Author Archives: Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson, Chartist column, March-April 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 23 February 2001

As I promised, this week I am unveiling the definitive guide to where Tribune readers should vote Liberal Democrat at the general election. This year, the electorate of Britain has an unprecedented chance to consign the Conservative Party to the dustbin of history — or at least to a poor third place in terms of seats in the House of Commons. The Tories are in an unprecedented mess, and are there for the taking. But it won’t happen if anti-Tory electors don’t vote tactically for the candidate best placed to beat the Tory throughout the land.

Where Labour or the Liberal Democrats (or Plaid Cymru or the SNP in Wales and Scotland) hold a seat, that means voting for the incumbent party. If you are a Lib Dem supporter in one of the 417 seats held by Labour, you should vote Labour. And if you are a Labour supporter in one of the 47 seats held by the Lib Dems, you should vote Lib Dem. Incidentally, Labour is in second place in only five of these, not one of them among its top 25 targets.

But it’s just as important to vote tactically against the Tories in Tory-held seats. In the 90 constituencies where a Labour candidate came second to a Tory at the last general election or more recent by-election, you should vote Labour — and persuade supporters of other parties to do likewise. But in the 72 constituencies where a Lib Dem came second to a Tory, you should vote Lib Dem. That means that you should vote for the Liberal Democrats in the following constituencies. In each, the Lib Dem candidate in the last election held there was second to a Tory. To spell it out, a Labour vote is a wasted vote in:

Aldershot
Arundel and South Downs
Aylesbury
Beaconsfield
Bexhill and Battle
Bournemouth East
Bournemouth West
Brentwood and Ongar
Bridgwater
Cambridgeshire South
Cheadle
Chelmsford West
Chesham and Amersham
Chichester
Christchurch
Congleton
Cotswold
Devizes
Devon East
Dorset Mid and Poole North
Dorset North
Dorset West
Eastbourne
Folkestone and Hythe
Guildford
Haltemprice and Howden
Hampshire East
Hampshire North East
Hampshire North West
Harborough
Henley
Horsham
Leominster
Ludlow
Maidenhead
Mole Valley
New Forest East
New Forest West
Norfolk North
Norfolk South
Orpington
Penrith and The Border
Poole
Ribble Valley
Ryedale
Saffron Walden
Salisbury
Skipton and Ripon
Solihull
Southend West
Stratford-on-Avon
Surrey East
Surrey Heath
Surrey South West
Sussex Mid
Teignbridge
Tewkesbury
Tiverton and Honiton
Totnes
Tunbridge Wells
Wealden
Wells
Westbury
Westmorland and Lonsdale
Wiltshire North
Windsor
Woking
Wokingham
Woodspring
Worcestershire West
Worthing East and Shoreham
Worthing West

Note that Buckingham, where Tribune’s editor Mark Seddon is standing for Labour, is not on the list – but that’s not because I’ve cheated so he doesn’t give me the sack. Although the seat hardly counts as a marginal, Comrade Seddon is the best-placed candidate to overturn the Tory, so stands to benefit from tactical anti-Tory voting.

Oh – and I’m sending this article to Lib Dem headquarters inviting candidates to reproduce any part of it in their election campaign materials if they wish. If you notice, I’ve written it carefully so that they can unscrupulously lift quotes to suggest that Tribune, the Labour Party paper, endorsed each one of them individually.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 9 February 2001

Nearly ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its shadow continues to hang over left politics in Britain. Last week, Tribune carried a feature by Jimmy Reid accusing the outfit the Communist Party became, Democratic Left, of running a KGB-style operation to stitch up a Labour MEP at the behest of “New” Labour. The paper then devoted nearly half its diary to the funding of the CP with “Moscow gold” and the supposedly shady activities of the outfit DL became – are you paying attention at the back? – the New Politics Network.

Now, I’m as fascinated as anyone by the relationship between the British left and the Soviet Union – indeed, I’m writing a book about it – and I think I’m as critical as anyone of the disastrous political practices of every variety of Leninism. But last week’s Tribune coverage was wide of the mark.

It is true that DL inherited the assets of the old CP, and that “Moscow gold” played an important role in building up those assets. I’m writing this piece in an office I rent from the New Politics Network in a building in Islington that was once the CP’s headquarters and is now home to the New Politics Network (among others). The building, which I guess must be worth around £3 million today, was bought with the proceeds of selling the CP’s previous HQ, which in turn was bought with the proceeds of selling its first HQ – and that first HQ, in Covent Garden, was purchased with cash sent from Moscow in 1921.

It is also true that ownership of the assets of the old CP makes the New Politics Network rather better off than most left-wing organisations – particularly when you consider that the Network has only 300 members (compared with the CP’s membership of 4,600 at the time of its demise in 1991).

There is, moreover, a real argument to be had about whether the Network is using its riches effectively. My own view is that it isn’t, though that might be coloured by the fact that I was deputy editor of its magazine, New Times, which it decided to close down last year on grounds of cost.

But I don’t think that anyone can fairly claim that the Network acts in a conspiratorial or Stalinist manner, or indeed that DL did so. The whole point of turning the CP into DL was to emphasise the organisation’s abandonment of Leninism; the Network was created to show it had ditched even the aspiration to be a traditional political party. More important, the whole thrust of the activities of both DL and the Network has been to encourage “progressive coalition-building” on various single-issue campaigns — for electoral reform, for trade union rights, for constructive engagement with Europe and so on.

None of this is uncontroversial. Even though I’m very much in favour of most of what the Network stands for, its jargon turns me off — when I hear the word “progressive” I reach for my sick bag. I also think that DL and the Network have been far too uncritical of “New” Labour, which in turn is a major reason for their failure to attract new members or retain existing ones.

The idea that DL or the Network have acted as New Labour’s Stalinist secret police is, however, ludicrous. What Jimmy Reid describes as DL’s New-Labour-inspired stitch-up of Ken Coates was at most an example of an individual journalist deciding to make a splash of a juicy off-the-record quote – Coates called Tony Blair a shit while the tape recorder was running – and it might not even have been that. (The principals disagree even now about whether it was off the record.) Whatever, it was only one small incident in the chain of events that led to Coates’s exit from the Labour Party.

Similarly, contrary to the opinion of Tribune’s diarist, there was nothing sinister in DL’s involvement either in the creation of what is now Unions 21, the trade union activists’ discussion forum, or in setting up Make Votes Count, the pressure group campaigning for proportional representation. In both cases, the group behaved wholly unlike the old CP, making no attempt to take over either organisation and working happily with everyone else involved as a junior partner. Nor is there anything “mysterious” about the workings of either Make Votes Count or Unions 21 today. Certainly neither receives subventions from the New Politics Network.

“Once a Stalinist, always a Stalinist” has always been a specious argument. But it’s doubly rich coming from someone who was once a senior CPer — or indeed from a paper set up to campaign for unity between the CP and the Labour Party, as Tribune was. The people who inherited the Moscow gold might be small in number, ineffectual and barking up the wrong tree, but unreconstructed they ain’t.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 26 January 2001


Oh dear. A year ago, a month ago, even a week ago, you could rely on Sion Simon, the onetime Millbank apparatchik turned political commentator, to mount a spirited defence of the Government, regardless of the circumstances. First in the Spectator, then in the Telegraph, and latterly in the News of the World, he would turn his hand to praising in lavish terms the most asinine “New” Labour policy initiative and defending the most hopeless minister.

So reliable a mouthpiece was he that, last year, Tribune‘s regular contributors discussed the possibility of running a satirical homage, written by a different person every month. The initial idea was to call the spoof “Simple Simon – the ‘Who ate all the pies?’ man”, but that was felt too cruel and a little clumsy. In the end, we decided on “Brion Bunter – the New Labour punter” as a working title, which tallied perfectly not only with Mr Simon’s girth and love of lunch but also with the sophistication of his political analysis. Unfortunately, the whole project came to nought. No one bothered to make the effort to turn in the first parody – and then he lost a few stone over the summer.

Whatever, something has changed in Mr Simon’s world. Last Sunday in the Screws, he wrote a piece calling for half the Cabinet to be fired – including John Prescott, Robin Cook, Nick Brown, Ann Taylor and Chris Smith. Then, not content with that, he went on to pour scorn on the performance of our dear Home Secretary. Jack Straw, he opined, “has been happiest to ape Tony Blair’s style as far as his talents will allow . . . But, despite all appearances, Straw’s not a complete fool. I’d be astonished if he were sacked altogether.”

Not a complete fool, eh? But a fool, it is clear, none the less. Which is why, one can only assume, that Mr Simon – who is likewise not a complete fool – believes that Mr Straw should be put in charge of our schools.

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There are, however, some more serious questions that deserve attention – not least how to vote at the next general election. Last week in this slot, my old friend and colleague Steve Platt devoted his column to the potential for left-wing electoral challenges to Labour, and concluded that, in the absence of proportional representation, a left alternative party has no chance of gaining parliamentary seats.

He’s quite right – though that doesn’t mean you should vote Labour everywhere next time. I shall be setting out here very soon the definitive list of constituencies where only a Lib Dem vote makes sense. But his piece did get me thinking. Like him, I’ve taken it for granted for years that PR would be a boon for the British left, allowing the emergence of a serious Green-left party that could realistically hope to win between five and ten per cent of the vote. And like him, I despair of the continuing head-in-the-sand commitment of most of the Labour left to maintaining the first-past-the-post status quo for Westminster elections.

But unlike him, I’m by no means sanguine about what has happened to the non-Labour left in the past couple of years since PR was introduced for the European Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Greater London Assembly. To be sure, it has been good to see the Greens win representation in Europe, Scotland and London. But any pleasure has been undermined by the extraordinarily narrow-minded anti-Europeanism that is at the core of their politics.

Meanwhile, the rest of the non-Labour left seems still to be stuck in the Leninist swamp, parroting the same old tired slogans. I don’t really care that Militant has changed its name or that the Socialist Workers’ Party is now prepared to work with Militant, Socialist Organiser and a couple of tiny Stalinist splinter groups to fight the next election as the Socialist Alliance: deep down, they’re still the same dishonest anti-democratic sects, primarily interested in recruiting to their own ranks in preparation for a revolution that is always round the corner but never comes.

I wouldn’t vote for them as a protest against New Labour, let alone if they had a chance of winning.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 12 January 2001

Quite the best beano of the festive season had nothing whatsoever to do with the time of year – the launch party for Gassed, Rob Evans’s new book on the British military’s shameful chemical warfare experiments on unwitting servicemen.

More than 200 hacks, liggers and assorted malcontents turned up to a boozer in Clerkenwell to congratulate the author, once a regular Tribune contributor, now on The Guardian, and meet old mates. I’m not entirely sure how I got home afterwards.

Whatever, I left with the book and read it over Christmas – and it’s an extraordinary piece of work on a scandalous story. Evans describes in detail how, for more than 70 years, Britain’s clandestine chemical warfare establishment at Porton Down, Wiltshire, conducted experiments on human “guinea pigs” to discover the effects of various chemical warfare agents. More than 3,000 troops were exposed to nerve gases alone, some of them, it seems, volunteers who believed they were helping to find a cure for the common cold. In 1953, a 20-year-old airman died as a result of being deliberately exposed to nerve gas. Many other participants in the experiments say their health has been impaired. True to form, successive governments have refused to award them compensation — though the police have at long last been persuaded to make inquiries.

Evans tells the story with meticulous care. He spent years researching it, conducting more than 100 interviews and trawling for months through declassified documents in the Public Record Office. What’s more, he did most of this unpaid. He was employed for a short while researching some aspects of the story for TV and used bits and bobs of his research in pieces for various newspapers and magazines. For the most part, however, the book was a labour of love, the work on it fitted in while earning a living doing other things.

Evans is not, of course, the first author to have done this – but his experience is increasingly the norm for anyone writing non-fiction that requires extensive research. More books are being published each year than ever before, but with the big publishers increasingly interested only in the bottom line, even the most meagre advance is hard to get unless you are considered a bankable star (in which case, name your price and forget about the quality).

To make matters worse, investigative journalism has gone out of fashion in the mainstream media, so it’s very difficult to subsidise writing a fat tome with related hack work. Very few newspapers or magazines have any genuine interest in complex researched stories any more — lifestyle and celebrity copy is cheaper and shifts more units — and the in-depth investigative TV documentary is now an endangered species. What a bloody world.

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But enough of grumbling: there’s been plenty to lift the spirits in the past couple of weeks — honest. I was particularly cheered by the near-universal derision that greeted reports that Tony Blair wants a “radical” manifesto on which to fight the next general election. Even normally government-sympathetic commentators poured scorn on the idea. Give us a break, wrote Hugo Young in the Guardian, the boy wouldn’t know what was radical if it bit him on the bum (I paraphrase). Radical schmadical, opined Steve Richards in the Independent, what we need is more money spent on the railways so I’m not kept waiting every morning at Carshalton (ditto).

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that Labour ought to go into the election on a “steady-as-she-goes”, safety-first programme. Rather it’s that what Blair thinks is radical is nothing of the kind: setting up websites for this and that, half-arsed pilot schemes of one kind and another, illiberal law-and-ordure measures, yet more deregulation and encouragement of “labour market flexibility”.

A truly radical platform would promise to complete the constitutional overhaul begun in 1997 by introducing an elected second chamber, elected regional assemblies for England, proportional representation for local government and a referendum on PR for the Commons. It would make the case for transforming Britain’s relationship with Europe, promising an early referendum on joining the euro and unstinting efforts to make the European Union democratically accountable by increasing the powers of the European Parliament. It would pledge a massive expansion of public investment in transport, education, health and housing, and a shift away from means-testing to universal provision in pensions and other benefits. It would be green to the core, with a swathe of measures to combat global warming. And it would contain plans for weaning Britain off the arms trade.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion I’ll find rather more of this in the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto than in Labour’s. What a pity they have no chance of winning.

• Gassed by Rob Evans is published by Stratus at £20.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 29 December 2000

There are probably only four or five months before the next general election, but it is remarkable just how little interest the impending contest is creating.

The assumption of just about every pundit – with some justification, given the opinion polls, the recent round of by-elections and the dire state of William Hague’s Tories – is that Labour will walk it. The big questions about the election are the turnout and the size of the Labour majority. In other words, one, will anyone bother? And, two, how easily will Labour win?

The two questions have related answers: the fewer people bother, the fewer seats Labour will win, because the voters most likely to abstain are those who would vote Labour if they could be bothered. For what it is worth, my hunch is that, come election time, abstention will not deny Labour a clear majority, but I’m not putting money on it. Sorry to be boring, but, like every other hack on every other paper, I think that – barring accidents (and I’m not ruling them out) – we’re looking at a second term for Tony Blair and his crew.

Which means that the really juicy story is who’s in and who’s out in the New Labour Government after it is returned. Over the past couple of weeks, the papers have been filled with speculation. Will John Prescott be given the heave-ho after his miserable performance in the transport brief? Perhaps he will get Cabinet enforcer? Will Robin Cook survive at the Foreign Office, which Peter Mandelson so covets? After Nice, he looks safe, or maybe not. And what about David Blunkett’s apparent desire for the Home Office – or is it something else? Could there be a constitutional supremo, and if so who should get the job?

I do not pretend to have inside information on any of this – and you should not trust any journalist who claims otherwise. But I know what I think Tony Blair should do. And this is it:

Get rid of Jack Straw as Home Secretary. He has always been one of Labour’s most useless chumps, ever since his days as president of the National Union of Students. In his current job he
has been an authoritarian-populist useless chump, responsible for a succession of idiotic illiberal law-and-ordure measures that have had no effect whatsoever on crime rates but do untold damage to the most vulnerable people in our society. Give him the Cabinet Office or something else where he cannot do any more damage. And, whatever happens, keep him away from anything to do with abroad, where his idiotic Europhobia would do untold damage.

Don’t give Blunkett Straw’s job. The current Education Secretary is even more of an intuitive authoritarian than the Home Secretary. Keep him where he is, where he has done some good work – and do not move him to anything to do with abroad unless it is the Ministry of Defence, where his antipathy to wasting money on stupid projects would be quite useful (and in line with what Gordon Brown would like).

Abandon Derry Irvine. The Lord Chancellor is not only a pompous twit – he is also indolent, incompetent and a constitution al conservative. Time for Blair to sever the sentimental link. (The
same goes for “Proper” Charlie Falconer.)

Keep Cook as Foreign Secretary. He has done a good job. If he moves, it should be to take responsibility for constitutional reform, with an out-and-out pro-European replacing him at the FO. That means not Straw, Prescott, Margaret Beckett or any of the
other obvious figures apart from – I never thought I’d write this – Peter Mandelson.

Kick Prescott upstairs. His performance over the past three years has been risible, particularly on transport. He’s almost as useless as Jack Straw. (But do not give his job to Gus Macdonald, once a Tribune office boy: he is even worse in his current role than he was here. Michael Meacher – no, I mean it – would be a better bet.) Deputy PM with no departmental responsibilities is just about Prezza’s level.

Fire a few Brownies. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has done a reasonable job in his own department, but his accolytes elsewhere have by and large been dreadful.

Don’t promote the clones. Stephen Milburn, Alan Byers, Patricia Morris, Estelle Clarke – you know who I mean – give us a break – please.

Oh well, at least we can dream.

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Finally, an admission. I got it wrong in a column earlier this year on the state of football, in which I predicted tough times for my team, Ipswich Town, in the premiership this season. As I write, we are third in the division, and the North Stand is singing:

We can’t read, we can’t write
But that don’t really matter
We come down from Ipswich Town
Riding on our tractors

It’s much more fun than politics.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 8 December 2000


Alf Lomas, the former Labour MEP for North East London who briefly led the British Labour Group in the European Parliament during the 1980s, was never my favourite politician. A numbskull Europhobe, he seemed to me to represent the worst of the old Labour left. I met him only once, when I debated the merits of the single European currency with him at a sparsely attended party meeting above a Labour club in Hackney. I remember him as extraordinarily rude – while I was speaking he made a point of noisily tearing up pieces of paper in a childish attempt to put me off – though I think his hostility might have been the result of some idiot telling him I was after his seat.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him last week when he became the latest victim of the Sunday Times in its long-running campaign of naming and shaming supposed one-time Soviet bloc agents in the Labour movement. The allegation that he was an informant for the Stasi, the East German secret police, is not radically at odds with his publicly expressed sympathies for the police states of “actually existing socialism”. But given the Sunday Times ‘s record of making preposterous claims about reds under the bed – most notoriously when it claimed in 1995 that Michael Foot was a KGB agent – it is difficult to have any confidence in its judgment.

This sense is reinforced by what the paper did with what appears to be the most solid piece of evidence it has managed to dig up on this story, an index of key Stasi reports relating to Britain from the 1970s and 1980s. In print, the Sunday Times told a gripping tale of how it came to light, selectively reporting its contents to suggest that important figures in the Labour Party colluded with the East German spooks. It was only when readers went to the paper’s website, where the document was published without comment, that they could see what to any unblinkered observer is the real story it reveals – the extent to which the Stasi’s efforts in Britain were concentrated upon and directed against Labour and the non-communist left.

Dozens of the reports listed in the index relate to the internal affairs of the Labour Party: it is clear that the Stasi had informants, witting or unwitting, at party headquarters throughout the 1970s and 1980s. But far more of the entries are on the peace movement – with a particular emphasis on European Nuclear Disarmament, the campaign set up in 1980 by Edward Thompson, Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others to push for a “nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal”.

END (of whose magazine I was deputy editor) made a point of opposing Soviet nuclear arms, supporting independent movements in the Soviet bloc against them. As well as playing a key role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – notably in ensuring that its pro-Soviet minority was effectively marginalised for most of the 1980s – its activists visited eastern Europe to engage in face-to-face dialogue with dissidents and peace groups. To the Stasi, we were the enemy, a “hostile peace movement”, and the Sunday Times document suggests that the East German spooks had at least eight people filing reports on our activities.

I was never so naïve as think the Stasi would have turned a blind eye to END, and last year a television documentary by the journalist David Rose revealed that it had a mole inside the organisation in London. But the scale of Stasi attention suggested by the Sunday Times document is genuinely surprising. END, though undoubtedly influential, was always a small group, with a core in Britain of some 200-300 people and perhaps a few thousand active sympathisers who read the magazine, came along to meetings and gave the group money.

So how come the Stasi took us so seriously? It doesn’t fit in with the Sunday Times view of the world, according to which everyone on the left is tainted by being “soft” on communism, but the reason is that we were a thorn in the side of the Soviet bloc authorities. By shouting loudly about Soviet militarism as well as Nato’s nuclear modernisation, we effectively undermined their efforts to portray themselves as the friends of the peace movement – which in turn ensured that the pro-Soviet caucus in CND never got anywhere. And by engaging publicly with dissidents and independent peaceniks in the eastern bloc, we challenged in a small way the legitimacy of single-party police-state socialism.

Of course, it’s ancient history now. But as long as the likes of the Sunday Times see fit to smear the left as dupes of Moscow and its satellites, it remains essential to make it clear that, in fact, most of us weren’t.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 11 November 2000

First the nation’s rail service grinds to a halt after a fatal accident, apparently caused because routine maintenance is considered a luxury by the privatised company responsible for rail infrastructure. Then the long-awaited report on mad cow disease shows a quite extraordinary dereliction of duty by government and officials convinced that the agricultural industry needed less intrusive regulation in order to flourish. Almost simultaneously, a spell of inclement weather reveals that recent relaxations of the rules governing new building have led to thousands of homes being built where they are likely to be flooded any time it rains a lot. And now we’re all on tenterhooks awaiting the next round of protests against fuel taxation to see whether a handful of fat blokes will again bring the country to its knees by blockading the handful of refineries that normally supply our oil products “just in time”.

Yes, the past few weeks have given us a string of wonderful advertisements for letting the spirit of enterprise run free (or rather with the lightest of regulatory touches). It all looks marvellously dynamic for a while, a few people make a lot of money by cutting corners on safety and otherwise ripping us off – and then everything either collapses in scandal or seizes up completely.

Sorry, but things look a lot better the other side of the Channel. All right, I know all about floods in Italy, BSE and farmers’ fuel protests in France and truckers creating mayhem in Germany. But at least over there they manage to keep the trains running, if not always on time.

For all the fashionable nineties neo-liberal talk about “Eurosclerosis”, no continental European country has been reduced to the pitiful state of Britain by the tribulations we have all suffered in the past few months.

I’m not arguing that the rest of Europe is perfect, or even that deregulation is always wrong (have you tried to buy a loaf of bread in Germany on a Sunday?). It seems to me incontrovertible, however, that economies in which the essentials are more strictly regulated, with key transport and other infrastructure in the public sector, work better overall – even if, week-on-week, when everything is going well, they seem to accountants to be less efficient.

A genuinely pro-European social-democratic government in Britain would now be making the case vigorously for the European model of regulated capitalism against those who would let the free market rip. By contrast, Tony Blair and friends have kept mum. I’d like to think that they’re embarrassed by the way that they embraced so wholeheartedly the neo-liberal enthusiasm for deregulation. But I have my doubts . . .

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On a different matter entirely, I’m amazed at the scanty coverage in the national media of the crisis that has hit the London borough of Hackney in the past month. To cut a long story short, the council will be declared bankrupt unless it makes gigantic cuts in spending – to the tune of £18 million – to claw back a £40 million deficit. Half its council tax is uncollected. More than 17,000 residents are owed outstanding housing benefit. Hundreds of local businesses have not been paid for work they have done for the council. Estimates of the number of workers Hackney will have to sack range from 500 to 1,000. Just about every senior officer is desperately searching for some way of jumping ship.

It is not quite on the scale of New York in the 1970s, but it’s big news all the same – not least because it raises serious questions about the much-vaunted pragmatism and responsibility of New Labour in local government.

It is true that, since the mid-1990s, Hackney has not been the Labour stronghold that it was before, and that at least some of the mess can be put down to a brief spell of Liberal Democrat administration and before that to a bout of vicious in-fighting among Labour councillors that resulted in a substantial breakaway from the Labour Party. But Labour councillors close to the party leadership nationally have been the dominant force in Hackney politics since the mid-1980s, and they were in power for most of the long period of incompetence and mismanagement that has led the borough to the brink. Anyone who suggests that Hackney’s problem is the loony left running riot is trying to pull the wool over your eyes.

Paul Anderson, Chartist column, November-December 2000

All the gossip around Westminster suggests that Labour is on the verge of ruling out British membership of the single European currency for the next parliament. So far, I’ve not met anyone who can do more than repeat the circumstantial evidence for this that has appeared in the press since the middle of October – and most of it is extremely circumstantial. But on the principle that in politics there is usually no smoke without something at least smouldering, it is worth taking the rumours seriously, if only as indicating a possible course of action that is being taken seriously in Labour’s upper reaches. Who knows? By the time you read this it could be policy.

First, though, the evidence of impending change, if you can call it that. The most important thing that has emerged in the past few weeks is clear the level of hostility to the euro in the Treasury. It’s not that Gordon Brown has declared publicly against joining the euro – but then his style has never been to say what he means. Rather, it is that, thanks to new books by Andrew Rawnsley and Geoffrey Robinson, more details have emerged of the famous row in autumn 1997 that followed the revelation by Brown’s spin-doctor, Charlie Whelan, that the Chancellor was going to rule out participation in the euro for the duration of this parliament.

Precisely who said what to whom and who behaved like a complete shit can be left to the squabbling principals and their interlocutors. What is important is that Brown won the argument against stiff opposition from the pro-euro camp (or, more accurately, those who thought the issue should be kept open), led by Peter Mandelson – and that now the chancellor is more than happy for the world to know not only that he stuffed Mandelson but that Mandelson has been making trouble for him ever since.

Meanwhile, a long-brewing crisis in Britain in Europe has come to a head. BiE was originally set up by the European Movement and others as a nominally cross-party outfit, backed by business and pro-European unions, to campaign for joining the euro. But it has consistently done the bidding of new Labour: even before its launch last year it was persuaded by Tony Blair to tone down its message so as to become a champion merely of British membership of the European Union. Last month, BiE’s high-ups announced a de facto suspension of activities until after the next election – to the consternation of ordinary supporters but with the backing of Peter Mandelson (funny how the same names keep cropping up).

Almost simultaneously, Tony Blair announced that he would vote no to euro membership if a referendum were held right now – and with that, the newspapers filled with mysteriously sourced speculation that, because Philip Gould’s focus groups were so unsympathetic, Brown was adamant that euro membership was not on and Alastair Campbell, John Prescott and others supported him, Blair had been persuaded to match the Tories’ promise of staying out of the single currency until the election after next.

We will find out soon enough whether all this is a matter of excitable journalists putting two and two together to make six. What is clear, however, is that, even if Labour does not rule out euro membership for the next parliament, it will almost certainly make little effort to persuade the sceptical British public of the case for the single currency between now and the election – which makes a referendum on the euro early in the next parliament somewhat unlikely. And this in turn makes it more likely that the referendum won’t take place at all before the election after next, regardless of what is in the Labour manifesto.

Whatever transpires, it is hardly surprising that other EU governments are becoming increasingly dismissive of Labour’s protestations that it wants to play a constructive role at the heart of Europe – and their mood has not been improved by Blair’s much-hyped speech in Warsaw last month on institutional reform of the EU to cope with enlargement.

Billed as the British contribution to the great debate inaugurated in the spring by German foreign minister Joschka Fischer and French president Jacques Chirac, Blair’s speech made some important points about the EU’s urgent need for greater transparency and democratic accountability. But his proposed solutions leave a lot to be desired.

Blair put forward three key reforms: a greater role for the Council of Ministers; a reduced role for the European Commission; and a second chamber for the European Parliament drawn from the membership of national parliaments to keep the existing directly elected chamber in check. In essence, his argument is that the supranational institutions of the EU should yield power and influence to intergovernmental institutions, on the grounds that national governments enjoy popular legitimacy that the supranational European institutions do not.

The problems here are twofold. Firstly, at the centre of Blair’s proposals is a misidentification of the locus of the EU’s democratic deficit, which is not in the role of the Parliament but in the lack of accountability of the Commission and, especially, in the secretiveness and horse-trading that characterises the intergovernmental Council of Ministers. Only an increase in the powers of the Parliament could really address this problem – yet this was explicitly ruled out by Blair.

Secondly, although Blair’s intergovernmentalism is viewed sympathetically by the French, it is anathema to the Germans and nearly everyone else – while his downplaying of the role of the Commission is anathema to the French. So his vision is not merely wrong in principle but poor Realpolitik.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Labour’s European policy is a shambles.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 27 October 2000

Like most other political journalists, over the past month I’ve spent rather more time than is healthy immersed in books that might be described as the continuation of internal Labour politics by other means – first Andrew Rawnsley’s chilling Servants of the People, then Julia Langdon’s somewhat disappointing life of Mo Mowlam, and now Geoffrey Robinson’s The Unconventional Minister.

Of the three, Robinson’s is the least revealing in conventional journalistic terms. The Daily Mail spent a lot of dosh on the serialisation rights, and it cannot be very pleased with what it got: the former Paymaster General’s account of how he came to lend Peter Mandelson the cash for his Notting Hill pad; a few snippets adding telling detail to what we already knew about the late-1997 crisis over Government policy on the euro; and, well, that’s about it apart from a lot of self-serving drivel. “My business dealings were never dodgy, I never tried to buy influence and it’s not fair that they’ve ditched me” pretty well sums it up.

But it would be a mistake simply to dismiss the book as a damp squib, showing at most that Robinson is a political ingénue and a Quixotic axe-grinder. Robinson’s memoirs might be short of hot poop, but the stench of ordure that hangs about them is so nauseating that it cannot be ignored.

Here, for the first time, we have a key New Labour player blowing the gaffe on the record about the internal workings of the Government. (The inverted commas are entirely appropriate, for there is nothing new about Robinson, an old Labour Eurosceptic Right-wing tribalist, apart from his money.) The Unconventional Minister confirms what we all knew but had hitherto been relayed only via unattributable briefings: that Labour’s upper echelons are dominated by competing cabals characterised by petty vindictiveness and personal hatreds. Robinson’s authentication of the viciousness at the top of New Labour – particularly when it comes to Europe policy – is invaluable.

And Robinson was a key player. He not only provided Mandelson with a lifestyle appropriate to his station and bankrolled the private offices of Gordon Brown (directly) and Tony Blair (indirectly, or so it seems). He also “delivered” the New Statesman to New Labour in 1996 by stepping in to buy it at the request of Brown and Blair, appointing their chosen candidate as editor and then pouring millions in to subsidise its losses. And for a couple of years his largesse supported a New Labour salon. In 1996-98, if you weren’t part of the Grosvenor Hotel set, you weren’t anyone. In 1997-98, during his brief spell as Paymaster General, Robinson was a senior member of Brown’s Treasury team with responsibility for a crucial area of policy, the private finance initiative.

Now, Robinson is not my favourite politician. I had dealings with him briefly after he bought the Statesman, when he reluctantly made me acting editor for a few weeks following the resignation of Steve Platt, whose deputy I’d been. I found the new proprietor rude, patronising and deeply unattractive politically: in fact, everything about him, right down to his pungent aftershave, gave me the creeps. It was a relief when the magazine’s new editor, Ian Hargreaves, unceremoniously fired me. And I must admit that, when I heard about the resignation of Robinson and Mandelson from the government in 1998, I ordered champagne (which was easy, because I was in a Soho restaurant at Tribune’s Christmas lunch).

But it’s not hard to see why Robinson still feels peeved at the way he was treated by New Labour. His reward for all those favours, all that disinterested generosity, was to be dumped without so much as a “thank you” – while Mandelson, whose failure to declare the house loan was a real scandal, returned to the Cabinet after a few months in the wilderness.

My hunch is that Robinson’s attempted revenge is unlikely to have much immediate effect beyond turning the stomachs of many of his readers: he certainly has not made Mandelson’s position untenable and – god forbid – might even have made a few people feel sorry for him. In the longer term, however, some good might come of his self-pitying tale. If nothing else, it should at least deter other plutocrats from flashing their wads around the Labour Party.