Author Archives: Paul Anderson

New Times, 3 July 1998

The current fighting in Kosovo is the worst Europe has seen since the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995. A substantial part of the long-suffering Albanian population of the province has risen in reaction to a brutal campaign to suppress separatism by Yugoslav – which means Serbian – police and army units.

The Albanians constitute nine-tenths of the population in Kosovo and are overwhelmingly in favour of independence from Serbia, which has treated them abominably ever since Slobodan Milosevic’s rise to the Serbian presidency more than a decade ago. Milosevic effectively turned Kosovo into a Serbian colony, destroying the autonomy given it by the Yugoslav constitution. Albanians were fired en masse from public sector jobs, denied education in their own language and routinely subjected to police harassment.

For years the Albanian resistance to Milosevic’s regime was resolutely non-violent. But in the past couple of years, support for the Kosovo Liberation Army has grown dramatically – not least because of Milosevic’s decision earlier this year to send in Serbian forces to burn and shell villages in areas where the KLA had a presence. According to newspaper reports, the KLA now controls a quarter of the province’s territory.

It is clear that there is no way of avoiding a bloodbath unless Milosevic withdraws his forces and the Kosovans are granted the national self-determination they so desire. The international community should be threatening Milosevic with dire consequences if he refuses to let the Kosovans free.

Yet such a course of action has not even been considered by the six major powers in the Contact Group that are attempting to resolve the crisis. In the short term, they argue, there must be a cease-fire and the Serbian forces must be withdrawn. In the longer term, they go on, Milosevic and the moderate Kosovo Albanian leaders, particularly Ibrahim Rugova, the head of the Democratic League of Kosovo, should negotiate a form of autonomy for Kosovo within the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Independence is out of the question.

Of course, a cease-fire and withdrawal of the Serbian forces would both be welcome – and Nato should be prepared to intervene militarily if the Serbian attacks continue. But the idea that autonomy for Kosovo inside Yugoslavia could provide a stable solution to the crisis is almost laughable. The Kosovo Albanians know from bitter experience that the Serbs could end such an arrangement by force, just as they did before. Not even the most moderate Kosovo Albanian leader will consider anything less than independence.

So why the major powers’ commitment to autonomy? One honourable reason is concern for the position of the minority Serbian population in Kosovo. But that is not the whole story. The members of the Contact Group are also stubbornly attached to the idea that Milosevic is a man with whom they can do business; and Russia in particular is opposed to any redrawing of maps that might give succour to its own separatists. As in the first phase of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the major powers have failed to recognise that the status quo or a variant on it is no longer a viable option. Let’s hope that in the case of Kosovo this doesn’t have effects as disastrous as the delayed recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992.

Paul Anderson, editorial, New Times, 13 June 1998

I’ve been involved in organising lots of conferences over the years, but nothing quite as big, ambitious or difficult as People’s Europe 98, which took place on the weekend of 5-7 June at the London School of Economics.

The idea was simple enough in the beginning. At last year’s Labour conference, I met Mary Kaldor, with whom I’d worked on the European Nuclear Disarmament Journal in the 1980s. I’d been involved in trying to get a radical left pro-Europe group off the ground, Left for Europe, and she’d been thinking about how the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, of which she was (and is) co-chair, could get involved in the British Presidency of the European Union during the first six months of this year. Wouldn’t it be great, we agreed, if we set up a pan-European forum of civil society that fed its deliberations into the Presidency, culminating in a big festival in Cardiff on the eve of the European summit there in June.

I didn’t give the idea much more thought – but Mary did, and in early December she said she’d got Robin Cook’s backing for the project. It fitted perfectly with the British government’s desire to open up the institutions of the EU, it seemed, and there was money available too. By the beginning of the year, we’d sorted out a realistic budget and lined up the staff we needed. A couple of weeks later, the Foreign Office gave us a provisional go-ahead for a big event in Cardiff on 12-14 June. Soon after that, we decided on the name People’s Europe 98 and made a start on setting up the advisory group that would steer the whole process.

Which is when it began to get complicated. The government started to get jittery over what it was letting itself in for. We emphasised that we had no dangerously subversive hidden agenda and made it clear that we were keen to get small business, the trade unions and local government on board. The FO was happy with our reassurances – but not Number Ten Downing Street, which refused to back People’s Europe 98 unless it was moved from Cardiff, unless it took place a week earlier, and unless various lefties involved in it took a backseat role.

To cut a long story short, we agreed reluctantly to change the time and place – much to the annoyance of everyone in Wales with whom we’d been working – and sorted out a personnel shuffle that made no real difference to our plans but looked better to Number Ten. In mid-March, we finally got the green light, just 12 weeks before the rescheduled event.

That People’s Europe 98 happened at all in such circumstances is a tribute to the staff and members of the executive and advisory committees who organised it. But it didn’t just happen – it was a resounding success. More than 1,100 people came along, more than 200 of them from outside the United Kingdom. There were 56 different discussion meetings on the programme, and by all accounts the overwhelming majority were extraordinarily good. There was a real engagement with government, in particular in the closing question-and-answer session with Robin Cook.

Most important, it looks as if People’s Europe 98 has enough momentum to continue in some form – as a Europe-wide organisation putting on similar events or as a Europe-oriented forum in Britain. Get in touch if you’re interested.

Review of Prawn Cocktail Party by Robin Ramsay (Vision, £9.99), Tribune 12 June 1998

On page 144 of Robin Ramsay’s book on the “hidden power behind New Labour” there is a footnote: “I have written book reviews for Tribune since 1986. The first review of mine which did not appear was of a book attacking Britain’s military-industrial complex, Neil Cooper’s The Business Of Death. A couple of months before I submitted my review the unions represented in the British arms industry had run a full-page advert in Tribune saying, basically, ‘jobs are at stake’. These two events are, of course, not connected.”

Which is, of course, a joke – or at least I think it is, Ramsay doesn’t really believe that the Tribune reviews editor, on receiving his piece, took a look and thought: “Hmmm. We can’t use this. The defence unions might pull their advertising.” Or does he? Worse, perhaps Tribune does work like that these days. After all, when I ran into the advertising manager last week, he did say that I’d better not slag off Ramsay’s book because the publisher was taking an advert. I think he was joking, though I’m not sure.

The difficulty with writing about hidden influences in any sphere of life is simple. You need evidence, and evidence of what is hidden is by definition hard to find. It is all too easy to stray into the realm of conspiracy theory. Ramsay knows this danger from long experience. He has been editor and publisher of Lobster magazine since 1983 and was co-author with Stephen Dorrill of Smear!, a sober and comprehensive account of MIS’s “dirty tricks” campaign against Harold Wilson. Prawn Cocktail Party cannot be dismissed as conspiracy theory, but Ramsay does push his thesis on the role of multinational capital in shaping the policies of New Labour rather further than the evidence will take it.

Ramsay’s big idea is that there “is a group of interrelated and mutually supporting financial institutions whose interests lie outside the domestic British economy” – what he calls “the overseas lobby” – that has for most of this century pursued a policy of undermining everyone who has backed measures to ensure that wealth created in Britain stays here. With New Labour, he argues, the triumph of this lobby is complete.

It is not an implausible story, and Ramsay tells it with a polemical verve unusual in contemporary political writing. The chapter on shadowy American-funded transatlantic networks for members of the political elite is excellent, as is the one on Labour’s fear of the City. The problem, however, is that Ramsay never tells us who, precisely, has been part of the “overseas lobby” or how members of the lobby operate – and the result is that he gives little idea of how its supposed influence could be countered beyond making a plea for Labour to resort to economic nationalism.

New Times, 10 April 1998

It is tempting simply to cheer last week’s decision by a Versailles tribunal to bar Jean-Marie Le Pen from public office. The president of the far-right National Front, found guilty of physically attacking a Socialist candidate during last year’s French general election campaign, is a thug whose racist message has poisoned French public life for more than a decade. The two-year ban means that he will be unable to continue as a regional councillor in Provence-Côte d’Azur and is unlikely to be allowed to stand again for the European Parliament in 1999. The ruling could be the beginning of the end of his long and inglorious political career.

Yet if Le Pen appears to be on the way out, the same cannot be said of his party. In last month’s regional elections, the National Front took 15 per cent of the popular vote, winning the balance of power between the left and the mainstream right in large swathes of France. More important, in five of the 22 regional councils its councillors struck deals with the mainstream right parties, the Gaullist RPR and the centre-right Union for French Democracy (UDF), to ensure the election of right-wing regional presidents.

President Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist, immediately disowned the agreements, appearing on television to denounce the Front as “racist and xenophobic”. Last week, he started consultations with politicians and constitutional experts on plans for changing the proportional representation system used for regional elections. His goal is to come up with an electoral system that ensures the Front will not in future win seats.

But he is engaging in damage-limitation. The regional council deals, the first significant agreements between the Front and “respectable” politicians, showed that a large section of the mainstream right is no longer prepared to treat Le Pen’s party as a pariah.

The main reason for this – apart from desperation for power – is the rise to prominence in the Front of Bruno Mégret, Le Pen’s deputy and chief strategist, who is now almost certain to succeed him as leader sooner rather than later. A smooth-talking former Gaullist, Mégret has made a point of toning down the Front’s crude anti-immigrant rhetoric in favour of a more reasonable-sounding appeal for lower taxes, more police and the defence of French ‘cultural identity’. The deal offered by the Front in the regional councils was votes in return for support for a six-point programme that did not include racist policies.

The changes in the Front’s image are cosmetic, as Mégret himself admitted in a remarkably candid interview with the Daily Telegraph last week. But the degree to which a section of the mainstream right fell for them is remarkable. If only briefly, it gave the Front’s racism and xenophobia unprecedented legitimacy.

It would be wrong to exaggerate the prospects of a far-right take-over in France. The short-term effects of the events of the past month have been to demoralise the RPR and UDF and to strengthen the moral authority and popularity of the governing Socialists and their allies. In the longer run, the likelihood is that electoral reform, consolidation of the centre-right and – with luck – falling unemployment will combine to squeeze the Front’s support.

But it would also be wrong to be complacent. Mégret believes that, by striking accords with the mainstream right, the Front can take up to 30 per cent of the vote, becoming the majority force on the French right. That this does not appear quite as incredible as it did a month ago is itself a cause for concern.

New Times, 13 March 1998

Everything was looking good for the German Greens when they met in the eastern city of Magdeburg last weekend for their last conference before the 27 September Bundestag election.

The opinion polls said they were set to take a healthy 10 per cent of the vote – more than ever before in a federal election. Joschka Fischer, their leader in parliament, arrived at the conference with a reputation as the most impressive left-of-centre politician in the country, widely tipped for a post in government in coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), possibly as foreign minister.

The Greens had to show that they were capable of brokering a deal with the SPD, now with the populist Gerhard Schroeder confirmed as its candidate for the federal chancellorship after his stunning victory in the Lower Saxony Land election earlier in the month.

That, however, did not seem to be an insurmountable problem.

Schroeder himself is no friend of the Greens, not least because he has Volkswagen in his home state and is a shameless populist on petrol taxation. But his party would undoubtedly prefer a coalition with the Greens to one with the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, the other possible outcome of the Bundestag election that has been widely discussed.

Moreover, days before the Greens met in Magdeburg, Oskar Lafontaine, the SPD party leader and a strong opponent of a “grand coalition” with the CDU, had won himself a key role in drafting the SPD’s election programme after anointing Schroeder as “chancellor-candidate” – a job he craved for himself. With Lafontaine in a position of influence, a “red-green” coalition, giving the Greens seats in federal government for the first time since entering the Bundestag in 1983, appeared more credible than ever before.

Yet somehow the Greens conspired to damage their prospects in the most spectacular fashion. On Saturday evening, after an acrimonious debate, they voted by 275 votes to 274 to reject Fischer’s proposal to support the use of German troops in peace-keeping forces in Bosnia.

This is not merely a personal blow for Fischer and a sign that the Greens have not grown out of their youthful enthusiasm for factional disputes. The vote also has a crucial symbolic importance. For Fischer and the party leadership – as indeed for most Germans – opposing the use of German troops in international peace-keeping efforts is an abdication of responsibility. They believe that it is imperative for Germany to play its part in preventing ethnic cleansing, however understandable it is that many peace-loving Germans shudder at the thought of deploying their country’s military might abroad.

Fischer and his colleagues are right. The crimes of the Third Reich or indeed of imperial Germany before it are no excuse for failure to face up to the – non-German – crimes of today. The Green fundamentalists’ pacifist isolationism is gesture politics at its worst. The rest of the world needs Germany to take its fair share of peace-keeping tasks.

As with their opposition to German unification in 1989-90, the Greens appear to have misread the political circumstances out of misplaced fear of resurgent Nazism. Whether the misreading is quite so politically disastrous as it was then remains to be seen. In 1990, the Greens and Lafontaine, who took much the same line as chancellor-candidate for the SPD, gave Helmut Kohl a free ride with their anti-nationalist rhetoric. This time, not so much is at stake – and Schroeder is too canny to fall into the same trap. The problem is that Schroeder without the Greens would be too much like Tony Blair without Robin Cook and John Prescott.

Paul Anderson, Red Pepper, March 1998

All the signs are that the government is set to reject replacement of the House of Lords with a democratically elected second chamber.

Insiders say that the committee chaired by Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine to examine the options for Lords reform – first to find a way of getting rid of the ludicrous archaism of hereditary peers and then to proffer suggestions for a ‘more democratic and representative’ second chamber as promised by the 1997 Labour manifesto – is likely to reject the idea of an elected upper house. Instead, they say, it will back Irvine’s (and Tony Blair’s) preference for a second chamber that is largely appointed.

‘The publicly stated rationale for rejecting democratic elections will be the supposed need for a diverse upper house,’ said a senior Labour peer. ‘In fact, the point of the exercise is simply to preserve the patronage powers of the prime minister.’

Irvine himself has made it clear that he sees a wholly elected second chamber as dangerous. He told an interviewer last month that ‘it’s difficult to see how without a very significant element you can really ensure that the House of Lords is a house of all the talents, and a place at which people enter at a fairly high age’.

But journalists have been slow to latch on to the dominance of his view in his committee – which is largely down to Blair’s strong support for his anti-democratic position.

The argument is by no means over. Labour peers certainly lack democratic legitimacy. But they are hardly a New Labour cabal, as they showed last month by voting to outlaw predatory pricing in the newspaper industry, a measure Blair had promised Rupert Murdoch that Labour would oppose. Many of them remain attached to the principle of a democratically elected second chamber as advocated by Labour before Blair became leader – not least Roy Hattersley, now elevated to the peerage but in past life, as shadow home secretary, the architect of Labour’s 1992 promise of an elected upper house. Even in Irvine’s inner circle there are a few convinced democrats.

But Irvine and Blair have strong support among Labour MPs who reject an elected second chamber on the grounds that it would inevitably reduce the powers of the Commons. And they can count on the backing of most of the press, which rather likes the idea of a second chamber packed with the celebrities it already knows, however they are chosen.

So – rather like proportional representation for the Commons – a democratic second chamber is already looking like a modernisation too far for the Blair government. Unless, of course, we start putting on the pressure right now.

New Times, 13 February 1998

Quite the most important elections in Europe during the first half of this year are those on 1 March in the German state of Lower Saxony.

Since 1990, the state premier there has been the populist Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, who is on the right of his party. If he stands as SPD candidate for the federal chancellorship in September’s elections for the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, he has a better chance than anyone else in his party of ousting Helmut Kohl and his centre-right coalition government.

But Schröder has said that he will not put his name forward for selection unless on 1 March the SPD vote in Lower Saxony does not fall by more than two percentage points. At present, it looks as if he’ll do better than that, actually increasing the SPD’s share of the vote – which will almost certainly mean that his main rival for the SPD chancellorship nomination, Oskar Lafontaine, the more left-leaning Saarland state premier and federal party leader, will withdraw and nominate Schröder when the SPD’s top brass meet to choose their candidate on 16 March.

If Schröder fails in Lower Saxony, however, the nomination will almost certainly go to Lafontaine, the unsuccessful  SPD candidate for the federal chancellorship in the 1990 post-unification election. Although Lafontaine has maintained a consistently high public profile in recent months with his assaults on the economic and financial policies of the federal government, opinion polls suggest that he is unlikely to beat Kohl.

To up the ante still more, victory for Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union in Lower Saxony would wipe out the SPD majority in the Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament, and bring to an end months of legislative deadlock.

So a lot is at stake on 1 March for both big parties, and both are pulling out all the stops during the campaign. Kohl plans no fewer than eight speaking engagements in support of his party’s challenger in Lower Saxony, Christian Wulf, and Schröder and Lafontaine – who started the year wrangling over the date that the SPD would choose its candidate for the chancellorship – are putting on public shows of mutual admiration as often as they can.

Of course, there’s plenty that can go wrong for Schröder even if he does well on 1 March. Schröder’s enthusiasm for reform of the welfare state and his tough-on-crime stance risk pushing many SPD voters into backing the Greens, and they could well provide a lifeline for the Party of Democratic Socialism, the former East German Communist Party. Schröder’s rhetoric might also make it very difficult for the SPD to reach a coalition arrangement with the Greens after the election. This doesn’t bother Schröder, who would prefer a coalition with the liberal free Democrats or a “grand coalition” with the CDU, but it worries many in his party, by no means all on the left.

Nevertheless, the prospects for the SPD today are brighter than at any time since German unification, and that can only be good news for the rest of the European centre-left. Under Kohl, Germany has for the last four years resisted all attempts to get the European Union to introduce reflationary measures compensating for the deflationary effects of European economic and monetary union. Largely as a result, German unemployment last month reached the startling total of 5 million.

Schröder is no radical Keynesian, but his populism means that he is at least open to the argument that Europe needs a concerted assault on unemployment. And that is a small but significant step in the right direction.

New Times, 16 January 1998

The idea that Europe should have a common foreign policy was one of the great dreams of the founders of what has become the European Union – and in one sense their dream has been realised.

The EU simply has to have a common foreign policy as it processes applicants for membership and makes trade deals.

Who is in, who is out: there’s real power here, as any Cypriot or Turk or Czech or Slovak or Windward Islander will tell you.

But beyond the crude mechanisms for deciding membership of the club, the record is scratchy. On the big question of security policy since 1945 – what should we do to stop the Russians invading? – western Europe has never found any answer but to beg the United States provide a “nuclear guarantee”.

Since the end of the cold war the community of west European democracies has failed miserably to rise above the competing interests of its major member states when dealing with crises on its borders.

The west European response to the collapse of Soviet imperialism in 1989-92 was chaotic, determined partly by the perceived interests of the national governments of France, Britain and Germany and partly by the US. German unification almost split the west asunder.

Far worse, the “diplomacy” of the EU as Yugoslavia collapsed – orchestrated by Britain and France – merely encouraged Serbian territorial aggrandisement and genocide.

In such circumstances, it is difficult to be optimistic about the prospects for the EU initiative on Algeria, announced by British foreign secretary Robin Cook earlier this month.

It’s not that Algeria should be left to its own devices. It is clear that its government is running a policy of terrorism against its own people to legitimise its suppression of democracy. The state massacres of recent weeks are the latest in a long line since the generals mounted a coup to annul an Islamist victory in local elections in 1992.

The problem, however, is that the Algerian regime has been allowed to get away with it for so long because it has been backed by France, the old colonial power and still a force in the land, with the acquiescence or support of the rest of the west.

The argument was – and is – that if Algeria were to fall to the Islamists, Morocco and Egypt would not be far behind. In a short time, the whole of north Africa would be in “enemy” hands. The idea that the people of Algeria should be allowed to make their own choices (and their own mistakes) has never been allowed to get a look-in. The same goes for the possibility that the Islamists might just sustain a polity that is more liberal than the current one.

Of course, this anti-democratic paternalism has an immaculate left pedigree. The totalitarian regimes of “actually existing socialism” before 1989 always claimed that “the masses” were too simple, too stupid, too prone to influence by propaganda to be allowed to vote. A similar position is taken by apologists for “socialist” police states in Cuba and North Korea today. It is no accident, as the communists used to say, that many of the leading figures in the regime were once acolytes of Moscow.

But there’s no reason for the EU to adopt their line. Free elections will not stop the slaughter on their own – but nothing will stop the slaughter until there are free elections. If the delegation comes back with a ringing declaration in favour of democracy, and if the governments of the EU back it up with an offer to run the polls, the initiative will at least have made a mark. Anything less will be a very sick joke.

Chartist, January-February 1998

Many commentators have rightly complained that social security secretary Alistair Darling’s plans for reforming the pensions system, announced at the end of last year, are insufficiently radical. The trouble with the present system is simple. People are living longer but aren’t saving for their old age. By 2020 we’d need to be paying a lot more tax to sustain state pensions. This is politically unthinkable, and in any case – as Charlie Leadbeater argued in the New Statesmanthe other week – the tax system is in grave danger of collapsing before then because of the growth of self-employment and Internet shopping. So it is imperative that we act now to make sure everyone starts saving.

Yet Darling has done the opposite. His plan to retain the basic state pension and pay a means-tested guaranteed minimum to those who have not made their own provision suffers from a fatal flaw. A substantial proportion of people who can well afford to save will choose not to because they recognise that their chances of getting the means-tested pension will be wrecked if they have money in a pension scheme.

The only solution to this “free rider” problem is to bring home to these irresponsible non-savers the risks that they are taking. To coin a phrase, we have to be tough on prodigality and tough on the causes of prodigality. And the most effective way to do this is to abolish all state provision for pensioners – the basic pension, means-tested income support and the state earnings-related pension scheme.

This is perfectly feasible politically: I am not suggesting abolishing any existing pensioners’ pensions, nor am I suggesting doing anything to alarm anyone who will soon retire. My suggestion is that the state should withdraw from pensions provision only for those whose 65^th birthday is on or after 1 January 2025. No one born before 1960 will be affected in any way. And because everyone born in 1960 or after has 26 years or more still to save before reaching 65, no one should have any difficulty in building up sufficient funds: we are, after all, an affluent society. Provision would of course be made for modest voluntary deductions from unemployment and disability benefits to pay into individual pension accounts so that everyone is able to feel that they have a stake in their future.

The economic advantages of abolishing state pension provision are many. By 2065, the demands on the exchequer from pensions would have become nugatory, allowing substantial reductions in income tax – with all that means for encouraging enterprise. Equally important, taking the state out of pensions would stimulate an ethic of personal responsibility and thrift, which in turn would have substantial beneficial knock-on effects on the British economy.

The less people spend and the more they save, the better the government’s chances of maintaining unemployment at a level compatible with low inflation – a particular headache if we are to join the European single currency. If everyone saved 40 per cent of his or her post-tax income in a pension scheme, the risks of runaway consumer demand causing the economy to overheat would disappear forever.

Getting the state out of pensions would also allow many older people to remain economically active for much longer. Older people are one of the great under-used resources of this country, and many regret having been forced into retirement at 65 when they are at the height of their powers and believe they still have much to offer. The arrival of working over-65s on the labour market would put welcome downward pressure on wage inflation, making Britain even more competitive in the global market place.

There is no reason why working over-65s could not have the same rights at work as everyone else. And if they lost their jobs, they would of course enjoy the same rights to unemployment benefits – and the same responsibilities to look for work. Anything else would be patently unfair.

However, it would be wholly utopian not to recognise that older people have a greater propensity to fall ill despite the great advances in medicine in recent years. So rules governing sickness and disability benefits for working over-65s would have to be kept under constant review to ensure costs to the taxpayer remain reasonable. On the other hand, because working over-65s would enjoy enhanced mortality rates, the costs of long-term care for the elderly who are genuinely incapable of working would be reduced.

I have no interest in benefiting from this proposal myself. Indeed, as I was born in October 1959, I would narrowly miss out on being a beneficiary – except indirectly as younger people’s changed patterns of spending and saving have their macroeconomic impact. But the more I think it through, the more its attractions become irresistible. Let’s hope Alistair Darling still reads Chartist.