Author Archives: Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 13 October 2000

Tony Blair’s speech in Warsaw last Friday on the future of the European Union was supposed to provide him with a golden opportunity to display his statesmanship after a week of Tory amateurism in Bournemouth.

As it happened, however, events intervened to blow him off the front pages – and what events! First, Slobodan Milosevic met his well deserved end in Belgrade. And then the Tories imploded after several Opposition frontbenchers admitted past membership of the Camberwell Carrot Tendency.

Of the latter, more anon. But the failure of Blair’s Warsaw speech to make a splash was a pity, not because it was brilliant – it was not – but because the issues he raised deserve discussion.

As regular readers of this column will know, I have been underwhelmed by this Government’s performance on European policy. Everything started well enough in 1997, when Blair and Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, made it clear that Labour in office would end the Tory policy of obstructionism on Europe. But from there it was downhill all the way. The Government failed to seize the opportunity in late 1997 of holding a referendum on British participation in the single European currency, and ever since has appeared increasingly uncertain on the issue, despite the best efforts of Cook, Stephen Byers and – ahem, but praise where praise is due – Peter Mandelson.

Just as important, even though the EU’s institutions were going through an ever more apparent crisis of democratic legitimacy, and even though imminent expansion of the union made radical reform of its structures imperative, the Government failed to make any coherent statement of its vision of the future of Europe.

Warsaw was Blair’s chance belatedly to put that right – and he fluffed it. He showed that he recognised the EU’s biggest problems, which are the lack of transparency and democratic accountability in its decision-making procedures and the concomitant absence of a strong sense among the EU’s citizens that Europe is theirs. But his proposed solutions were – are – way off the mark.

At their core is a retreat from supranational institutions into intergovernmentalism as a way of coping with enlargement. Essentially, he wants a bigger role for the Council of Ministers, a reduction in the responsibilities of the European Commission and a new second chamber for the European Parliament, drawn from the membership of national parliaments, to keep the existing directly elected chamber of the European Parliament in check.

The problem with this is simple: the root of the EU’s crisis of democratic legitimacy is precisely the intergovernmentalism that Blair wants to enhance. The least democratically accountable institution in the triumvirate of Council, Commission and Parliament is on the face of it the Commission, which is wholly appointed and supposedly supranational. But the crucial thing about it is that it is composed of the placemen and placewomen appointed by national governments, which have deliberately refused to enhance its democratic credentials lest it prevent them from carving up all the business of the EU in the closed sessions of the Council – where the real power lies.

The only EU institution directly answerable to the citizens of Europe is the Parliament. And although it has asserted its authority against the Commission and the Council it has been consistently held back by national governments fearful of a democratic challenge to their right to rule the roost with their secret deals.

Far from requiring a check in the form of a second chamber along the lines suggested by Blair, the Parliament needs to be set free to become the tribune of the European citizenry, with powers to elect the Commission as a Cabinet and to legislate in those areas assigned to it by a future federalist democratic European constitution.

To give it such powers would be to create a truly European democratic polity – and people would soon recognise that it mattered rather a lot. As with local government, the way to respond to popular disenchantment with supposedly democratic institutions that in fact have very few powers is not to decrease those powers but to increase them and the democracy. Blair’s scheme gets it completely arse about face.

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Back, though, to our dopey Tories. Who would have believed it? David Willetts as a one-time Furry Freak Brother. Lord Strathclyde as Cheech – or was it Chong? – coming into Los Angeles, bringing in a couple of keys . . . Is that how you spell it? Sorry, my mind was wandering . . . Well, I’ve shared a fair few spliffs with sitting Labour MPs and have friends who have done the same with another couple of dozen, including Cabinet ministers. I have no intention of joining the Mirror’s shameful campaign to out senior Labour tokers – but unless they cough up some bread for Tribune’s new appeal for funds, and do it soon, it might be time for a few signed affidavits. We know who you are. A mere £100 guarantees anonymity. You think I’m joking?

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 29 September 2000

The mood at Labour conference this week has been more nervous than for years – which is hardly surprising. The last time that Labour met for its annual beano neck-and-neck with the Tories in the opinion polls was in 1991, and then the party was in optimistic mood because it seemed to be regaining the ground lost when John Major replaced Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Every year from 1992 to 1999, Labour enjoyed giant opinion-poll leads at conference time.

This week, Labour has been meeting in the shadow of a massive slump in its popularity as a result of the fuel crisis. Everyone in Brighton has been wondering whether it’s just a blip or whether it means what was until a fortnight ago almost unthinkable – that Tony Blair could lose the next election.

My hunch is that it’s a blip, but then I’ve learned through bitter experience not to trust my hunches when it comes to general elections. Although I didn’t expect Labour to win in 1983, I didn’t foresee the rout that transpired. I felt Labour victory in my bones in 1987 until well after the Greenwich by-election. And in 1992 I was still optimistic when we finished the celebratory champagne in the small hours of election night, though by that point I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on.

All the same, there are good reasons to expect a Labour recovery. For a start, although people are angry about the price of petrol, with exceptions they’re not that angry. It should not be too difficult for the Government to come up with some formula for tweaking the transport taxation regime to make it fairer to car-reliant people without getting too much egg on its face (or losing revenue).

More generally, there is plenty of mileage for Labour in knocking the Tories, who still look a bunch of dangerous third-rate lunatics.

Nevertheless, to use the cliché of the moment, there is no room for complacency. Labour’s collapse in the polls after the fuel crisis might well be reversible – but the very fact that it has happened is a serious warning to the government.

It is evidence that the electorate is volatile even in circumstances – more than three years of near-to-full employment – in which it might be expected to be quiescent if not grateful. It demonstrates that many voters do not believe that the greenhouse effect is a problem of any urgency. And it shows that tax remains Labour’s Achilles’ heel even though the government has stuck to its promises on income tax.

A substantial section of the electorate has rumbled the sleight of hand involved in shifting taxation from income to consumption. The trick that allowed the Tories to retain an undeserved reputation as the tax-cutting party right up to the 1997 election no longer works – at least in Labour’s hands.

Now, Gordon Brown has plenty of room for manoeuvre here: he’s sitting on piles of cash, and if he wanted he could use quite a bit of it simply to buy off disgruntled motorists – and to hell with the consequences for revenue or anything else. To do so, however, would be a grave mistake. As a surrender to ignorance of the danger of global warming, it would destroy the government’s already dodgy reputation on environment policy. And as a capitulation to “I’m all right Jack” anti-tax populism, it would kill Labour’s credibility as a social democratic alternative to the Tories. Labour’s members and core supporters would desert it in droves.

In short, the government needs to make two parallel arguments: for reduced emissions of greenhouse gases and for maintenance of public services. Any changes Brown makes to the transport taxation regime should be revenue-neutral and should retain disincentives to car use. Otherwise there will be a big electoral price to pay.

Or to put it more positively, Labour has got to come out as enthusiastically green and make the social democratic case for tax and spend. Which shouldn’t be a problem – except that it’s precisely what it has failed to do in the three years it has been in power.

Paul Anderson, Chartist column, September-October 2000

It was difficult to disagree with the Europe minister, Keith Vaz, when he complained at the beginning of September about the “xenophobia” of much of the British press over Europe.

The week he made his remarks, Fleet Street’s finest were in a wild anti-foreigner froth over the French fishermen’s blockade of Channel ports. In the Telegraph, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan fumed that the events in Calais and Boulogne showed that respect for the rule of law was “peculiarly Anglo-Saxon”. The Sun denounced “the Paris regime” for compromising with the fishermen. The Mail complained that the “regime” was “chronically unstable”.

Nor was this exceptional. Day after day, week after week, year after year, the right-wing press in Britain has kept up a relentless anti-European barrage. If you believed what you read in the Telegraph, the Mail, the Sun and the Times, you would think that everything Britain held dear was under threat from a giant European conspiracy led by the domineering Germans, the arrogant French, freeloading MEPs and corrupt Brussels bureaucrats.

All of which is, of course, inaccurate and reprehensible – and a major cause of the unpopularity of “Europe” among British voters. Vaz was quite right to say that rabid press Euroscepticism is one reason that it is extremely difficult to have a rational debate on Britain’s place in Europe.

But it is not the only reason.  Almost as important is the failure of pro-Europeans of any persuasion to put their case with conviction or credibility. And here the government – and particularly Tony Blair – must take at least some of the blame.

Labour came to power in 1997 promising constructive engagement with Europe, and its victory was widely welcomed across the political spectrum on the continent: the sense of relief that the Tories’ histrionic obstructionism was a thing of the past was palpable.

In practice, however, the Blair government has proved rather less pro-European than its first days’ rhetoric suggested it would be. Most crucially, Blair and Gordon Brown spurned the chance to hold the promised referendum on British participation in the single European currency in 1997, at the height of the government’s popularity. Ever since, the government has held to a position – or rather a non-position – of  “wait-and-see”, making only the most half-hearted case for joining the euro at some unspecified point in the future. So far, the best it has come up with is to say that, if we join, businesses and holiday-makers will not have the inconvenience and cost of changing money. That hardly counts as a killer argument.

In the meantime, the government, like its Tory predecessor, has made much of its successes in “standing up for Britain”, in the name of the US model of deregulation and enterprise, against other European governments and the EU. The most notable of these have been to block extensions of workers’ rights and steps towards tax harmonisation – thereby effectively endorsing the Eurosceptics’ assumptions. Even the most significant collaboration between British Labour and its continental sister parties, Blair’s Third Way initiative, was an attempt to redefine European social democracy in American deregulationist terms.

To make matters worse, the government has treated the European Parliament (and Labour’s MEPs) with contempt, and has so far failed to make any coherent statement about how the EU can be made more democratic and accountable – a particularly important question in the wake of last year’s European Commission corruption scandals and in the light of the impending enlargement of the EU into central Europe.

I have a hunch that it would all have been a lot better if Blair and Brown had given Robin Cook greater leeway on Europe policy. In 1997, Cook was the most sceptical of Labour’s “big four” about the euro. But his experience as foreign secretary changed his mind, and since last year he has been the main protagonist in the cabinet for the single currency. At the same time, he has been a consistent enthusiast for democratic reform of the EU’s institutions and for maintenance of the “European social model” of a comprehensive welfare state and “social partnership” between capital and organised labour.

As on arms sales policy, however, he has been squeezed out of the policy-making loop by Brown and Blair. The chancellor is basking in glory as he presides over a sustained boom outside the euro-zone; the prime minister is imprisoned by the focus groups and opinion polls telling Philip Gould that Europe is a no-no. Both find the US far more exciting than Europe in every way.

We are promised a keynote Blair speech on the future of Europe some time this autumn. It  should make the case explicitly for Europe as the best hope for sustaining a modernised welfare state as a bulwark against the Wild West capitalism of the US – but somehow I have a feeling it won’t.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 4 August 2000

I have been taken to task over the past couple of weeks by friends in Make Votes Count, the proportional representation campaign, over my interpretation of last month’s Labour National Policy Forum shenanigans over electoral reform.

In case you didn’t read my last column – or, perish the thought, you read it and forgot it instantly – I was not at all happy about the Forum’s agreement to postpone indefinitely Labour’s long-promised referendum on electoral reform for the House of Commons or about what I saw as its effective rejection of a variety of PR as the putative replacement for first past the post that would be put to the people in the referendum.

The Forum’s line, I thought, means that a referendum probably will not take place at all – but that if it does it will offer a choice between the status quo and an even less proportional system than FPTP, the alternative vote. And that, I concluded, is a Bad Thing.

My MVC friends, however, think I’ve bought the spin from the opponents of electoral reform. In fact, they say, the Policy Forum was not too bad. It didn’t rule out a referendum forever. And it certainly didn’t endorse an FPTP-AV choice in the referendum. There is, they say, everything still to play for – which is a lot better than it might have been.

So – is the glass half-empty or half-full? I accept that things could have been much worse. But I still think half-empty, because I believe that the Labour leadership could and should have told the union barons that are the financial and political mainstay of Labour’s constitutional conservative camp to get lost, or else bought them off. The “mo”, to use an American term that was all the rage eight years ago but now seems strangely archaic, is now with opponents of reform.

Nevertheless, it is true that the door has not been slammed shut. If at some point – probably not in the next parliament, maybe in the one after that – Labour needs Liberal Democrat support for a Commons majority, a referendum on PR could once again find itself very much on the agenda.

A Labour government reliant on Lib Dem support would also be forced to restart its stalled constitutional reform programme – a democratically legitimate second chamber, regional government for England – and take a much more positive line on Europe. It would be unable to get away with the crass illiberal populism that has characterised Jack Straw’s Home Office. And it would probably be rather more active in defence of the welfare state and on the environment.

For all these reasons, it makes sense for constitutional reformers and pro-Europeans, civil libertarians and environmentalists, socialists and social democrats to do what they can to ensure as large a Lib Dem contingent as possible in the next two Parliaments. And that means that Labour members and supporters should vote Lib Dem in the next general election wherever there is a sitting Liberal Democrat MP – sorry, no exceptions — and wherever the Liberal Democrat is better placed than Labour to oust a sitting Tory, the 20 most winnable of which (in descending order of marginality) are the following:

Teignbridge
Wells
Dorset Mid and Poole North
Totnes
Norfolk North
Tiverton and Honiton
Bridgwater
Dorset West
Eastbourne
Christchurch
Surrey South West
Orpington
Dorset North
Southend West
Wiltshire North
Cheadle
Worcestershire West
Guildford
Westmoreland and Lonsdale
Worthing East and Shoreham
Bournemouth East

Don’t worry – the Labour candidate in all these seats will be either a local council worthy standing to remind people to vote Labour in the local elections or a fresh-faced wannabe career politician (probably Millbank-approved) showing willing in the hope of getting somewhere winnable next time. They really won’t mind if you don’t vote for them – and it won’t do any harm at all to the socialist or working-class cause. Take my word for it.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 14 July 2000

I’m afraid you won’t see me this Saturday if you’re going to the “Democratic socialism in the 21st century” conference at TUC Congress House.

It’s not that I’ve given up on democratic socialism, which remains as good a thing this century as it was last. It’s just that I’m fed up with left-wing borathons in general, and think that this one in particular is based on a singularly specious premise – namely, that Labour should be concentrating a substantial proportion of its fire in the run-up to the general election on the Liberal Democrats.

One of the key points in the statement put out by the organisers of the conference is “rejection of 19th-century Liberalism” – by which of course they actually mean “No to co-operation with Charles Kennedy!” – and one of its main sessions is on “Defeating the Liberal Democrats”.

Sorry, comrades, but this is what the New Labour spin-doctors would call “a load of bollocks”.

Of course, there are lots of urban areas where the Liberal Democrats have in recent years become serious challengers to Labour in local government, in some cases ousting Labour from power. I wouldn’t expect Labour activists in, say, Liverpool, Islington, Sheffield or Oldham to feel very friendly toward the Lib Dems. As it happens, I myself don’t like them very much in Tower Hamlets, where memories of the local Liberals’ disgraceful racist campaigning in the early 1990s are still fresh.

But these parochial rivalries are wholly beside the point. At national level – where it matters rather more – the imperative is to put all hostility to the Lib Dems aside until after the next genera election.

Put bluntly, Labour does not need to “defeat” the Liberal Democrats at the next general election. It needs Lib Dem supporters to vote tactically for Labour where the Labour candidate is better placed than the Lib Dem to defeat the Tory – as they did in 1997. Without Lib Dem tactical voting, Labour will lose scores of seats, perhaps even its parliamentary majority. Self-interest dictates that Labour puts its energies into offering the hand of friendship to Charles Kennedy – and that’s even before it starts thinking about possible post-election coalition partners should things go really belly-up.

Unfortunately, last weekend saw Labour putting its relations with the Lib Dems in serious jeopardy, with a shabby stitch-up at the party’s National Policy Forum on electoral reform. Faced with demands from a handful of trade union barons that Labour abandon its promise of a referendum on a more proportional system for elections to the House of Commons, Tony Blair agreed to kick the issue into touch.

Instead of backing a referendum in the next parliament on “AV-plus”, the watered-down form of proportional representation recommended by Lord Jenkins’s Independent Commission on the Voting System, the Forum adopted an amendment expressing “serious concerns about the acceptability” of the Jenkins system and putting off the referendum until – well, probably for ever.

According to the amendment, “Labour will allow the changes introduced for elections to the European and Scottish Parliaments and for the Welsh and London Assemblies to become familiar and allow time for all the consequences to be felt before deciding on any further proposals for electoral reform”. Look out for further thoughts some time around 2015.

So far, Liberal Democrat leaders have affected an insouciant air over all this – but they are not well pleased, and I’m prepared to put money on the Lib Dem grassroots being very angry indeed once the news has sunk in that PR is off the agenda for the forseeable future.

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty angry too. As regular readers of this column will know, I believe that PR for the Commons is essential if Britain’s parliament is ever to regain the popular legitimacy it has been losing for the past 20-odd years.

I’m not going to rehearse all the arguments here yet again. But I do think that Blair has blown an opportunity that will not come around again for another generation. His casual agreement to indefinite postponement of the electoral reform referendum, along with his de facto acceptance that even a diluted form of PR is not a runner, confirms my long-standing suspicion that, deep down, he’s a constitutional conservative who accepted what he did of Labour’s constitutional reform agenda back in 1994 only because he had no choice.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 30 June 2000

The word around Westminster is that Tony Blair has decided to come out against proportional representation for the House of Commons and in favour of the system known as the alternative vote. If so, he should think again. AV is the worst possible electoral system for general elections – much worse than the first-past-the-post status quo – and it would almost cer­tainly be disastrous for Labour in the medium term.

Of course, it is not difficult to see why Blair might be tempted by AV. He is in a bit of a hole. As things stand, it looks as if the leaders of the big trade unions, who are opposed to PR for the Commons – even the diluted version recommended by Lord Jenkins’s independent commission on the voting system – will succeed in getting a motion to ditch Labour’s promise of a refer­endum on electoral reform on to the agenda of this year’s party conference in Brighton. If it is debated, it stands a good chance of being passed, largely because the union barons will put their block votes behind it.

That would be a disaster, not only for Blair but also for the Labour Party. A defeat of the leadership by the block vote is the last thing the party needs in what could be the last conference before a general election. It would wreck Labour’s relations with the Liberal Democrats, whose continued co-operation is predicat­ed on the referendum being in Labour’s manifesto. And this, in turn, could switch Lib Dem voters off the idea of voting Labour tactically to keep the Tories out. Result: dozens of Labour seats lost unnecessarily, possibly even a Tory victory.

In the circumstances, it would be surprising if Blair were not casting around for something – anything – that might keep the union barons at bay and the Lib Dems on board. And at first sight AV looks as if it fits the bill.

For a start, it is not a system of PR – which means that it could well be acceptable to the unions and those Labour MPs who object to PR. Under AV, single-member constituencies are retained. All that changes is that voters do not mark their ballot papers with a single “X” next to the name of their favoured can­didate but instead rank the candidates “1, 2, 3, 4 …” in order of preference. Unlike any PR system, AV would not necessarily re­sult in a reduction of the proportion of seats won by Labour. Indeed, all the evidence suggests that Labour would have won even more seats in 1997 had AV been in place.

At the same time, AV would also almost certainly increase Lib Dem representation. Not by as much as a PR system, granted, but it might just tempt Charles Kennedy into acquiescence, par­ticularly if the prospect of further change is not ruled out.
Here it is worth remembering that the system recommended by Jenkins was “AV-plus”, in which AV would be used for single-member constituencies and topped-up from lists of candidates in mini-regions to make the overall result more proportional. It must have crossed Blair’s mind that AV on its own might be saleable to the Lib Dems and other supporters of PR as a first step toward introduction of a Jenkins-type system.

All of which would be fine and dandy – were it not for the fact that AV on its own is so flawed as an electoral system. Its main effect would be to ensure that results in marginal seats were determined in most instances by the second prefer­ence votes of supporters of third- or fourth-placed candidates.

In nearly all the Labour-Tory marginals that decide British general elections, that would mean Lib Dem voters deciding whether they would rather keep Labour or the Tories out.

AV would reinforce the already stifling trend in British poli­tics toward lowest-common-denominator politics. And, as Lib Dem voters’ second preferences piled on the agony for whichever of the major parties they disliked more, it would also exacerbate the in-built tendency of FPTP to yield landslide election results

Although in 1997 this would have benefited Labour, through­out the 1980s, when Liberal and Social Democratic Party voters generally saw the Tories as less bad than Labour, it would have given Margaret Thatcher even more commanding majorities than she actually won. The chances that AV could deliver a Tory landslide at the election after next or the one after that should not be dismissed lightly.

In short, far from yielding a House of Commons that more ac­curately reflects the spread of party support across the country, AV would make the Commons less representative. It is not a step toward proportional representation but a step away from it – and as such deserves nothing but contempt from democrats.

Tribune column, 16 June 2000

I have always had my doubts about the journalistic value of the long “backgrounder” news features that have become a staple of the Sunday broadsheets.

More often than not, they are exercises in padding, ludicrously detailed narrative accounts of domestic political events about which we know quite enough already. Even the best of them rely a little too much on unnamed insiders as sources – and sometimes it’s clear that supposedly telling detail is made up by a hack desperate to fill the space he or she has been told to fill.

Nevertheless, I am a great fan of the genre – for one simple reason. The breathless, earnest prose in which Sunday backgrounders are typically written is often unintentionally hilarious, particularly when the subject matter is, as it so often is, mundane. And last Sunday, the Observer came up with a real gem on Tony Blair’s reception at the Women’s Institute conference.

Under the headline “End of the affair for Tony and his women”, Kamal Ahmed and Gaby Hinsliff turned the incident into a drama worthy of a television mini-series. Here’s a taste:

“… At Wembley, the fleet of cars ready to whisk Blair away con¬tained a chastised set of occupants. In the first car, Blair sat with [Anji] Hunter. In the second car came Lucie McNeill, of his strategy team, and David Peel, of the press office. McNeill had spoken with the WI director of communications about setting up interviews with ‘modern looking’ WI members who could give their reaction to the Blair speech. All the plans had to be abandoned. Hunter said she felt personally let down by the WI. Their rudeness was inexcusable.

“At Millbank, an ashen-faced Phil Murphy, the deputy general secretary of the Labour Party, was on the phone to the BBC. . . Staff watched in silence as television screens revealed Blair’s disaster. Many knew it had been a mistake. By tomorrow they would he in action. . .”

OK, I admit it, I inserted “an ashen-faced”. But you get the drift, and there are another 1,500 words in the same vein. All on a story that was not only straightforward and rather less than breathtaking – “Prime Minister heckled at meeting while giving over-hyped duff speech” – but had already filled three days’ worth of papers. It is not quite in the class of the two hacks who managed two years back to make three-quarters of a book out of what Charlie Whelan said in the Red Lion one evening in 1997. But it is quite a feat none the less.

Of course, the WI incident is significant even if it does not deserve quite the treatment that the Observer gave it. It is one of several recent indications that the government has run out of ideas – and that everybody, even rhinoceros-brained Tory ladies from the shires, knows it.

I must admit to being extremely disappointed by this. When Labour was elected in 1997,1 didn’t expect that the new government would usher in the New Jerusalem. For nearly a decade in opposition the party had followed an ever-more cautious, pro-business line in every aspect of policy.

But I did think it possible that a “safety-first” Labour administration might acquire a taste for radicalism. Labour’s commitments on constitutional reform were very much the “unfinished business” from the Kinnock and Smith years, to which Blair was not particularly committed – but I really hoped that, in power, New Labour would come sooner rather than later to see the benefits of a comprehensive overhaul of Britain’s creaking constitutional machinery, including proportional representation for the Commons, regional government for England and a democratic second chamber.

Similarly, on Europe, although it was clear that Labour was badly divided on the key question of British membership of the single Euro¬pean currency, I didn’t think it Utopian to expect that the Labour government would overcome its hesitations and make the necessary leap. Much the same went for the potential for shifts in policy in every area from the welfare state through workers’ rights to foreign policy.

Instead, what has happened is that New Labour has, in almost every field, done the bare minimum it promised in 1997 – then taken fright. The constitutional reform programme has run out of steam and the much-vaunted constructive engagement in Europe appears increasingly chimerical in the absence of any initiative on participation in the euro.

Meanwhile, Jack Straw is engaged in a futile attempt to outdo the Tories in populist illiberalism in home affairs. New Labour today is the party that wants to build more roads, sell more arms, means-test more benefits. Any hope of a radical manifesto for a second term seems to have vanished completely.

It could all have been so different….

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 2 June 2000

I am, at the time of writing, in a very good mood — such a good mood, in fact, that I’m not bothered in the slightest by the hangover I acquired after spending last night on the razz (as they say where I come from).

The reason is simple. On Monday the football team I have supported since I was a kid, Ipswich Town, won promotion to the Premiership by beating Barnsley four-two in the First Division play-off final at Wembley. We’d reached the play-offs the three previous seasons, but each time we’d fallen at the semi-final stage. This time, after beating Bolton in the semis, magnificent goals from Tony Mowbray, Richard Naylor, Marcus Stewart and Martijn Reuser — and some equally magnificent goalkeeping from Richard Wright — sent us back where we belong.

I’ve still got the chants of the jubilant Town fans ringing in my ears:

Are you watching
Are you watching
Are you watching Norwich scum?

(Actually, that bit was just to wind up Tribune‘s ad manager. He is a secret Norwich fan, so ashamed by his team’s miserable performances in recent years that he pretends to follow the Arsenal — or is it Spurs this year? I don’t really condone the description of Norwich supporters as “scum”. They’re just fickle, that’s all.)

Seriously, though, I’m not expecting the elation to last too long into next season. Ipswich play attractive football, and we’ve got some good players. But we are going to struggle to compete with the big boys in the Premiership.

The average gate at the Town’s ground, Portman Road, is just under 20,000. That is nearly one-third of the gate at Manchester United, England’s biggest club — and Portman Road’s capacity is being increased by 5,000 over the summer. But Ipswich have only the tiniest fraction of Manchester United’s resources.

Last year, United made a profit of more than £30 million on a turnover of more than £110 million excluding transfer dealings. Ipswich lost £1 million on a turnover of £7 million, making up the shortfall (and a bit more) by selling our best player, Kieron Dyer, to Newcastle United.

Of course, the Town will benefit from going up, to the tune of something like £12 million a year next season, and more once a new broadcasting rights deal, currently under negotiation, is finalised. To clubs still stuck in the First Division — let alone to those in the Second and Third Divisions — it looks as if we’ve joined English football’s elite.

And in a way we have. But even among Premiership clubs there are extraordinary disparities in wealth — and they are getting bigger by the year as cash from broadcasters and commercial sponsors floods into football. In financial terms, Manchester United are now almost in a league of their own, with a turnover nearly twice that of Chelsea, the next richest club. Then there are another half-dozen clubs of roughly comparable wealth, then another half-dozen with reasonable hopes of matching them some day — and then the rest.

It is no accident, to use an old Leftist cliché, that as the richest half-dozen clubs have become ever-richer they have increasingly come to dominate the game. They can afford the best players and managers, and teams with the best players and managers are most likely to win matches. In the past five seasons, only one club outside the richest dozen, Leicester City, has won a major domestic trophy.

All of which is just the way it goes, you might think. But in the long run football with an ever-smaller number of serious contenders for honours is a real turn-off for everyone apart from supporters of the big clubs. Unless the money in the game is spread around more evenly, it will not be long before English football becomes almost as predictable as Scottish football, in which Rangers are champions nearly every year and only Celtic ever have a realistic hope of catching them.

There is a strong case, in other words, for believing that the health of football requires an urgent redistribution of wealth — something that the big clubs will never sanction. Which is where legislation could come in. It’s a mark of the superficiality of “New” Labour’s much trumpeted commitment to the beautiful game that it has never apparently considered any such thing.

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On a different matter entirely, the most shocking thing about the elections to Labour’s National Executive Committee — apart, of course, from the editor losing his seat — was the small number of people who voted.

Precisely how small is a matter for conjecture. Even members of the NEC were not told how many ballot papers were sent out and how many members returned them or phoned in their votes: all they were given was a figure for turnout, 25 per cent, along with the number of votes cast for each candidate.

Because no one could vote for more than six candidates, it is easy enough to work out that at least 60,823 people voted. (You just have to add all the votes cast for each candidate and divide by six.) But of course not everyone did voted for six candidates, so that’s not the actual number.

It is difficult to explain the reticence about hard figures unless Millbank is trying to cover something up. But what? Is it just trying to play down the low turnout — which would be peculiarly stupid — or has there been a slump in total party membership over the past year? As the late John Junor used to put it, I don’t know, but I think we should be told.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 5 May 2000

One of the most dangerous temptations of writing for a political weekly is to anticipate Thursday’s news. Tribune, like the New Statesman and the Spectator, goes to press on Wednesday, but most readers don’t get their copies until Friday. It is sometimes difficult to resist referring to events that are “on diary” for Thursdays as if they have already happened.

But resist one must – because there’s nothing more humiliating for a weekly than getting a Thursday story wrong. My old mate Steve Platt still shudders when he thinks of the issue of the New Statesman (of which he was then editor) that arrived on subscribers’ doormats the day after the 1992 general election. Its cover story was a big piece by Sarah Baxter, then the Statesman‘s political editor, declaring that John Major was yesterday’s man.

So I’m not going to congratulate Ken Livingstone on his easy victory in the London mayoral election. By the time you read this he might just have been abducted by aliens from outer space.

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On a different matter entirely, I am disturbed to hear that opponents of electoral reform for the House of Commons are making a concerted effort to get Labour conference this autumn to ditch the party’s promise of a referendum on the voting system.

The issue is currently in the hands of a party policy commission, which has been sounding out party members’ opinions on the system of “AV-plus” proposed by Lord Jenkins’ Independent Commission on the Voting System. The policy commission is due to report to Labour’s National Policy Forum in July, and the word is that it will recommend retention of the referendum pledge.

But supporters of first-past-the-post think they have found a way of killing off the referendum. If they get enough backing at the July policy forum for a minority report recommending abandonment of the referendum, it will automatically make it on to the Labour conference agenda. If it is debated, such a report stands a good chance of being carried at the conference by the block votes of a handful of large trade unions.

As regular readers of this column will know, I am a supporter of proportional representation for the Commons – so it is hardly surprising that I am unhappy at the prospect of the referendum being ditched. The referendum is the only hope of getting even an approximation of PR in the foreseeable future.

But that’s not the only reason I’m distressed at the first-past-the-post lobby’s antics. The point about the promise of a referendum, first made by John Smith, is that it is a pledge to “let the people decide” on the electoral system they want. The first-past-the-post lobby is doing its damnedest to ensure that the people are [itals]not[close itals] allowed to decide – that the decision is fixed by a cabal of trade union delegates at Labour conference.

Of course, every Labour Party member has the right to attempt to change any aspect of party policy, and I’m all in favour of the party conference having real debates on substantive issues. But if the first-past-the-post lobby prevails it will be a victory for anti-democratic machine politics of the worst kind. What’s more, it will look that way not only to the Liberal Democrats – whose support Labour may well need after the next general election – but also to most individual Labour Party members and, most importantly, to the voters. The anti-referendum campaign should be sent away with a flea in its ear.

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Finally, although I know it’s bad form for columnists to use their privileged position to respond to critical letters, Judith Orr’s missive last week attacking my “venomous” column a fortnight ago on Tony Cliff, the late leader of the Socialist Workers Party, deserves a reply.

She says that, “far from putting people off revolutionary politics”, Cliff inspired “successive generations to socialist ideas”. I wouldn’t dispute the second part of that statement. Indeed, I’m happy to place on record that, according to a reliable source who was for years a senior SWPer, Cliff’s party has managed to recruit 800 to 1,000 people every year since the mid-1970s. The problem, however, according to the same source, is that the same number have left it every year. By my reckoning, that’s at least 20,000 put-off people – but maybe my maths is insufficiently revolutionary.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 21 April 2000

I never met Tony Cliff, the guru of the Socialist Workers Party, who died the weekend before last. But I’ll always be grateful to him. Back in the mid-seventies, a brief encounter with the International Socialists, as his tiny political sect was then called, inoculated me against Leninism for life.

It happened like this. I was a bored teenager at a public school in Ipswich — and, under the combined influence of the New Statesman, Tribune and my grandfather, I’d come to the conclusion that capitalism was a bad thing that ought to be overthrown.

But how to go about it? I flirted briefly with the idea of joining the Labour Party, but the prospect of being associated (however distantly) with Harold Wilson’s Government was too much to bear. The Communist Party locally consisted of a dozen or so pensioners whose hard-line Stalinism was a real turn-off — and the couple of Workers’ Revolutionary Party members I knew were stark raving bonkers.

Then, however, I started to read Socialist Worker, the IS newspaper. Unlike Tribune and the New Statesman, it had no qualms about attacking Wilson for being a reformist toe-rag — and unlike the Morning Star it was not hung up on the supposed wonders of the Soviet police state. The slogan underneath the masthead on each issue, “Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism”, seemed to express in a nutshell precisely what I wanted. And the paper’s preferred means of achieving this state of bliss, a revolution led by rank-and-file workers, appeared absolutely spot on. (OK, I know it seems completely quixotic now, but at the time, just after the 1973-74 miners’ strike and in the middle of the Portuguese revolution, it wasn’t quite so daft. Honestly.)

Anyway, after a couple of months of following Socialist Worker‘s inspiring reports of class struggle throughout the world, I decided to send off the form in the paper asking for more information. A few days later two long-haired beardies from the Ipswich branch of IS presented themselves at my parents’ house — much to the consternation of my Tory grandmother, who was staying with us at the time and answered the door to them.

I started going to local IS meetings, selling the paper to my friends at school and reading my way through massive piles of IS pamphlets and books. I didn’t actually join — I think I was too young to be a member — but for six months or so I was as immersed in IS as I had previously been in railway modelling.

Then, however, all of a sudden, it all went sour. For reasons that were unclear even then, Cliff decided that the time was ripe to turn IS, at the time a relatively pluralist outfit that allowed serious differences of opinion in its ranks, into a “proper” disciplined Leninist revolutionary party. He set up a central committee to run the organisation and gerrymandered the annual conference to minimise dissent. Then he launched what seemed to us a ridiculous campaign demanding the “Right to Work” — East Anglia at the time still had full employment — and expelled everyone who disagreed with him, including the six or seven most active members of the 15-strong Ipswich branch.

It was hardly on the scale of Stalin’s Great Terror. Indeed, to the outside world all it meant was that no one sold — or attempted to sell — Socialist Worker outside the town hall and Crane’s engineering works.

But the arbitrariness of Cliff’s purge came as a real shock to me. I couldn’t see how he could justify chucking people out of IS just because they disagreed with him about organisational structures, campaigning priorities or the likelihood of revolution in the next couple of years. He was, I thought, a bright bloke — but no brighter than plenty of other people in IS. He certainly did not have a monopoly of truth. And if he could behave like this towards comrades in a tiny organisation on the political margins, what on earth would it be like if the IS seized state power?

A couple of the people who had escaped expulsion tried to explain that Lenin’s theory of democratic centralism dictated that, once decisions were made, every member of the party had to stick to the line. But I was unconvinced. Indeed, the more they talked about Lenin, the more I wondered whether what went wrong in Russia after 1917 might not have had a lot to do with Lenin’s conception of the revolutionary party.

I started to read everything about Lenin and the Bolsheviks I could lay my hands on — and before long, thanks to Leonard Schapiro’s The Origins of the Communist Autocracy, Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative and Robert V Daniels’ The Conscience of the Revolution, my suspicions were amply confirmed. I’m pleased to say that I’ve never been tempted by Leninism in any shape or form ever since.

The same is true, of course, of thousands of other people who left IS or the SWP disillusioned over the years. I’m not sure whether Tony Cliff put more British socialists off Leninism in the last quarter of the 20th century than anyone else — but my guess is that he’s up there with Gerry Healey, a much nastier man who ran the WRP.