PAUL ANDERSON

New Statesman & Society leader, 5 August 1994

Oh, well, at least it’s novel. Presenting his annual report on Monday, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Condon, laid the blame for at least part of the crime wave on the public’s ambivalent attitude to crime, citing as an example our affection for Arthur Daley. On this view, if we really are to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, as Tony Blair wants, it is obviously imperative that Minder is never shown again on British television.

But there is a serious side to all this. Condon’s remarks about the deleterious effect of a television comedy character were very much in tune with his whole presentation. His message on Monday was simple: the Met takes full responsibility for its successes, but where it fails it is always someone else’s fault. Burglaries are down in London because of the success of the Met’s “Operation Bumblebee”, targeting known burglars and handlers of stolen goods. But racial and sexual assaults are up because of increased reporting by victims, and firearms offences (particularly against police officers) are up because gun control legislation isn’t tough enough. As for the increase in muggings, well, that’s nothing to do with the police either.

Worse, some people just don’t appreciate what sterling work the Met does. Particularly reprehensible are those lawyers who specialise in legal actions against the police. Condon’s report reveals that the Met paid out £1.8 million in damages in the past year for assault, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution and other misconduct. In the previous year, the figure was £1.1 million, and in 1991-92 a paltry £571,000. Clearly, there is a conspiracy to do down our wonderful boys in blue. “One of the things that we fear is that more and more people are suing the police, and the Metropolitan Police is being seen as a soft target,” the commissioner complained.

Of course, there is another possible explanation – that the police have indeed been guilty of assault, false imprisonment and so on, and that they have been getting their come-uppance because their victims have refused to take this lying down. Similarly, it could be that the rise in muggings has something to do with the absence of police on the beat in certain areas – and that the rise in racial assaults relates at least in part to the Met’s lack of seriousness in tackling racist violence. It might even be that the lack of cooperation from the public that Condon blames on Arthur Daley is actually down to a decline in public confidence in the police brought on by the relentless flow of stories of police corruption and by bitter experience of the Met’s inadequacies.

Condon’s refusal even to consider the most obvious explanations for the problems that his force undoubtedly faces is a symptom of a worrying bunker mentality all too common among Britain’s police. In some ways, of course, it is quite understandable. During the postwar boom years, the British police en-joyed a reputation for fairness, decency and non-violence unrivalled by any other police force in the world. Until the mid-1970s, there was a cross-party consensus that Britain’s tradition of unarmed, decentralised policing was simply the best.

But then everything started to go wrong – and the scale of the disaster was such that the police are still reeling. First, the Met was revealed to be riddled with corruption. Then, as the economy went into crisis in the 1970s, the police were pushed further and further into adopting a politically charged public-order role – defending strike-breakers against pickets, neo-fascists against the Anti-Nazi League, nuclear bases against protesters. Increasingly, ethnic minority groups complained of police racism and women of police attitudes to domestic violence.

Then came the riots of the early 1980s, then the miners’ strike, then revelations of police frame-ups in the cases of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, then more corruption scandals. And all the time crime rose inexorably, including violent crime – even as the Conservative government increased expenditure on the police. By the mid-1980s, the British bobby’s reputation was in tatters.

Things have improved since then in some ways. Safeguards against abuses of police powers have been strengthened, complaints procedures introduced and refined. Corrupt officers have been sacked (although rarely prosecuted). Serious efforts have been made to eliminate police racism and to get police forces to take domestic violence seriously. There has been a genuine attempt to get police back on the beat in the inner cities. Condon has some right to feel that all his critics don’t appreciate just how much has been done to put the police back on course.

But more is required. To gain the trust and confidence of the public, justice must be seen to be done with officers who fiddle evidence or take bribes. Measures must be taken to connect the police to local communities and to gain the confidence of ethnic minorities. Resources must continue to be shifted from harassing drug-takers, prostitutes and drunks to deterring and catching muggers, burglars and rapists.

And, yes, there need to be changes in the law too – but not just on guns. One of the defining characteristics of this Tory government has been its enthusiasm for criminalising more and more behaviour – picketing, drinking at football matches, squatting, computer hacking – a tendency that has reached its nadir with the Criminal Justice Bill. Most of this anti-libertarian legislation serves only to waste police time.

If an incoming Labour government is serious about being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, as soon as it takes office it should embark on a radical programme of decriminalisation to allow the police to concentrate on stopping real villainy.

New Statesman & Society, 22 July 1994


At first sight, the Labour left looks washed up with nowhere to go. But Paul Anderson wonders whether Tony Blair’s election could revive its fortunes

It is customary to write off the Labour left – and it is easy to see why. In the past ten years it has suffered an inexorable decline in numbers and in influence, both in the Parliamentary Labour Party and among Labour’s ordinary members. Tony Benn’s narrow defeat by Denis Healey for the party’ s deputy leadership in 1981 seems a lifetime away. Almost as distant are the GLC and the 1983 election manifesto – the infamous “longest suicide note in history” – with its promises of withdrawal from Europe, unilateral nuclear disarmament and widespread nationalisation.

In parliament, the left is hopelessly split between the 26-strong hard-left Campaign Group, which no longer has a single representative on the party’s national executive committee or in the shadow cabinet, and the 100-strong but ineffectual and inactive soft-left-cum-centre-right Tribune Group, whose left-wingers are in an increasingly beleaguered minority to the centre-right (Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson are all members of Tribune).

Outside parliament, the left has lost its local government base and is weak in all but a handful of constituency parties and trade unions. In Labour’s leadership election, the two left-leaning candidates, John Prescott and Margaret Beckett, (both of them accomplices, however unwilling, in Labour’s rightward drift since the mid-1980s), were outside chances from the start. Ideologically, the Labour left is divided on economic policy, Europe, electoral reform and a host of other key questions.

In the circumstances, talk of an impending Labour left revival might seem little short of lunatic. Yet the prospect of Blair as leader does seem to have led to an outbreak of cautious left optimism at Westminster. Some Labour left-wingers reckon his brand of centrist social democracy will encourage the left to pull together in the opposite direction; others reckon Prescott’s expected strong performance will give the left greater influence.

According to Peter Hain, the MP for Neath, “the prospects for a new alliance on the left are better today than for ages. There’s a sense of flux on the left of the party. And after the Euro-elections and with a new leadership, there’s a curious contradiction in the party between optimism about our chances in the next election and a sullen demoralisation at the grass roots. People recognise that we can’t win by default, that we have to build a new agenda for radical policies. It’s a great opportunity.”

Wishful thinking? Perhaps. Hain, who isrunning for the NEC this year on a “friend of the activists” ticket, has been attempting to engineer a rapprochement between the Tribune left and the Campaign Group since 1987 – and every attempt has ended in failure. Most recently, as secretary of the Tribune Group from summer 1992 until late last year, he tried to use opposition to the Maastricht treaty and to Labour’s cautious economic policy as the basis for a left realignment. He was rewarded with the secession of the (pro-Maastricht) European Parliamentary Labour Party Tribune Group from its Westminster sister and the emnity of Gordon Brown. Main was ultimately ousted (along with his allies among the group’s officers) after publishing a pamphlet considered too explicitly critical of the shadow chancellor. Even he admits that, if Blair adopts the sort of inclusive style of leadership associated with John Smith, it could take some time for the left to get its act together.

But there are signs that things might just be moving in Main’s direction. On the parliamentary left, the Tribune Group coup against Hain and his comrades reinforced the already strong feeling among Tribune left-wingers that the group is beyond redemption and that a new, genuinely left, initiative is required – a feeling that has been further strengthened by four of the five current Tribune Group officers nominating Blair for the Labour leadership. Several left Tribunites are expected to allow their membership of the group to lapse this year, although there is disagreement among them about what to do next: a few will join the Campaign Group but most will not.

Meanwhile, the Campaign Group has also changed as the influence has waned of the old guard who can remember why Campaign split from Tribune in 1982 (for the record, the crunch issue was the register of internal party groups designed by the party leadership as a means of getting rid of Militant). Campaign’s current chair, Alan Simpson, is open to the idea of working with left Tribunites – he was on the platform at the “What’s Left?” conference earlier this month organised by Tribune newspaper, whose board has been chaired for the past year by Hain. He is less sanguine than Hain about the likelihood of a rapid realignment of the left, but nevertheless detects an air of promise. “There are big dilemmas over the organisational framework of the left in parliament,” he says. “I don’t see any prospect for a new organisational alignment for a little while yet. What’s good is the growing dialogue about issues. That’s a really helpful change.”

On its own, this wouldn’t amount to much. In the absence of a resurgence of the left in the constituencies, manoeuvring between parliamentary caucuses involving, at most, some 50 MPs, nearly all on the back benches, is, in itself, inconsequential. But there is more. Least significant is the speculation that a defeated Margaret Beckett might make an explicit pitch to lead the left from the back benches; far more important is the decision by the front-benchers and NEC members closest to the Tribune Group left to attempt to revive the Supper Club, the secretive soft-left forum set up in the Kinnock era to allow such politicians as Bryan Gould, Michael Meacher, Clare Short and David Blunkett to talk politics out of earshot of colleagues who would report to the leader’s office anyone who dissented from the Kinnock line.

So far, there has been only one poorly attended meeting, and that after months of talking about a revival – but the very fact that it happened shows that there are worries that Blair will reintroduce a Kinnock-style disciplinarian regime. Soft-left front-benchers are particularly concerned about the future role of Peter Mandelson, the Labour public relations chief in the late 1980s and a hate figure at the time for soft-left shadow cabinet members, who accused him of manipulating the media against them. Mandelson has worked on Blair’s campaign, and the soft left is looking out to see how he is rewarded. “If he’s allowed to go round trashing people again there will be all-out revolt,” says one frontbencher. “That said, it’s early days yet. Blair’s not like Kinnock. He’s basically a nice bloke.”

But the most difficult area for Blair to manage in the short run will probably not be the shadow cabinet soft left or left backbenchers but relations with the unions. The issue here is not so much the constitutional niceties of their relationship to Labour – although plenty of union leaders are sore about Blair’s role in the Omov row last year, no one expects any attempt at further constitutional change this side of a general election – but economic policy.

The unions’ disaffection with Labour on the economy goes back to the run-up to the 1992 general election, when they were unhappy at the party’s refusal to adopt sufficiently aggressive policies against unemployment. The disgruntlement went public, however, only with shadow chancellor Gordon Brown’s refusal to endorse devaluation of the pound, even after Black Wednesday forced sterling out of the ERM. Ever since then, there has been barely coded trade union criticism of Brown’s excessive caution, most consistently from GMB general secretary John Edmonds (another speaker at the Tribune “What’s Left?” conference) and Transport and General Workers Union general secretary Bill Morris. It was Edmonds whose series of interventions on the need for full employment forced Smith to declare at the TUC Congress in Brighton last year that full employment was a central Labour goal, and both union leaders have made a string of speeches during this leadership election campaign carefully designed to force each one of the candidates to endorse the unions’ economic policy agenda.

Where all this gets interesting is in the unions’ determination to press their case through Labour conference this year – blockbuster motions from the big unions are expected giving targets for full employment and for a minimum wage – and in their increasingly fraternal relations with the left in parliament and outside. It’s not just a matter of Tribune conferences. Although Edmonds himself is pro-Europe and the GMB backed Maastricht, his union has made a point of endorsing Full Employment Forum, the think-tank set up by Bryan Gould last year after his resignation from the shadow cabinet over the party’s pro-Europe economic policy in 1992. (Full Employment Forum has also set up its own group of MPs, which, som believe, might form the basis for the realignment of the parliamentary left sough by Peter Hain.)

This hardly means that the split on Europe that debilitated the Labour left’s response to Maastricht is no longer significant: with the 1996 intergovernmental conference on European Union coming up, there is still potential for spectacular bust-ups. But the fact that Brown’s Eurosceptic and Euro-Keynesian critics are now prepared to act together should be causing alarm bells to ring in the Blair camp, particularly if he has decided to keep Brown in the shadow chancellorship as a reward for his backing in the leadership contest.

None of which is to say that Labour is set for civil war under Blair. There is no appetite for a return to the bad old days of the early 1980s in any section of the party – and the left remains weak and divided, whatever the signs that it might b getting over the worst of its impotent fractiousness. Most important of all, Blair himself can ensure Labour’s political differences are successfully contained. He has written to several soft-left shadow cabinet members who did not back his leadership to say that he wants them on board, and his pronouncements on dissent in the party during the campaign have been relaxed.

“I don’t mind having a debate with peopl on the left,” he told NSS last week. “I think it’s very important. What is tiresome is when you don’t actually get people debating with you. They just sort of abuse you by saying ‘Oh well, it’s SDP Mark Two’ or ‘It’s not really socialism’ without ever explaining what they mean by socialism. I’ve put forward what I believe the Labour Party and socialism is about. If people want to knock that down, that’s fine, but they should use arguments to do so.”.

As long as his promises of tolerance an openness are put into practice, and as long as the soft left feels wanted in Blair’s shadow cabinet, he should have no more difficult a ride than his predecessor. But Smith did not have a particularly easy time, and Blair honeymoon will not last forever – it might even come to an end this October in Blackpool if the unions win their trial of strength. Whether he has the management skills necessary to deal with the run-ins when they inevitably start is one of the many unknowns about him.

New Statesman & Society leader, 15 July 1994

The international plan for the partition of Bosnia finalised in Geneva last week and endorsed by the Group of Seven summit in Naples at the week­end is a shabby capitulation to Serbian a­gression.

The long and the short of it is that unless the Bosnian government accepts by 17 July Serb control of more than half its terri­tory, it will face international sanctions, with­drawal of the United Nations’ humanitarian relief effort and an end to the protection of “safe havens” by UN troops.

Unsurprisingly, President Alija Izetbegovic’s government is less than happy with the plan—but the threats against it if it refuses to comply are of such magnitude that it has no alternative but to accept. Despite all the rhetoric of the international community about the importance of maintaining Bosnia’s terri­torial integrity—a rhetoric employed with particular enthusiasm by President Bill Clin­ton—partition of Bosnia is now virtually inevitable.

The British and French govern­ments have at long last got what they wanted from the very beginning of the Bosnia crisis, before it erupted into war: the dismember­ment of a state that their “expert” foreign ministries had declared unviable before it was even created and which they never lifted a finger to help.

Of course, there is some ground for hope. There is a slim chance that the Serbs will refuse to say that they will give up a third of the land they have grabbed, thereby ensuring that existing sanctions on them are not lifted and that the arms embargo on Bosnia is removed. The Bosnian government’s forces have already started to win the war against the Serbs, who are increasingly demoralised even though they are better armed.

By the end of the year, armed at last with the tanks, heavy artillery and ground attack aircraft that they have been denied throughout this war (unlike the Serbs, who have had the Yugoslav army’s tanks and artillery from the start), the Bosnian forces might even have got to the point of breaking the Serbs’ supply lines through northern Bosnia to the western towns of Banja Luka and Prijedor.

If that happened, it is not inconceivable that the Serbs would be forced to sue for peace on terms that allowed the re-creation of a secular, multi-ethnic, democratic Bosnia covering the whole of its internationally recognised territory.

But such an outcome essentially depends on Slobodan Milosevic and his puppet Radovan Karadzic really being as stupid as they ap­pear. For, if they reject the partition plan, they will be looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Given what they are after, it makes far more sense for them to take what the international community is offering them with open arms: a large chunk of Bosnia in a continuous swathe, their “ethnic cleansing” accepted as a fait accompli, the lifting of sanctions, no relaxation of the international constraints on the ability of the Bosnian government to de­fend itself. Unless they are idiots, Milosevic and Karadzic must be thinking that Christmas has come early. They are being offered pre­cisely what they have been holding out for.

The brutal truth is that, even by the stand­ards that David Owen and his various partners have set as “mediators” in negotiations among what they call “the warring factions”, the past few weeks’ diplomacy in Geneva have been an extraordinarily cynical perfor­mance. It is difficult to imagine an outcome more favourable to the Serbs if Owen had been on their payroll.

Perhaps, if the partition plan could be real­istically expected to bring the killing to an end, there might be something—not much, just something—going for it. But there is no reason to believe that it will do any such thing. On one hand, the likelihood is that, like the Palestinians after the partition of Palestine in 1948 and and the subsequent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the defeated Bosnians will turn to increasingly desperate ideologies and actions to retrieve what they feel has been seized from them.

So far, the Bosnian government has done remarkably well in controlling the more militant Islamists: contrary to what most of the British news media seem to believe, Bos­nia remains a secular democracy; and, although the majority of the population in areas under government control is Muslim, it remains committed to religious tolerance and multi-ethnicity. Partition could make the pressure for the creation of an Islamic state irresistible; it will certainly encourage the growth of militant Islam, perhaps with a ter­rorist current.

On the other hand, there is no reason to believe that the Serbs will suddenly lay down their arms. The Milosevic regime survives on war: with its economy in tatters, it continues to exist only because it is able to persuade its population that Serbia is surrounded by enemies and is battling for national survival. If the Bosnian war fizzles out after partition, Milosevic will have to look for new targets. Partition of Bosnia makes it more not less likely that Serbia will turn its attentions to Kosova or Macedonia.

Of course, in the long run Milosevic’s Greater Serbia is doomed. As Branka Magas argued in NSS last month, Serbia is such an economic basket-case and faces such internal social tensions that it is difficult to imagine the Milosevic regime surviving for ever, even with the help of all the tools of the totalitarian police state.

But it might hang on for decades rather than months or years before it falls as a result of its internal weakness. A compre­hensive defeat on the battlefield, on the other hand, would greatly hasten the process. In the end, the key to lasting peace in the Balkans is to lift the arms embargo so that the Bosnians can inflict that defeat.

New Statesman & Society leader, 8 July 1994

Just as in 1992, the “race” for the Labour leadership is no such thing. Like John Smith then, Tony Blair is certain to be elected by a landslide, and the result is that the whole show has become rather tedious. The interesting question is not who wins on 21 July, but what Blair will do when he becomes leader – and so far he has proved himself adept at not revealing too much apart from his broad political philosophy.

But if Blair is pretty much home and dry, the same cannot be said of either of the contestants for the job of deputy leader. Here there is a real race going on between Margaret Beckett and John Prescott, and the signs are that it is going to be a close-run thing. All the opinion polls put them neck and neck.

Whom to choose? A difficult question, not least because of the amorphous nature of the deputy leader’s job description. Indeed, there is a strong case, most eloquently advanced in the past couple of weeks by Tony Wright, the MP for Cannock and Burntwood, that the deputy leadership of the Labour Party is not really a job at all. Just about everything the deputy leader does, the argument goes, from filling in for the leader at prime minister’s questions to chairing various national executive sub-committees, could quite easily be done by other senior Labour politicians. On this view, just about the only thing that a deputy leader is useful for is what Beckett has been doing since Smith’s death – leading the party between a leader’s death or resignation and the election of another leader. And there’s no reason that such a caretaker leader could not be elected by the NEC as and when the need arose.

Of course, in practice, what Labour’s deputy leadership has meant has depended on the incumbent and the period. When Labour is in office, it is generally a post conferred to give status to its holder. Out of office, the deputy leadership can be more important. With Denis Healey and Roy Hattersley, the post was perceived as crucial because each

provided right-wing respectability to a left-wing leader – which is why the two serious attempts to unseat them from the left (Tony Benn’s 1981 challenge to Healey and Pres-cott’s 1988 challenge to Hattersley) were so vigorously opposed by the party machine. In 1992, the idea behind Smith’s support for Beckett getting the job was that as a right-wing man, he needed a left-wing woman to provide “balance”.

Nevertheless, for all the symbolic importance that the deputy leadership has had in recent years, it is difficult to work out precisely what the last three deputy leaders have done as deputy leaders that goes beyond the symbolic. Healey managed to be deputy at the same time as holding down the shadow foreign affairs portfolio; Hattersley was shadow chancellor and then shadow home secretary – neither of them exactly part-time jobs – while he was deputy.

It is true that Beckett was charged mainly with sorting out the party’s campaigns and organisation – but that was largely because of pressure from Prescott, who based his 1992 deputy leadership campaign on a promise to turn the job into a campaigning one if he was elected. As she has found in the past couple of years, travelling the country whipping up party morale sounds like a great idea but is rather difficult to put into practice except at election times. Reinvigorating the Labour Party is a mammoth task, certainly too big for even the most dynamic politician to take on single-handed. It is no surprise that we have heard rather less about “the need for a campaigning deputy leader” than we did in 1988 and 1992.

So we are back to making a decision on the basis of who would better complement Blair in the way that Healey complemented Foot or Hattersley complemented Kinnock. Is there anything to choose between Beckett and Prescott? Certainly not on political grounds. If 15 years ago Beckett was very definitely on the hard left, she has not been for at least five years, and there is nothing in her personal manifesto to suggest that the Campaign Group is being other than sentimental in giving her its support. Contrary to the Guardian‘s view that she is “too much a creature of old left labourism for comfort”, these days Beckett, like Prescott, is very much a mainstream Labour politician, just a little to the left of the party’s centre.

Both Beckett and Prescott have been key figures in Labour policy-making in the past five years, and both can be assumed to back its broad thrust if not every last detail. Both are more Eurosceptical than Blair, both are hostile to electoral reform, both like the idea of cutting defence expenditure to continental European levels. Of course there are differences in nuance between them – but either would provide much the same political balance to Blair.

Which brings the decision down to such matters as style and personality. Beckett is undoubtedly the more cautious by temperament – though whether this is a good or bad thing is arguable. Her critics say that she is dull and plodding, her friends that she is sober and dependable. Similarly, Prescott’s energy and enthusiasm for policy innovation are recognised by all – but there are widely differing assessments of their worth. His critics describe him as a loose cannon and say that some of his policy ideas are half-baked; his friends say that his energy is a great strength and argue that most of his policy ideas have been sound. Prescott has the advantage of being and sounding working-class, say his supporters; Beckett is a woman, say hers. Then there are the questions of who has more experience (probably Beckett), who is better on television (definitely Prescott), who is more effective in parliament (definitely Beckett) and who is more inspiring on the stump (definitely Prescott).

It’s a very difficult choice – and all for a job that doesn’t really matter. In the end, the best way to settle it is probably to toss a coin.

New Statesman & Society leader, 1 July 1994

John Major’s use of the British veto at the European summit in Corfu to prevent the appointment of Belgian Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene as Jacques Delors’ successor at the head of the European Commission was, of course, largely motivated by domestic considerations. Contrary to the Tory spin doctors’ view in the wake of their party’s “not as bad as expected” humiliation in the European elections, Major’s position in his party remains extremely vulnerable. Kicking Johnny Foreigner, particularly if he’s a fat Belgian federalist, goes down a treat with the xenophobes on the Tory right – and that reduces the likelihood of a credible challenge to Major’s leadership this autumn.

But it would be wrong to consider Major’s performance entirely through the prism of British politics. Dehaene would have been vetoed even if the British Tories were riding high in the polls – and not just because he is a Euro-federalist. Dehaene is from the left of European Christian Democracy, a man who could have been expected to pursue an economic agenda as President of the Commission not unlike Delors’ social-democratic one. He is the sort of person, in other words, who might have revived those reflationary, public works elements of Delors’ white paper to which the British government has so successfully led the opposition over the past few months. And that is precisely what the Tories don’t want.

For them, unemployment is a good thing: it keeps wages low and workers cowed. It can be reduced only by people “pricing themselves into jobs”. Moreover, as things stand, the Tories reckon that they have done enough to scupper any possibility of Euro-Keynesian measures to attack the mass unemployment that is eating away at the social fabric of the entire continent – and they are well pleased. It’s certainly no time to risk some social-Christian do-gooder trying to dream up schemes to set people back to work.

That such a point of view is both morally bankrupt and economically illiterate should be apparent to anyone – but the unfortunate fact is that the Tories and their allies on the free-market right have done serious damage to the prospects for a Euro-Keynesian response to the unemployment crisis, and that has important implications for the left throughout Europe.

Euro-Keynesianism remains the best way of attacking European unemployment. Demand needs to be increased throughout the continent, and the impossibility of any individual European state going it alone with reflation was amply demonstrated by the failure of Frangois Mitterrand’s socialist experiment in the early 1980s: combined European action, preferably through European Union institutions, is just about the only way for the EU countries to reflate without causing massive balance-of-payments problems.

But the political balance in Europe is now such that implementation of a Euro-Keynesian strategy is unlikely. Right-wing election victories in France and Italy in the past 18 months have reinforced the already strong pro-austerity consensus among EU governments, and Delors’ hopes that his white paper’s programme of deregulation would buy off opposition to its proposals for large-scale public spending proved wrong. It is going to take a few left election victories if Euro-Keynesianism is to have a chance.

So does that mean that there is nothing practically that can be done about unemployment? By no means. Stimulating the overall level of demand in the economy is only part of the picture: even within the constraints of austerity, there are actions that can be taken that would significantly cut the dole queue.

What is not needed is further labour market deregulation as part of a desperate attempt to reduce west European wages to Polish or even Malaysian levels. West European competitiveness is never going to be a matter of undercutting Asian or east European sweat
shops: western Europe’s future has to be high-skill and technologically advanced. In line with this, as social democratic parties throughout western Europe argue, it is crucial that education and training are constantly improved.

But, as John Prescott has said very clearly during the Labour leadership contest, improved education and training do not of themselves generate very many jobs. Other measures are also needed. Progressive redistribution of income and wealth through the tax and benefits systems has a beneficial effect because poor people tend to spend a greater proportion of their incomes on domestically produced goods. Shifting consumption from private to public sector by raising taxes to pay for public transport and construction programmes stimulates the economy because public works programmes involve few imports. Taxation can also be used to provide incentives to entrepreneur-ship and to subsidise public-sector service jobs. The benefits system can be reformed to make it easier for people to come off social security and go to work.

Whether such measures are enough to ensure full employment, in the sense of everyone who wants a job having a job, without politically unsustainable levels of tax is, however, a moot point. It could be that even the most vigorous feasible application of policies for job-creation reduces unemployment only by a little. What then? It is here that we have to start to think much more radically, about schemes for sharing out the available work – by cutting weekly working hours, reducing the age of retirement, encouraging job sharing, making it easier to take years off work to study at any age and so on – and about the possibilities of developing a “twin economy” partially isolated from the normal economy and with its own money, as advocated by the think tank Demos. It is a mark of the conservatism of British politics that such ideas are anathema to every established party.

New Statesman & Society leader, 24 June 1994

Tony Blair’s speech at last week’s Guardian/Fabian Society “Whatever Next?” conference in London was without a doubt the clearest expression of his overall beliefs that he has made during this Labour leadership election campaign.

“The socialism of Marx,” he declared, “of state control of industry and production, is dead. It misunderstood the nature of a modern market economy; it failed to recognise that the state and public sector can become a vested interest capable of oppression as well as the vested interests of wealth and capital; and it was based on a false view of class that became too rigid.”

“By contrast,” he went on, “socialism as defined by certain key values and beliefs is not merely alive, it has an historic opportu-nuity now to give leadership. The basis of such socialism lies in its view that individuals are social, interdependent human beings, that individuals cannot be divorced from society. It is, if you like, social-ism.

“It contains a judgment that individuals owe a duty to one another and to a broader society – the left view of citizenship. And it believes that it is only through recognising that interdependence and by society as a whole acting upon it that the individual’s interests can be best advanced.”

So there you have it – Tony Blair, just like John Smith, is a Christian socialist in the R H Tawney mould. For him, socialism is not about nationalisation and planning, nor is it about class struggle. Rather, it is “a set of principles and beliefs based around the notion of a strong society as necessary to advance the individual”.

And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. Leaving aside the question of whether Blair was being fair to Marx, who was much less of an enthusiast for “centralised state control of industry and production” than Blair thinks (and rather more nuanced in his ideas about class), it is perfectly reasonable of him to distance himself from the dominant Marxism of this century – the disaster that was “actually existing socialism”.

He is also quite right to make it clear that he is opposed to the notion, dominant on the British left from the 1920s until the late 1970s, that socialism is all about nationalisation and planning. Labour’s association with the bureaucracy and inefficiency of the Morrisonian model of nationalisation (a model, incidentally, that owes a lot to Fabian admiration for Stalin’s Russia) did it tremendous harm, as indeed did its enthusiasm for the tower block.

More generally, Christian (or rather ethical) socialism, with its emphasis on the importance of altruism, solidarity and community, is an honourable tradition of left thinking, untainted by the bureaucratic statism at the heart of Leninism and Fabianism. Like G D H Cole’s guild socialism, anarchism and the ideas behind the cooperative movement, it is a useful tool for developing a non-statist socialism – the only sort that can be credible at the end of the 20th century. We do need to place what Blair called “a new settlement between citizen and society” at the centre of the left’s concerns.

But there are difficulties here too. If the left needs a political philosophy, and if Blair’s broad approach has a certain amount going for it, the picture is not entirely rosy. Most fundamentally, there is a major tension between Blair’s advocacy of values of “social justice, cohesion, equality of opportunity and community” and his enthusiasm for the market and for the consumerist affluence that has transformed the everyday lives of the majority of people in the developed world since 1945. As many left and green thinkers have argued since the 1960s, it is the rise of privatised consumption that more than anything else has eroded feelings of solidarity and community in modern industrial societies: ours is a society of enjoying the home we have bought, driving to work alone in our cars, staying in to watch the television. Certainly people feel isolated, certainly they yearn for a feeling of belonging – but to satisfy these cravings demands a quite extraordinarily profound transformation of our whole way of life. Blair, like most of us, wills the end but not the means.

More mundanely, there is the problem that political philosophy butters no parsnips. However appealing the big idea of community and solidarity might turn out to be – and it certainly worked for Bill Clinton in 1992 – it cannot be all that Labour offers the electorate if it is to win the next election. The party needs concrete policies to give credibility to its vision and to reassure voters that a Labour government would mean more than just a change in government rhetoric.

Last weekend, however, Blair talked of “a central vision based around principle, but liberated from particular policy prescriptions that have become confused with principle”. The charitable interpretation is that he meant that Labour shouldn’t stick to particular policies just because they have always been Labour policies, which is fair enough. But it is equally plausible that he meant that the party should fight the next election with the minimum of concrete policy commitments.

Such an approach is superficially tempting, particularly on the economy: given the impossibility of Keynesianism in one country and the unpopularity of taxes, it is difficult these days to put together an economic policy package that is both election-winning and specific, as Labour found in 1992. But it would be a disaster to yield to the temptation. If Labour goes into the next election without being clear about what precisely it will do with the reins of power, it will not win the trust of the electorate. Even Clinton, in a political culture dominated far more than Britain’s by the soundbite and the political broadcast, offered more than just big ideas.

New Statesman & Society, 17 June 1994

Can Tony Blair define a new Zeitgeist? Will he be the most extreme right-wing Labour leader ever? Or is he just promising more of the same, asks Paul Anderson

In a week of enthusiastic endorsements of Tony Blair, quite the most gushing came from Martin Jacques, the former editor of the Communist Party magazine Marxism Today, writing in the Sunday Times.

The Labour Party leadership election, he wrote, “has the potential to transform Britain’s political landscape . . . The Conservatives have lost their way and Labour seems about to elect a leader in Blair who marks a break with the past… The desire for change has been in the air for several years now. The problem was that Labour did not offer a convincing alternative. The result was a blocked political system. Blair could be the man to unblock it… He could turn out to be one of those rare politicians who, like Margaret Thatcher and Harold Wilson, succeed in defining a new Zeitgeist, in ushering in a new political era.”

For Jacques, Blair is a Labour politician “possessed of a deep hostility towards labourism —towards the culture of class, the block vote, con¬servatism, certainty and insularity — which is now, at last, in headlong retreat. .. Blair will be the first leader of either of our two major parties who is an authentic creature of the 1960s and its aftermath, of the era of weak ideology and postmodernism.”

Over the top and pretentious? Certainly, and Jacques’s underlying assumption that class no longer matters in British politics is nonsense. But the notion that Blair marks a radical break with Labour’s past is widespread. According to Ken Livingstone, MP for Brent East, Blair would be “the most extreme right-wing leader” the party has ever had. “He more than anyone else represents the desire to turn the Labour Party into something much more like the American Democratic Party.” Even the normally guarded political editor of the Financial Times sees the election of Blair as somehow changing Labour’s ideological identity once and for all. “By the end of July, we should have a clear idea of whether his party is ready to see social democracy sup¬plant socialism,” he wrote in a profile last weekend.

But will Blair make that much difference? Perhaps — but it is more likely that the effect of his elevation to the Labour leadership will simply be more of the same with a slightly modified gloss. Blair undoubtedly has a very different style from any Labour leader since Harold Wilson. Like Wilson in 1964, he appears classless, he’s young, he’s a good television performer. And in Labour’s row last year on its links with the trade unions (more accurately, its system for leadership elections) he did stick his neck out in favour of one member, one vote, which lost him some union friends.

This, however, is all image, apart from the union link — and no one is suggesting that further reforms of the Labour constitution are on the cards this side of a general election. Even the most cursory consideration of the stream of interviews and speeches he has made in the past week shows that, for all his rhetoric of “change” and “renewal”, he is determined to keep Labour firmly on the course set by John Smith and Neil Kinnock. And although he told the Guardian‘s Patrick Wintour that “we are not going to win through the politics of caution … It is never enough for a left-of-centre party to wait for government to be delivered to it”, this means setting caution at the centre of Labour strategy.

Take, for a start, the hardy old perennial of pacts with the Lib Dems, up for discussion yet again at this weekend’s Guardian-Fabian Society “Whatever Next?” conference in London (needless to say, the event was planned before the Lib Dems’ disappointing performance in the Euro-elections). For some reason, word had got around that Blair might be open to a pre-election deal with Paddy Ashdown over seats. So he killed the story, telling the Financial Times: “I don’t believe in pacts and I don’t believe that they work… What I have always said is that at the level of ideas we should be prepared to open up. The Social Justice Commission is the beginning of that.” In the Guardian he declared that “if Labour is not electable, then doing a deal is not going to make it electable”, then went on to attack the Lib Dems’ record in Tower Hamlets.

Like it or loathe it, the position is identical to Smith’s. It was Smith who invited Lib Dems on to the Commission for Social Justice, Smith who authorised the assault on Lib Dem local govern¬ment spearheaded by Jack Straw in the six months before this year’s council elections. The idea is to go for a majority Labour gov¬ernment, but to keep the Lib Dems reasonably sweet in case they’re needed for a coalition or to prop up a minority Labour administration. In days gone by, Jacques would have denounced this as old-fashioned labourist “winner-takes-all” politics, deeply antipathetic to pluralism and blind to the fact that, in the postmodern world, traditional parties are passe.

In line with this, Blair’s position is also at one with Smith’s on proportional repre¬sentation for the House of Commons — kicked into touch last year with the promise of a referendum. “The party policy is to give people a referendum on PR,” Blair told the FT. “I personally am not persuaded by PR but the party policy I think is the right one.”

On other constitutional matters: “We must revi¬talise our aged and decrepit constitution—de¬volving power to the nations and regions of our country, rebuilding our local democracy, removing unaccountable quangos and bure¬aucracy, taking on vested interests, granting our people the constitutional rights and free¬dom other nations have long taken for granted and guaranteeing equal rights in society and fair treatment at work for all our citizens.”

That is Blair a week ago, speaking in his constituency: leaving aside that he said nothing about the undemocratic nature of the House of Lords, it is virtually indistinguishable from Smith’s pronouncements on the constitution at a Charter 88 meeting last year. It is fine as far as it goes but it doesn’t go very far.

As for the economy, “the key to whether Brtiain succeeds lies first of all in developing its potential through eduction and skills” – just as Gordon Brown has been saying for the past two years and just as John Smith said as shadow chancellor from the late 1980s. In similar vein, Blair has made it clear since declaring his candidacy that Labour will not be in the business of taxing and spending for the sake of it; nor will its industrial policy “pick winners”.

He has backed “full employment” (although “I don’t think anyone would suggest that this is something we can achieve overnight”) and a minimum wage (“implemented in a way that is sensible and practical”). And he has endorsed partnership between the private and public sectors to rebuild Britain’s economy.

He won’t declare on the future of tax and benefit systems until after the Commission on Social Justice publishes its report in mid-October — a report that no one now expects to recommend more than minor adjustments to the post-1945 welfare state settlement. Not one of Blair’s pronouncements has provided the slightest indication that he has given a moment’s thought to the green critique of social democracy’s enthusiasm for economic growth or to the deleterious effects of military expenditure.

Once again, all completely in line with the past.

It is, of course, easy to find a difference in nuance on economic policy between Blair and his main challenger for the leadership, John Prescott. Prescott has made much of the crucial importance of full employment for the best part of a decade and has spent the past nine months as employment spokesperson developing policies for job creation. Last weekend, he said that Labour ought to set a target for job creation “because I don’t think people are going to be satisfied by rhetoric”.

But he has also declared that no timescale should be attached to this, which rather spoils his point. And, in policy terms, Prescott is suggesting nothing that everyone else on the Labour front bench hasn’t already endorsed.

Along with Margaret Beckett, Prescott is also far more sceptical than Blair about the prospects for European monetary union. But neither Beckett nor Prescott is prepared to state publicly that the only way for a Labour government to act is to let EMU go hang and go it alone for job-creating growth.

Unlike Bryan Gould, who resigned from the shadow cabinet in disgust in 1992, after Gordon Brown refused to endorse devaluation even in the wake of Black Wednesday, both have given unswerving public backing to Labour’s ERM-based economic policy ever since Kinnock and Smith introduced it in the late 1980s.

There is no sign that Blair has had even private doubts.

As NSS pointed out in its leader last week, there is still plenty on which Blair has never said anything, from the Common Agricultural Policy to the future of Northern Ireland. He might yet surprise us. But on the key policy questions, there is no sign that he has any intention of deviating from the cautious game-plan con¬ceived by Kinnock in the wake of the 1987 election defeat and made still more cautious by Smith after 1992.

The aim remains to play safe — to reassure voters, particularly affluent workers and the middle class, of Labour’s trustworthiness, by distancing the party from its controversial past and avoiding commitments on tax and spending until immediately before the next general election. Far from representing a radical change in Labour’s direction, Blair is straitjacketed by the austerity social democracy established as Labour’s ideology by Kinnock in the late 1980s.

In the week of Labour’s landslide in the Euro-elections, it is tempting to see this continuity as a strength — particularly in the context of Blair’s apparent attractiveness to voters. But the dangers of caution should not be forgotten. It has, after all, lost one general election already after a stunning mid-term Euro-election success, and it could do so again.

It is quite possible that a Blair-led Labour Party will succeed where Kinnock’s failed, picking up substantial support from the affluent working and middle class to romp home with a large Commons majority. But that is by no means guaranteed.

On one hand, the affluent voters might just stick with the Tories, particularly if they ditch John Major and the economy really does pick up. On the other, there is the real possibility that wooing affluent voters by minimising policy commitments, particularly on employment, will en¬courage abstention by Labour’s core traditional working-class supporters.

Unsurprisingly, there is no great enthusiasm for the strategy of social democratic caution among Labour politicians and activists. They’re prepared to live with it, not least because the only coherent alternative on offer, the devaluationist anti-European Keynesianism most cogently advanced by Bryan Gould, seems worse.

And if they’re enthusiastic about Blair, it is not because they feel the need suddenly to turn their backs on labourism or to opt for social democracy: they did that years ago. It’s simply that they think him the best available salesman. He has an unenviable job.

Leader, New Statesman and Society, 10 June 1994

By the time most readers of NSS get this issue, voting in the European election will be over and the runners in the Labour leadership will have de¬clared — as indeed will the non-runners. But as we go to press the only certainty is that Gordon Brown will not be putting his name forward. All the others who have been mentioned as possible contenders have kept their intentions to themselves as planned.

All the same, it is increasingly likely that the best person to lead Labour into the next election is not going to be in the race at all. Robin Cook has this week apparently been swayed by his poor showing in opinion polls of Labour Party members and supporters not to go for the top job. Far and away the most intel¬ligent and radical of all the would-be contenders — and easily the most effectively combative in the House of Commons and as a public speaker — he seems to have decided that standing would mean risking humiliation and subsequent demotion from his current job as Labour’s trade and industry spokesperson.

Many of Cook’s supporters will be disappointed, and with reason. He is the most able representative of Labour’s libertarian left, a political tendency that deserves a voice in the leadership contest. Given that his economic policy differences with Tony Blair are nowhere near as big as those between Bryan Gould and John Smith, there is no reason to expect that he would have been given the Gould treatment in the event of a Blair victory.

As it is, however, if Cook sticks to his decision not to run, Tony Blair is now virtually unstoppable. The reason is simple. Put bluntly, there is no credible challenger apart from Cook.

Of the two hopefuls who seem almost certain to run against Blair from the left, John Prescott cannot win and Margaret Beckett has even less chance. Both Prescott and Beckett are generally admired in the Labour Party, and each has undoubted qualities. Prescott is blunt, pugnacious and sharp-minded, and Beckett has an unrivalled head for detail.

But neither, unlike Cook, is widely considered to be leadership material. On the level of image, it is difficult to imagine Prescott living down his reputation as a loose cannon or Beckett suddenly acquiring a television manner that matches the warmth of her off-air personality. More important, both are out of tune with the politics of the time. They are very much of the old left – Eurosceptic, against proportional representation for the House of Commons, lukewarm about green politics. Neither will get more than grudging support from the increasingly important part of the Labour left that is pro-Europe, pro-PR and environmentalist.

At least, however, Prescott and Beckett have the capacity to give Blair a real political test. More is known about Blair’s views than was before John Smith’s death  – but he is still very much an unknown quantity. His position on law and order is by now familiar, as indeed is his line on trade  union rights. His speech last Thursday in Eastleigh, much praised by the weekend papers, endorsed the approach to economic policy developed by Gordon Brown, the shadow chancellor, in the past two years; and he has made a string of speeches outlining his ideas about a new sort of demo¬cratic socialism involving a changed relationship between the individual and the community.

But too much of this political philosophising is high-sounding flannel, and the range of policy areas on which he has said nothing is surprisingly large, particularly considering his reputation among the pundits as a man of ideas. Indeed, it is just about impossible to find more than a soundbite on such crucial policy areas as European integration, electoral reform, defence and security after the cold war, Ireland, the future of the welfare state or the effects of global warming – in fact, just about everything that has not fallen directly within his brief since he was catapulted into his first frontbench job a year after entering parliament.

This is not to say that Blair has no opinions apart from those required to function as a shadow minister. Nor is it to cast aspersions on his effectiveness as shadow home secre¬tary or on his ability to lead Labour. But the lacunae in public knowledge of his politics cannot be overlooked. Forget the cynics’ argument that his lack of ideological baggage is his greatest strength: it is essential for Labour (and indeed for the country as a whole given the party’s standing in the opinion polls) that Blair is not elected to the leadership before being made to give a full account of his political credo. A hard-fought leadership campaign “on the issues”, as Tony Benn would put it, is a must.

When Blair wins, his first priority will have to be to unite the party. Even if his support is at the levels suggested by the opinion polls, there remains a substantial minority of La¬bour MPs and ordinary members (including, it seems from anecdotal evidence, most of the activists) who are underwhelmed by the prospect of Blair as leader. His performance during the leadership campaign might change their minds – but the likelihood is that he will need to be generous to the left if he is to avoid demoralisation of activists and polarisation of the Parliamentary Labour Party in the run-up to the next election. Offering Robin Cook his pick of the top three shadow cabinet jobs is the very least he should do.

New Statesman & Society, 3 June 1994

Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey talk to Noam Chomsky about the roots of his libertarian  socialist politics

Noam Chomsky is nothing if not consistent. Back in the mid-1960s, a rising star in the American academy because of his work in linguistics, he shocked his colleagues by taking a vocal public stand against what he called “the American invasion of Vietnam”. In his 1966 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”, he railed against the assumption underlying all mainstream discussion of US policy in Indochina – “namely, that the United States has the right to extend its power and control without limit, insofar as is feasible”.

Ever since, while continuing to develop his linguistic theories, he has been the most prominent US critic both of his country’s foreign policy and of the intellectuals and media that give it overwhelming consensual support. “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” was followed by a series of ever more devastating attacks on American policy in Vietnam (collected in American Power and the New Mandarins and At War With Asia): by 1970, he was far and away the best known intellectual opponent of the US war effort.

After the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, he expanded his field of fire with a string of articles and books. All are worth reading, but several stand out. In 1979, the two volumes of The Political Economy of Human Rights, co-authored with Edward Herman, exposed America’s backing for Indonesia’s war against East Timor, its responsibility for the rise of Pol Pot in Cambodia and its support for bloody dictatorships in Latin America. In 1982, Towards a New Cold War subjected the US rearmament programme and its apologists to an unrelenting political attack.

Next was The Fateful Triangle (1984), an assault on US sponsorship of Israel’s suppression of the Palestinians, which prompted Zionist accusations that Chomsky was a “self-hating Jew”. It was followed by Turning the Tide (1985), opposing the US siege of Nicaragua and support for death squads and dictatorship in El Salvador and Guatemala. In the late 1980s and early 1990s came a further batch of writings on the media (notably Necessary Illusions and – with Herman – Manufacturing Consent), Latin America (Year 501), the Iran-Contra scandal (The Culture of Terrorism), and the cold war (Deterring Democracy). A volume on the “new world order”, World Orders Old and New, is out in October (in Britain as a Pluto paperback).

Chomsky is a critic, not a policy-maker, a whistle-blower rather than a strategist furnished with alternatives. Today, he is using all his considerable powers of argument against calls for the US military to go into Bosnia and Haiti. Although he backs the lifting of the UN embargo on arms sales to Bosnia, he says: “I find it hard to take seriously those people who are saying ‘Let’s intervene’. It just happens that there’s one country that’s offered to send forces to protect Bosnia – Iran. I haven’t heard anyone agree to that, and there’s a straightforward reason. If Iran were to invade Bosnia to save it from Serbian attack, the result would not be pretty. The same problems arise with anyone else.”

As for Haiti, he says: “The people there don’t want US intervention. They understand what it means, from bitter experience – the end of the grassroots movements, the end of any hope of democracy.”

Chomsky has amassed an extraordinary body of evidence to show that, since 1948, the US has operated a foreign policy of refusing to allow radical nationalist third-world regimes to come between the US and the raw materials needed by its industry. Military intervention has been used consistently to this end – and the media have given the policy almost unstinting support.

But the single-mindedness of Chomsky’s critique has unnerved many commentators. Mainstream journalists get particularly hot under the collar about his “propaganda model” of the workings of the US media, according to which television networks and the press slavishly defer to the government line on every contentious foreign policy question. It’s far more complex than that, say the journalists. Chomsky will have none of it. Every piece of research he and Edward Herman have conducted on media coverage of Nicaragua in the 1980s shows “a degree of conformity to power that would rarely be attained in a totalitarian state”, he says. “The only time that the propaganda model is falsified is when the media turn out to be even more servile to the interests of the state than we would expect.”

Still more controversially, Chomsky has been criticised, particularly from the right, for being soft on communism and third-world authoritarianism. He has always concentrated his fire on the US and has consistently argued for solidarity with the victims of US policy. Where, ask the critics, are his polemics against the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan, Pol Pot’s genocide, Cuba’s drug-running or the PLO’s terrorism?

Chomsky dismisses this line of criticism out of hand. “If you look at all of the stuff I wrote about the Vietnam war, there’s not one word supporting the Vietcong,” he says. “The left was all backing Ho Chi Minh: I was saying that North Vietnam is a brutal Stalinist dictatorship. But it wasn’t my job to tell the Vietnamese how to run the show. My view is that solidarity means taking my country, where I have some responsibility and some influence, and compelling it to get its dirty hands out of other people’s affairs. You give solidarity to the people of a country, not the authorities. You don’t give solidarity to governments, you don’t give it to revolutionary leaders, you don’t give it to political parties.

“The point is that the people of a country should be free to do what they want – and the main reason they’re not is that we’ve got our boots on their necks. Once our boots are off their necks, it’s up to them to figure out how to be free. If they’re left with an oppressive government, then they can overthrow it – and maybe I’ll help them.”

Chomsky’s refusal to extend support to governments and leaders is rooted in his underlying anarchist political philosphy. This world-view is based in part on the notion that a capacity for self-realisation and freedom is an unchanging part of human nature (an idea not unrelated to the central thesis of his linguistic theory that, as part of our genetic make-up, we all have an innate capacity for acquiring the rules of language). But it is also based on Chomsky’s study of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism and of the dissident libertarian Marxism of 1920s and 1930s council communism – an underground socialist tradition he first came across through friends and family as a teenager in the 1940s.

“I disagree with the orthodox left on just about everything, going back to the Bolshevik revolution,” he says: all the Bolsheviks managed to create was a form of state capitalism. “That was a defeat for socialism. Lenin and Trotsky destroyed the factory councils, remade the Soviets and wiped out every socialist tendency in the revolution. Leading socialist intellectuals like Anton Pannekoek and Rosa Luxemburg saw at once that it was counter-revolutionary.”

Unlike the majority of anarchists, who argue that direct action is the only form that anarchist politics can take, Chomsky does not believe that his political philosophy dictates particular political tactics. “The basic anarchist idea is that any system of authority has to prove its legitimacy: if it can’t prove its legitimacy then it ought to be eliminated. Occasionally a system of authority can justify itself. If it can’t, and it’s important enough, well, you have to undermine it. How you do so depends on the situation. There’s nothing in anarchism that tells you how to proceed.” This means that, sometimes, even traditional reformist activity is the best way forward. Chomsky is a member (albeit “very passive”) of Democratic Socialists of America, the Socialist International affiliate in the US that boasts a handful of supporters among Democrat Congressional representatives. “You can be anti-parliamentarian – and indeed I am – and still think it’s important to deal with parliament,” he says. “If you’re trying to stop US terror in central America, it’s sometimes very effective to lobby Congress. There are no new ideas in political strategy – just constant educating and organising.”

New Statesman & Society leader 3 June 1994

Such is the incompetence of John Major that Tory European election campaign managers must be grateful that the newspapers have decided that the main story this week is whether or not former Tory defence minister Alan Clark displayed his penis to a 13-year-old girl. At least Major comes out of that story with some credit: he was an opponent of the Powellite bigotry championed by James Harkess, the father of the girl in question, when Tory candidate for Brixton in 1970.

But even the lurid tale of Clark’s alleged misdemeanours cannot quite rescue Major from the spotlight after his massive gaffe on beggars and his smaller one on a “two-speed Europe”. The first was quite obviously intended as a routine Tory attempt to heap blame for society’s ills on a defenceless, marginal group: previous targets in the past couple of years have included single mothers, the workshy, “bogus” asylum-seekers, New Age travellers and ravers. Until last week, it seemed that this scapegoating tactic had few deleterious political side-effects. Liberals might howl, but the voters for the most part acquiesced. This time, however, Major appears to have gone too far: his tirade against “offensive” beggars has backfired spectacularly.

That he went on this week to state that he believes in a “two-speed Europe” – giving the unmistakable impression that he thinks that, under his leadership, Britain can’t keep up with the continent – almost defies credibility. Major is now as vulnerable as he was before the untimely death of John Smith. If the Tories get the drubbing that they deserve (and that everyone expects them to get) in next week’s European election, his days could be numbered. As Ian Aitken argues this week (see page 18), this has ramifications for the Labour leadership that the party ignores at its peril.

But the Euro-elections are not simply a referendum on the competence of Major or the performance of his government. For a start, they are happening not just in Britain but throughout the European Union, and, although it is only in Spain that the fate of a prime minister also hangs on the result, they are important in every one of the 12 EU countries. In Germany, with a general election in October, the vote is a crucial test of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s apparent political renaissance; in France, it will show whether the left has recovered from the nadir of its general election defeat last year.

More important, however, is the impact of the elections on the future of the EU itself. As a result of the increased powers for the European Parliament in the Single European Act and the Maastricht treaty, voters will for the first time be choosing MEPs who can exert real influence over EU legislation.

Of course, the powers of the European Parliament remain far more limited than those of national legislatures (although the powers of national legislatures should not be exaggerated: as study after study has shown, in recent years their role has declined just about everywhere as the powers have shifted to the executive). It is the European Commission, composed of appointees of national governments, that still sets the legislative agenda for the EU; and the European Parliament can still do little to affect the decision-making of the secretive inter-governmental Council of Ministers.

But the idea that the European Parliament is little more than an expensive talking shop – an idea, unfortunately, still all too prevalent on the British left – should have been buried long ago. Although MEPs still cannot initiate legislation, they can ask the Commission to propose it, a right previously reserved for the Council. They can also reject Commission legislation and the EU budget – which gives them serious leverage in securing amendments. And they have the right to be consulted on Commission appointments, as well as the right to sack the Commission en bloc. The MEPs elected on 9 and 12 June will have a big say in economic, social and environmental policies that will affect every EU citizen’s daily life.

What is more, the European Parliament’s powers are set to increase in the next few years. On one hand, this is a matter of MEPs using the legitimacy that comes from being democratically elected to set precedents that will be difficult to reverse once established: for example, by voting on the successor to Jacques Delors as president of the Commission. On the other, the 1996 intergovernmental conference to sort out some of the issues left dangling by Maastricht will almost certainly agree to measures to reduce the universally recognised “democratic deficit”.

The question is: what measures? Here we come back to Major’s “two-speed Europe”. The charitable interpretation of his remarks is that he meant not that Britain can’t keep up, but that Britain shouldn’t sign up for the whole package of single currency and federal polity advanced by continental Christian democrats and social democrats. As far as 1996 is concerned, that means attempting to limit as far as possible the inevitable increase in the European Parliament’s powers while trying to preserve as much as possible of the powers of the Council of Ministers and those of individual national governments within it. If this strategy fails, Major reserves the right to opt out of European democracy.

The alternative is clear: a massive increase in the powers of the European Parliament and a reduction of the role of the Council of Ministers and of individual national governments, with no opt-outs from democracy. It is a mark of the debilitating effect of the Tories’ flag-waving on the confidence of their opponents that not one leading opposition politician – not even a Liberal Democrat – has had the courage to come out explicitly for a democratic federal Europe, with the European Parliament playing the leading role, during this European election campaign.