition of radical left groups and parties has been formed to fight next month’s European elections in England.

The Socialist Alliance was set up at the end of March at a meeting in Birmingham attended by members of a variety of national and local socialist groups, the largest of them the Socialist Party, formerly the Militant Tendency. The Alliance will run candidates in most English regions. Similar socialist groupings announced last year that they would be running candidates in Scotland and Wales.

The elections are taking place for the first time using a regional list system of proportional representation: to win a seat it will be necessary to win between 8 per cent and 20 per cent of the vote depending on region.

Alliance candidates are confident of their chances. Mike Davies, who heads the Alliance list in Yorkshire and Humberside, said: ‘It’s not just a matter of fighting valiantly and building a socialist campaign. I don’t see why we shouldn’t win a seat.’ Davies said that the Euro-election campaign would be given momentum by the local election campaign, especially in Hull, where 20 Left Alliance candidates are running for the council. Just over 11 per cent of the vote in the region will guarantee a seat.

The Alliance’s best chances are probably in the West Midlands and East Midlands. In the West Midlands, where just over 11 per cent of vote will guarantee a seat, there are strong independent left networks in Walsall and Coventry. In the East Midlands, where just over 14 per cent will guarantee a seat, the high-profile former Labour MEP Ken Coates heads the Alliance list.

The Alliance is short of cash, and it has little time to organise an effective campaign. But its main problem is that it has not managed to persuade either the Green Party or Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party to join it or to refrain from running competing candidates — which means that the left-of-Labour vote will be split. The Greens made it clear last year when Coates and fellow rebel MEP Hugh Kerr were expelled from Labour that they had no interest in an electoral arrangement with anyone, and Scargill has ensured that the SLP has rebuffed all advances from other socialists.

The problem is particularly apparent in London, where a coalition of left groups has been meeting for more than a year and, other things being equal, the Alliance might have expected to do well. Scargill himself heads the SLP list in the capital and the media-friendly Jean Lambert is top of the Greens’ list.

The Alliance is not standing in the two regions where the Greens have their greatest hopes of winning seats, the South East and the South West.

New Times, May 1999

Paul Anderson reports from the American left’s annual bean feast in New York

As talking-shops go, it’s difficult to beat the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York. It is the American left’s big East Coast gathering, held every easter or thereabouts for the past 17 years.

This year, nearly 2,000 people came along to Manhattan Community College on the Lower West Side between 9 and 11 April to listen to the big-name speakers – Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Staughton Lynd, Manning Marable, the Reverend Al Sharpton – and to take their pick among more than 100 panel discussions spread through the weekend.

All of American left-wing life was there: members of Democratic Socialists of America (the more radical of two US affiliates to the Socialist International and the core of the Democratic Party’s left wing), environmentalists, feminists, black activists, trade unionists, writers and editors from the Nation, Dissent, Monthly Review and Mother Jones, radical broadcasters, a smattering of Trotskyist and Maoist sectarians.

If that sounds chaotic, it was – but not completely. Anyone who can pay $100 can run a panel, and some of the things people decide to discuss are obscure or eccentric, to say the least. I could have spent Saturday afternoon immersed in ‘A left defence of Heidegger’ or ‘Marxist-Leninist ideology is alive and well’.

Such exotica are very much on the fringe, however. The core of the conference programme is put together by DSA and its friends and is anything but crazy. I went to excellent sessions on the next US presidential election, on the state of non-corporate media and on European social democracy – and I was told I missed some of the best discussions.

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest talking points was Kosovo – on which there is no more of a consensus on the US left than there is on the European left.

The argument goes right to the heart of DSA, with one of its co-chairs, the political scientist Bogdan Denitch, giving forceful backing to deployment of Nato ground troops against Slobodan Milosevic and another, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, coming out strongly against the Nato bombing. My sense was that Denitch’s position had greater support – but that might just be because I agree with him.

Kosovo apart, the great obsession of the conference was a hardy perennial: the marginalisation of the American left and how to overcome it.

That the left is up against it there can be no doubt. DSA, the biggest organisation on the left and the nearest thing there is to a European social democratic party, has only 10,000 members, and although it has considerable influence in the leadership of the trade union movement, in the Democratic Party its position (and more generally the position of the left) is weaker than for many years.

The Democrats’ progressive caucus in Congress has more than 70 members, making it the second biggest organised body of opinion in Congress after the Republicans’ conservative caucus. But since funding was withdrawn from the caucuses in the wake of the 1994 Republican Congressional landslide, they have been far less powerful than they used to be. Left-leaning Democrats in Congress have been unable to force any significant concessions from Bill Clinton since his administration took a sharp turn to the right in 1994. And no one I talked to thought there was any hope of the Democrats choosing a presidential candidate next year who came from anywhere but the far right of the party.

Clinton has been such a disaster in the eyes of most DSAers that they cannot understand why Tony Blair has been so keen to emulate his political strategy and to draw him into discussions of the ‘Third Way’. DSA’s ‘project’ has since its inception in the 1960s been completion of the American welfare state along European social democratic lines. DSA members cannot fathom how a European social democratic leader could want to get into bed with a president who has done more to dismantle social protection than the Republicans that preceded him.

Yet for all this, there is a vibrancy about the American left that is extraordinarily refreshing. American left publishing is in a far healthier state than left publishing over here. There’s a culture of local organisation and agitation as healthy as any in Britain. And Socialist Scholars was – as in previous years – bigger, more inclusive and more exciting than any event the British left has put on in living memory. There’s plenty we can learn from the other side of the pond even if we decide we want to keep our welfare state.

New Times, May 1999

Paul Anderson talks to Peter Hain about Welsh devolution and his plea for the left to engage with the Blair government

‘A friend said to me the other day: “You’ve worked your guts out on the referendum campaign and ever since to do yourself out of a job,”‘ says Peter Hain in his room in the Welsh Office in Whitehall. ‘And he was right. The powers that go with my job as a Welsh Office minister will transfer as from 1 July to the new Welsh assembly.’

The MP for Neath is in London only briefly. His main job until 6 May, when Wales votes for the 60-member assembly, is as co-ordinator of Labour’s election campaign in Wales, and it’s a job that does not allow him much time in Westminster.

After the controversy surrounding the choice of Labour’s leader in Wales – Alun Michael, favoured by Tony Blair, beat Rhodri Morgan for the position, but only because several unions backed him with their block votes without balloting their members – Labour’s commanding lead in the opinion polls has slipped alarmingly.

The party is still almost certain to emerge as the biggest party in the assembly, but there is a strong possibility that it will not win an overall majority. The election is using the additional member system of proportional representation, and the latest polls suggest that Plaid Cymru will do better than anyone expected, particularly in the ‘top-up’ seats elected on a regional basis to make the overall result more accurately reflect parties’ shares of the vote.

Hain is sceptical about some of the more extravagant interpretations of the poll data that have appeared in the press. ‘Some of the people being polled think they’re being asked what their second choice is,’ he says. ‘There’s a lot of confusion.’ He dismisses the idea that Michael might fail to win a top-up seat in the Mid and West Wales electoral.

But he is candid about Labour’s task. ‘The party’s gone through a really rough time over the past year. And I think the government has failed to get its message across to its core supporters.’

With this in mind, Labour is concentrating its focus on bread-and-butter issues. ‘ We have to connect the devolution of power with better decisions on schools and jobs and so on.’

Labour’s campaign in Wales has a distinctly more left-wing feel to it than the 1997 general election campaign – which is hardly surprising as Hain has a reputation as one of the most left-wing members of the government.

It is nearly 30 years since he first came to public attention as a South African Young Liberal advocate of direct action against apartheid and more than 20 since he first established himself as a spokesman of the Labour left. But even as recently as 1995, his book Ayes to the Left laid out a ‘libertarian socialist’ strategy for Labour that in many of its key elements – Keynesian expansionism in economics at United Kingdom and European level, interventionism in industrial policy, radical civil libertarianism – was implicitly critical of Tony Blair’s conception of ‘modernisation’.

His latest pamphlet, A Welsh Third Way?, recently published by Tribune, holds back on criticising the government of which he is part. Indeed, it buzzes with enthusiasm, arguing that new Labour is the true inheritor of the libertarian socialist tradition.

Hain dismisses the notion that he wrote it because he had been put under pressure from on high. ‘I simply thought that the Third Way debate needed some positioning in terms of socialist traditions. You can’t write a pamphlet unless it’s been cleared. But it was my idea and I wrote it myself.’

Too many on the left seem unwilling to recognise just how much the Blair government has achieved, he says. ‘On the economy, what’s very striking is that we’ve done what no Labour government has done before: we haven’t blown it in the first two years after hitting an enormous crisis. We’ve enjoyed the confidence of the markets and the City. And yet we are injecting record amounts of spending into health and education and other public service priorities in the next three years.

‘The pitch of the government has been to middle England and to the Daily Mail rather than the Daily Mirror. Yet there is a huge amount of redistribution. The minimum wage, the working families tax credit, the increases in child benefit and the 10p starting rate of income tax, all have attacked poverty and boosted low incomes. I wouldn’t call Gordon Brown a traditional Keynesian chancellor – and he wouldn’t want to accept that label – but people on the left should at least acknowledge that it’s significant that a government of the left has managed to implement some radical economic policies while not being under furious attack in traditional fashion.’

Not that success is confined to the economy. ‘The constitutional agenda – I mean, here we have a supposedly right-wing Labour leader and government about to roll over the House of Lords – fairness at work, the right to roam, they’re considerable achievements.’ The pamphlet, he says, is a plea to the rest of the left to engage. ‘Engaging doesn’t mean sacrificing principles. It means getting into the Realpolitik of the Labour Party and engaging with it. The Labour government is the only show in town. If the left doesn’t get involved, it will have sold the pass. But, with the exception of a few small groups, I don’t feel there’s any serious engagement from the left at all.’