Author Archives: Paul Anderson

New Times, 2 May 1997

French President Jacques Chirac’s decision to call a snap National Assembly election, with the two rounds of voting taking place on 25 May and 1 June, has put the parties of the left, the communists and the socialists, in a difficult position.

The two-round voting system means that both parties always do badly unless they reach agreement with one another about standing down in the second round. And this time, because of the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, there are many seats where the left parties will have to agree on single candidates in the first round if the best-placed left candidate is not to finish third.

The problem, however, is that they disagree with one another on the most important issue in this election, European monetary union. While the Communist Party (PCF), led by Robert Hue, is against the single currency – as it has been all along – the Socialist Party (PS), led by Lionel Jospin, is broadly in favour. EMU was the brainchild of François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors, and the socialists cannot easily rat on it.

Under Jospin, a likeable 63-year-old who did far better in the 1995 presidential election than anyone expected, the PS has returned to its social democratic ideological roots after the ideology-free late Mitterrand years – and this has allowed it to move some way towards the PCF’s Euroscepticism. The PS has long argued for Europe-wide reflation, but in recent weeks it has taken to emphasising its concern about the strict rule in the Maastricht treaty limiting state budget deficits to 3 per cent of gross domestic product. Unemployment in France is running at nearly 13 per cent, and the socialists have come out against cutting spending to get the budget deficit down. As Jospin put it last month: “If, in respect to the 3 per cent criterion, it is necessary to impose new austerity measures on the nation, my answer is no.”

Rather than austerity, the PS is promising to create 350,000 jobs in the private sector by cutting working time and to subsidise another 350,000 in the public sector.

This programme – which is radically unlike Labour’s in Britain – would mean that France would not qualify for EMU in 1999. This in turn would at very least postpone the whole project and might just scupper it completely. It is no surprise that it is very much to the liking of the PCF.

Whether it goes down as well with the voters remains to be seen, however. Voters are worried about the effects of the deflation and deregulation required by EMU, and the centre-right government of Alain Juppé, which has made a priority of reducing the deficit rather than creating jobs, is highly unpopular. The two government parties, the Gaullist RPR and the centre-right UDF, are almost certain to lose many of the seats they currently hold in the National Assembly.

On the other hand, the right can afford to lose a lot of seats. Both left parties were routed in the last parliamentary election in 1993: in the outgoing National Assembly, the socialists have 63 seats and the communists 24 to the RPR’s 258 and the UDF’s 206. The left also has the problem that many voters disaffected with the government seem likely to opt for the far-right National Front, which has won several municipal victories in the south of the country in recent months – although its candidates will be to the left’s advantage where they get through to the second round and split the right-wing vote.

So a left victory is not impossible, just unlikely. But if it happens, the implications for the rest of Europe could be enormous. Watch this space.

New Times, 4 April 1997

New Times, 7 March 1997

Anyone who suggested ten years ago that we would now be discussing the rights and wrongs of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia joining NATO would have been ridiculed.
It was not quite the height of the cold war: the United States and the Soviet Union were negotiating seriously on nuclear arms, Mikhail Gorbachev had tentatively begun the  liberalisation of the Soviet Union, and at least some of the communist regimes of the Soviet bloc – notably Hungary and Poland – had relaxed their suppression of dissident opinion.

But the division of Europe between two hostile blocs, one dominated by the United States, the other controlled by the Soviet Union, seemed such an established fact that ending it peacefully appeared utopian even to those, like Edward Thompson and his colleagues in European Nuclear Disarmament, who most wanted it. The idea that NATO should expand to the eastern border of Poland hardly entered the mind of even the most militant western cold warrior.
Which only goes to show that the course of history is impossible to predict. The enlargement of NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic is now imminent. It is US President Bill Clinton’s top priority in foreign affairs for 1997, and there is a remarkable degree of consensus across the political spectrum in Europe that it is a good thing. In Britain, it has the blessing of all the main political parties.

But is NATO enlargement really such a bright idea? There are good reasons for doubt. It will be difficult and expensive to integrate Polish, Hungarian and Czech armed forces into NATO’s military structure; and enlargement will do nothing for the security of Europe’s most volatile region, the Balkans. Most important, it is likely to have an unwelcome effect on Russia.
NATO was begun in 1948 as an anti-Russian alliance at a time when the west feared – with some reason – that Moscow would attack western Europe. Today, NATO says that it is no longer anti-Russian, and that Russians have nothing to fear from its expansion. But it is not seen that way by Russians, or indeed by most Poles, Hungarians and Czechs. The reason they want to join is to provide security against a future military threat from Russia.

These fears of Russia are understandable and legitimate. It is less than ten years since east-central Europe was under the Soviet yoke. Even if Russia today is not a threat, it could well be in the none-too-distant future. It retains substantial nuclear and conventional arsenals, which it has been less willing to dismantle of late than in the early 1990s; and it is anything but politically stable. In the next few years, it could certainly find itself with an authoritarian government, possibly with strong backing from the military, that plays relentlessly on nationalist anti-western themes.

The problem, however, is that expanding NATO eastwards makes it more rather than less likely that this will happen. Public opinion in Russia is running strongly against NATO expansion, and authoritarian nationalist politicians are already trying to exploit this for their own ends. The Russian parliament has refused to ratify the START-2 agreement on strategic nuclear weapons and the government is dragging its feet in other disarmament negotiations. There is a strong case for believing that the priority for European security is to  prevent Russia from turning nasty – and that the best way of doing this is to postpone NATO enlargement and use the good will this creates in Moscow to press for rapid and radical disarmament agreements.

This would of course necessitate some radical new thinking about creating a new post-cold-war security structure for Europe. One option that would certainly allay Russian fears would be expansion of NATO to include Russia. Alternatively, NATO could be recast as a strictly European alliance, excluding both the US and Russia but with non-aggression agreements with each: this would have the advantage of aligning Europe’s security arrangements more closely with the political structures that will emerge in the early years of the next century as the European Union expands. Most radically of all, NATO could be dismantled and the security of Europe entrusted to either the European Union or the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

All of which sounds ridiculously unrealistic and utopian. But in ten years’ time, who knows . . .

Red Pepper, March 1997

Tony Blair looks set to win the general election. That’s good, but the left shouldn’t expect radical change, says Paul Anderson

Labour has been ultra-cautious with its pre-election policy commitments for a long time now. Avoiding hostages to fortune was a crucial element of the pre-1992 campaign strategy – and John Smith as leader decided to make it the guiding light of Labour policy-making. Since Tony Blair became leader in 1994, however, “safety first” has been taken to new extremes in just about every area of policy.

ECONOMY
The priorities for Blair and shadow chancellor Gordon Brown have been to reassure taxpayers and to calm business nerves. They have repeatedly announced that they will run a tight anti-inflationary fiscal and monetary regime. In January, Brown promised not to change either the top rate or the standard rate of income tax – and said that, with the exception of the money he gets from his windfall tax on the excess profits of privatised utilities, he will stick to the Tories’ plans for public spending for his first two years in office. That means a continuing clamp-down on public-sector pay and only small increases in spending on health, education and local government.

EUROPE
Policy on Europe has changed little since 1994 – although shadow foreign secretary Robin Cook has adopted a marginally more sceptical position on economic and monetary union than Labour had before. The idea of the EU running a counter-cyclical macro-economic policy, very popular with both Brown and Cook, has been downgraded, although this is in part because the Delors plan on which it was based was scuppered by the British government in the Council of Ministers.

WORK
Labour has stuck to its promise to sign up to the Social Chapter of the Maastricht treaty. But since 1994 it has watered down its commitments to rights for part-time and temporary workers and has abandoned plans to allow trade unions to engage in sympathy actions in certain circumstances. It has also changed its policy on its promised minimum wage: instead of announcing what it will be before the election, as in 1992, it will leave it up to a commission to set it afterwards at a “sensible” level.

WELFARE
In education, the key change since 1994 is that Labour has made it clear that it will not now abolish grammar or grant-maintained schools. In health policy, the party’s opposition to the internal market and GP fundholding has softened. Labour will not now abolish Jobseeker’s Allowance and go back to Unemployment Benefit, and its pensions policy is in limbo after last year’s row at its party conference. The welfare state in its broadest sense is, however, an area where Labour could well prove radical in government. Its plans for “lifelong learning” and a “university for industry” are ambitious, and its “welfare to work” strategy for tackling unemployment contains much that makes sense.

CONSTITUTION
Changing the constitution was the one thing about which Labour under Smith was not ultra-cautious. Reformers looked forward to a Labour government legislating for a Bill of Rights, an elected second chamber and devolution to a Scottish parliament, a Welsh assembly and directly elected regional councils in England. Labour also promised a referendum on the electoral system. Now devolution to Scotland, Wales and the English regions will happen only if people vote for it in referendums, and Lords reform will be limited for now to removal of the voting rights of hereditary peers. There are persistent rumours, denied by Blair’s office, that he has decided to ditch plans for a referendum on electoral reform.

ENVIRONMENT AND TRANSPORT
Labour has downgraded the profile of environment policy since 1994 – to the disappointment of green campaigners (see Charles Secrett in last month’s Red Pepper) – but has not formally changed it. On transport, its key shift has been on what to do about the privatised rail network, where it is now promising something less than wholesale renationalisation.

Review of Changing States by Glyn Ford, Glenys Kinnock and Arlene McCarthy (eds) (Mandarin, £7.99), Tribune, 8 November 1996

Labour’s MEPs don’t get the attention they deserve. The European Parliament has long since ceased to be a mere talking shop: it now has considerable powers to influence decisions that affect us all. And Labour plays a major role in every aspect of its business. The party is the largest single national group in the Party of European Socialists, itself the parliament’s biggest party, and Labour MEPs hold a string of key positions.

Yet the European Parliament goes largely unreported by the British media, which still consider, entirely wrongly, that political life begins and ends in Westminster and that Europe is essentially a matter of foreign policy. In the Labour Party, MEPs are too often viewed, equally wrongly, as second-rate politicians with the cushiest jobs going.

This collection of essays by a group of 14 members of the European Parliamentary Labour Party should go some way towards changing all this. Between them, the authors, all from the pro-European (but not-quite-federalist) mainstream of the EPLP, cover just about every aspect of European Union politics, from economic and monetary union to consumer protection. No one who reads this book from cover to cover will come away doubting that the EU has to be at the centre of Labour’s political concerns.

All the contributions are intelligent, well-written and easy to understand – itself uncommon in writing about European politics – and the book sends a clear message to Labour’s leaders in Westminster as it prepares for power: flirt with Euroscepticism at your peril. It will not be easy in the heat of an election campaign for Labour to remain essentially pro-European. With Sir James Goldsmith threatening them from the right, the Tories are setting themselves up to run a vicious xenophobic anti-European campaign, and they will be given strong backing by much of the press. The temptation for Labour to respond by adopting a much more Eurosceptic line than it has taken for the past decade, particularly on the single currency, will be great.

That, however, would be a major mistake. As several of the authors argue, the EU needs to be reformed and democratised, and there are undoubted risks in economic and monetary union. But the risks that would be involved in Britain turning its back on Europe are greater. A “positive, proactive approach to Europe”, in the words of Glyn Ford’s excellent introductory essay, is the only option that makes sense. And, as Alan Donnelly and David Martin make clear in their respective contributions, that includes engaging actively in the negotiations leading up to the single currency and backing a massive increase in the powers of the European Parliament.

Red Pepper, November 1996

Labour’s conference last month was an even easier ride for Tony Blair than last year’s. But, says Paul Anderson, the unity on show might not last much beyond the general election

Like it or loathe it, Labour is more united today than at any time in living memory. Last month’s party conference in Blackpool was all smiles and standing ovations. Not one vote went against Tony Blair – even after Barbara Castle’s impassioned call for the basic state pension to be linked again to earnings not prices.

But the party is united for one purpose only: winning the next election. After that, it is unlikely that Labour’s unity will survive long. New Labour is a fragile coalition, and a Labour government will have its work cut out to keep it together. Even now, it’s easy to predict what will stimulate Labour opposition to prime minister Blair – at least some of which will give strength to the pro-European green libertarian left.

Europe The most contentious decision Labour will have to make in office is whether to join the single European currency in 1999. Labour is divided on European monetary union, but unlike the Tories, not on straightforward left-right lines.

The official position is that Labour is in favour of EMU in principle, but against joining unless there is “real economic convergence”. Not only should inflation and government borrowing be low all round – as the Maastricht treaty dictates – unemployment should be low and growth high. This line will probably see Labour through to the election, although it is anathema to the party’s hard-line nationalist Eurosceptics (some hard left, some right-wing Keynesian devaluationists) who are against a single currency in principle.

Once Labour comes to power, however, “the fireworks could start almost at once”, as one centre-left MP put it in Blackpool. A decision on participation in EMU from the outset will have to be made soon after the election, and the best guess is that membership will be on offer only on the terms laid down by Maastricht (albeit flexibly interpreted). It’s most likely that Labour will have to decide whether to join without “real economic convergence” – and that means an unenviable choice. Joining EMU will be a disaster if the convergence criteria turn out to be so tough that they crash the economy. But staying out will be bad news if it means British exclusion from a continental European boom or an EMU-wide job-creation programme.

Unsurprisingly, Labour is divided right to the top on what to do. Gordon Brown apparently wants to take a deep breath and jump in the deep end – but Robin Cook would rather stand on the side and see whether the water is as cold as it looks. Blair is in two minds, but inclined to follow Cook. According to insiders, a majority of the shadow cabinet is wary of EMU, but the balance in a real cabinet will tilt in favour if Blair promotes some of the younger modernisers now in junior front-bench posts. Whatever the leadership decides, at least a significant minority of MPs will disagree, as will a fair number of MEPs, key advisers and trade unions. A referendum on EMU, touted as a way out of Labour’s dilemma, would exacerbate its divisions more spectacularly even than the 1975 Common Market membership referendum.

On the non-xenophobe left, there’s a real argument going on, between EMU sceptics, who would like a renegotiation of the Maastricht conditions (Unison, the TGWU, Tribune, Roger Berry, Peter Hain, Alan Simpson, Jonathan Michie), and EMU enthusiasts, who argue for signing up and then pressing for compensatory measures to cope with the resulting austerity (the GMB, the TUC, Denis MacShane, most of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, John Palmer, Stuart Holland).

This one will run and run – but if Labour signs up for EMU, the protagonists will almost certainly come together behind a Europe-wide employment programme like that being promoted by Labour MEP Ken Coates, which is backed by an impressive coalition of socialists and greens throughout the continent.

Public spending One of the arguments advanced by opponents of participation in EMU is that it requires draconian cuts in public spending; even pro-EMU Labour politicians concede that it means fiscal discipline. But it’s quite possible that a Labour government will decide to squeeze expenditure – except on education, on which Labour is committed to spend – even if it stays out of EMU.

Having made so much of the Tories’ lies about tax, Gordon Brown cannot easily raise income tax or VAT if he needs to reduce public sector borrowing, as he will have to if it overshoots the government’s estimates (as seems likely). There are other options for raising revenue – such as windfall taxes and green taxes – and, in the medium term, growth might ease Brown’s problems. If, however, he decides he has to cut spending (for example to curb inflation), there will be howls of protest from the PLP left, from the constituencies, from the public sector unions and from Labour local government.

Even a refusal to increase public spending beyond the minimal promises in Labour’s manifesto document will be unpopular. Local authorities have high expectations of a Labour government. And the public sector unions are in no mood to be told that big pay rises are out of the question. They will be especially angry if a nugatory minimum wage eventually emerges from the government.

Relations with the unions It’s at this point that big union trouble could start for Blair, and the he knows it. Measures that give substance to the slogans of “social partnership” and “stakeholding” will go down well with the unions – but they might still insist on exerting their influence inside the Labour Party. Because they still dominate Labour’s conference and National Executive Committee, they have the power to make the party ungovernable if they fall out with the government.

Labour’s general secretary, Tom Sawyer, is looking at ways that party structures could be reformed to minimise the damage if the unions get awkward; and if that doesn’t work, there’s the option, floated by junior employment spokesman Stephen Byers during TUC week, that the leadership could cut the party adrift from the unions. As the furore that followed Byers’ remarks shows, that would start a bloody battle that the leadership could well lose.

All the same, it’s not just the modernisers in the New Labour camp that reckon a divorce might not be a disaster. The unions increasingly feel that money they spend on Labour could be better used. Few union leaders are likely to join Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, but the TGWU, MSF and Unison – at very least – are already thinking seriously about life without. Using all their political funds on their own campaigning is looking more and more attractive.

Welfare reform There have been tastes of the potential for welfare policy to generate Labour dissent in recent months – not just the conference row over the proposals from Barbara Castle and welfare expert Peter Townsend on pensions, but also the less-public spats over Gordon Brown’s plans to drop universal child benefit for 16- to 18-year-olds and to retain the Job Seekers’ Allowance.

How much of a hot potato welfare will be in government is unclear, however. If Labour’s welfare-to-work programme really does reduce the dole queues, there will be few complaints; but if benefits are cut – or if Labour embraces some of the wilder privatisation schemes being hatched by Frank Field and others – there will be mayhem, and not just from the parliamentary left and the unions.

The network of left-leaning academic and pressure group welfare experts is out of the New Labour loop: the Castle-Townsend collaboration on pensions could be a portent of trouble to come from politicians acting in league with the Child Poverty Action Group, Shelter and others. There’s also growing interest across the political spectrum in the (originally radical left) idea of a basic income, which will find increasing purchase if a Labour government fails the poor.

Scotland On Blair’s insistence, Labour is now promising referendums on devolution for Scotland and Wales in the first year of a Labour government. And the Scottish one, considered a sell-out on Home Rule by many Scottish Labourites and ridiculed by nationalists, is set to be a particular problem.

The Scots will decide whether they want a Scottish parliament and whether it should have tax-raising powers. If the result is “yes-yes”, Labour will be laughing. ”Yes-no”, the next most likely result, will spark apoplexy not just in the Scottish Labour Party but among everyone – from the Scottish TUC and the Lib Dems to the churches and the Greens – who backed the Scottish Constitutional Convention agreement on self-government for Scotland.

Electoral reform Labour is committed to holding a referendum on electoral reform for the Commons – and, if it’s ditched, the party’s electoral reform lobby will be livid. There is also potential for conflict over the wording of the referendum and in the referendum campaign itself, in which senior Labour figures will back different systems.

Once again, Robin Cook is a key player (he is the most senior enthusiast for the German additional member system of proportional representation), and once again there is not a simple left-right divide. Although MPs tend to be sceptical about anything that might threaten their hold on their seats, several, many on the left, are enthusiasts for PR (Ken Livingstone, Clare Short, Richard Burden), and their numbers will swell after the election. They have backing from younger party activists and some unions – as well as from non-party pressure groups such as Charter 88. Cross-party alliances will be key, particularly when it comes to deciding on the particular electoral system the PR lobby supports if the referendum goes ahead.


Civil liberties With Jack Straw as shadow home secretary, Labour has relentlessly asserted its enthusiasm for getting tough on crime, playing down civil libertarian themes. In opposition, internal Labour criticism has been muted – largely because Straw has not come up with concrete proposals that are particularly authoritarian even though his rhetoric has often echoed Michael Howard’s.

The tests here will come in office: in the scope of the Freedom of Information legislation Labour has promised, in the content of its Bill of Rights, in its replacements for Tory laws restricting asylum rights, immigration and freedom of assembly. There is a strong civil libertarian movement outside party politics, part of it long-established and single-issue (Liberty, Amnesty International), part of it new and as involved in questions of social justice and environmentalism (The Big Issue magazine, the new squatting movement, the campaigns against the Criminal Justice Act and road-building).

It would be rash to predict a flowering of a radical new left after Tony Blair makes it to Number Ten. But the pond life is stirring. And it will certainly be more exciting than Blackpool last month.

Review of The Blair Agenda by Mark Perryman (ed) (Lawrence and Wishart, £9.99), Tribune, 4 October 1996

After the closure of the Communist Party magazine Marxism Today in late 1991, its marketing manager, Mark Perryman, was at a loose end. So, with a handful of north London buddies, he set up a discussion group, Signs of the Times, to keep exploring some of the ideas about “New Times” that had been central to the magazine’s thinking in its final years.

Ever since, a shifting group of people, some but by no means all ex-CPers, have met for two series of seminars every year. The group has heard from speakers from a wide range of backgrounds: old Marxism Today stalwarts, writers on cultural studies, right-wing libertarian activists, feminist columnists.

 This collection of essays is based on papers given to last autumn’s seminars, and it’s a typically mixed bag. The best two pieces are by Andrew Gamble, professor of politics at Sheffield University, who contributes a typically pithy analysis of the legacy of Thatcherism, and Kevin Davey, a regular on Tribune’s reviews pages, who writes with great insight on the likely tensions inside the Labour Party if Tony Blair wins the next election.

I also liked the contributions by Helen Wilkinson, project director at the think tank Demos, on Blair as the first “post-1960s, post-Beatles, party leader”, and Gerry Hassan, on the impact of Scottish devolution.

But too many of the contributors exaggerate the novelty of the Blair “project”, and there are too many occasions on which authors lapse into pretentious gobbledygook, with buzz-words taking the place of clear thinking – an all-too-common trait of Marxism Today, as I remember. Perryman’s introduction is a case in point. Try as I might, I can’t find much meaning in his claim that “Tony Blair remains the supreme arbiter of the fluid of British politics” or his talk of “the millennial terrain on which Tony Blair and his colleagues will be tip-toeing as they ponder over their red boxes in Whitehall”. Which is a pity, because much that Perryman says is really quite sensible.

One final gripe: again like Marxism Today, the book is peculiarly parochial in its focus. It desperately needs more on the international context of New Labour, particularly on the impact of Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats” and on how other west European social democratic parties have adapted to globalisation and the end of the Keynesian era. Britain might be a peculiar little country, but it has rather more in common with abroad than you’d think from The Blair Agenda.