Author Archives: Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson, review of Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating by Frank Furedi
(Continuum, £14.99), Tribune, 29 January 2010

Frank Furedi is the leading light of that strange, strange group around the website spiked online and the Institute of Ideas that used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party way back in the 1980s and turned into LM magazine in the 1990s. Starting off as (fairly) orthodox Trotskyists, with a penchant for the Provisional IRA and anti-fascist street-fighting, they have transmogrified into a bunch of media-savvy contrarians whose place on the political spectrum is hard to define.

They’re still very much of the Leninist left in their visceral anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism – and at least to my knowledge they have never disavowed the crazily pro-Serb position they took in the 1990s that led them, notoriously, to claiming that entirely genuine pictures of Bosnian Muslims in a Serb prison camp that had appeared on TV and in newspapers throughout the world were faked. But on GM foods and climate change they’ve taken a line aggressively at odds with the left-environmentalist consensus – and they’ve been pretty-much libertarian on issues of censorship and free speech and on migration. On parenting and education, there’s a strong current of traditionalism in their ideas.

It’s a weird mix that few would swallow wholesale, but at least they’re not afraid to go against the grain – and for the most part they argue their case with some sophistication and verve. Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, is their most prolific writer and thinker and also the most stimulating, particularly on education. As well as writing weekly on spiked online and turning out a hefty book every year or so, he’s a regular in the pages of Times Higher Education, where he has been a trenchant critic of – among other things – the philistine managerialism now dominant in British universities and the dangers inherent in treating students as customers.

His new book, Wasted, had been widely trailed, and my expectation was that it would develop some of the themes he has pursued in THE and elsewhere. It does, up to a point, but it’s essentially about schools, not universities.

Furedi, ever the contrarian, argues that school education is failing because the whole political and educational establishment has lost sight of the primary function of education, which is to transfer humankind’s knowledge and wisdom from generation to generation. Instead of valuing education for its own sake, all the emphasis in contemporary schools is on equipping students for life after they leave school, whether as workers, consumers or citizens.

“Old-fashioned” and “useless” “subjects” are replaced in the curriculum by “relevant” and “useful” “themes”. The authority of the teacher is relentlessly reduced as his or her role becomes that of “child-centred” therapist and agent of socialisation rather than imparter of knowledge. Children’s respect for teachers is undermined, discipline breaks down, parents start panicking about the standard of schools, there’s more and more pressure to teach to the test … and so government comes up with fresh initiatives that unintentionally further dilute the intellectual rigour of schooling.

There is a lot of sense here, and anyone who teaches “traditional” subjects at A-level or lectures at a university will recognise the phenomenon of students who are exemplary in their work-related personal skills (punctual, polite, neat CV), conscientious in their environmentalism and tolerance of diversity, sensible in their eating, drinking and non-smoking – but also utterly uninterested in intellectual debate and incapable of seeing the point of simply knowing more. Furedi makes his case well, though the book lacks empirical back-up and is too long. Inside this volume is a thinner extended essay waiting to get out.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 22 January 2010

Reforming the voting system is an anorak thing most of the time – but every now and again it breaks out of the closet, as it has in the past few months.

A year ago, electoral reform was barely on the agenda. Labour had won three elections in a row promising a referendum on the way we vote for MPs, and in government it had introduced different versions of proportional representation for elections to the European Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the London Assembly. Roy Jenkins had laboured mightily during Labour’s first term to produce a report recommending a more proportional system for electing the Commons, published in 1998. But the promised referendum on the Commons voting system had not happened – and since becoming prime minister Gordon Brown had given no indication of interest in it.

Then, however, came the MPs’ expenses scandal – and suddenly electoral reform once again lurched into view. There were letters in the papers and petitions demanding change. At last autumn’s Labour conference Brown promised a referendum on the voting system to allow voters to choose between the first-past-the-post status quo and the alternative vote (in which you have single member constituencies and mark your ballot paper “1, 2, 3, 4” in order of preference instead of “X”). And last month, Jack Straw, the justice secretary, said the government would legislate before the general election for such a referendum. Cue more letters in the papers and, of course, a backlash against the referendum among Labour MPs – apparently led by Ed Balls, the schools secretary – culminating in a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on Monday that seems to have come to no conclusion whatsoever.

I’ve been an anorak on electoral reform for getting on for 25 years, but I’m afraid I’ve found it a bit difficult to get worked up about it this time round.

On one hand, what’s most likely to be on offer (if anything) is deeply unattractive. A multi-choice referendum with the options of the status quo, the alternative vote and a proportional electoral system would be fine. But a choice between first-past-the-post and AV is not. AV is not a system of proportional representation – and it’s not a step towards PR. Indeed, in many respects it’s worse than first-past-the-post when it comes to reflecting the spread of opinion in the electorate: voting “1, 2, 3, 4” and redistributing preferences means that the least unpopular candidate wins in every constituency. Big deal!

On the other hand, it’s a bit late for Labour to be changing the voting system. Yes, it’s a matter of democratic principle, and yes, I’ve signed the petitions, but legislating for potential change now, with a general election imminent and Labour 10 points behind in the opinion polls, smacks of desperate opportunism.

What ought to have happened is easy enough to spell out. Labour should have agreed in 1994 or 1995 to propose a sweeping new constitutional settlement for the UK in its first term, with proportional representation for Westminster elections integrated with a democratic second chamber based on regional and national devolution – so that, when implemented, we’d have had something like the federal republic of Germany as our political system. Of course, that’s just a bit too neat: there are plenty of things in the German basic law that wouldn’t have worked for Britain, not least because we’ve got three stroppy Bavarias to contend with, hazy boundaries to regional identities in England and a monarchy (at least in stage one) … but you get my drift.

The idea of a “big package” constitutional revolution was first given traction by Stuart Weir, Anthony Barnett and others who set up Charter 88 in the wake of the 1987 general election. They were dismissed at first by the Labour leadership – Neil Kinnock famously described them as a bunch of “whiners, whingers and wankers” – but Kinnock and others gradually came round. By 1993, a Labour Party commission headed by Raymond Plant had recommended an end to first-past-the-post Westminster elections – and with a democratic Lords and devolution to Scotland and Wales solid Labour policy under John Smith (and John Prescott winning the argument on regional government for England in Labour circles), it looked as if a Labour government just might do the business.

Instead, Smith died, and Tony Blair decided that constitutional questions were a diversion. The focus groups didn’t see them as a priority. Labour rowed back from electoral reform and promised referendums galore on devolution. Lords reform was watered down.

What was left by 1997 was worth having, particularly devolution to Scotland and Wales. But the government lost all momentum on the constitution by 2001– both on Lords reform, which was appallingly fudged and then put out for endless consultation, and on electoral reform, on which nothing happened after Jenkins produced his report. English regionalism breathed its last as a cause (at least for now) after a farcical referendum in the north-east voted no to a regional assembly in 2004.

It is a sorry story of opportunities missed – and it would be great if the government could make amends, just a little, in the next couple of months. But something tells me that this is going to be one for the Labour manifesto after next.

Paul Anderson, review of The Left at War by Michael Bérubé (New York University Press, £19.99), Tribune, 15 January 2010

“Whither the left?” books are an acquired taste, but once you’ve got it you can’t help yourself. My bookshelves are groaning with volumes, mostly deservedly long-forgotten, outlining how the left has got it wrong and what it must do next, the oldest of which go back to the French revolutionary era when the idea of a left-right divide in politics first took hold.

Whatever, the past year has not been a great one for the genre – at least in the Anglophone world. In the UK, the great debate, if that’s what it was, on the left’s response to 9/11 and the British government’s decision to join the US in invading Afghanistan and Iraq has become repetitive and boring. And it’s too early for polemical retrospectives on the New Labour years. (Who knows? They might not yet be over.) In the US, nearly all eyes are on Barack Obama, and it’s too soon to know what to think unless you made up your mind before he was elected.

Michael Bérubé, an academic who teaches literature and cultural studies at Penn State University and is that rare thing in the US, a self-confessed social democrat, hasn’t much to say about Obama except that he hopes for the best. But he does have a take on Afghanistan and Iraq (and on Bosnia and Kosova) that goes beyond trotting out the old arguments for and against.

His line is that different parts of the left had (and have) radically different philosophies when it comes to the US and its allies using military force against rogue regimes that oppress their people and harbour or promote terrorists. There’s a “Manichean left” that says all intervention is evil imperialism (Noam Chomsky, John Pilger et al); a “liberal hawk” left – or maybe ex-left – that in the end backs any intervention against such regimes (Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen et al); and a “democratic left” that bases its judgments on evidence and international law, sometimes backing intervention and sometimes not.

Like me, Bérubé supported intervention in the Balkans and in Afghanistan but not in Iraq, and he sees himself as a spokesman for the “democratic left”. But although I’m coming from pretty much the same starting point, I’m not entirely convinced. A lot of what Bérubé says is on the money. His chapter on the “Manichean left” is a competent demolition of Chomsky and of the Leninist and anarchist anti-imperialist hard left, though it is far from comprehensive. He is incisive on the worst excesses of the “liberal hawks”. And his idea that knee-jerk counter-culturalism is an endemic problem on the left is spot-on.

But … well, he doesn’t get any of it quite right and then goes off on a tangent. He over-eggs the case against the war to topple Saddam (without, however, deploying one of the most important anti-intervention arguments, that, if Iraq really did have weapons of mass destruction, it would have been irresponsibly risky taking on Saddam). Then he under-eggs the case for getting rid of Saddam, which was – yes, really – a lot stronger than he claims. And, after that, he brushes aside the argument, made by the anti-war signatories of the Euston Manifesto – remember that! – who said that once the invasion had happened it was stupid to continue wittering about whether it should have taken place in the first place. This isn’t an unprincipled position. In politics you always start from where you are.

The second half of the book is a let-down, all about how marvellous Stuart Hall, the guru of British cultural studies and of Marxism Today from the late 1970s until the 1990s, was and is, and how the left would be OK if only it re-read Hall’s work on Thatcherism and applied it to the present. I am a great admirer of Hall, and I think Bérubé is right to say (a) that there’s no point in fighting the last decade’s battles yet again and (b) that old-style hard leftism is the worst kind of dead-end.

But he could have put it better, and I have a horrible feeling that, in the UK at least, what he warns against is what’s going to be happening on the left for at least five years.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 27 November 2009

So here we are, with just six months left. The party conferences and the Queen’s Speech have come and gone, and judgment day is looming. There doesn’t have to be a general election before 3 June next year, but just about everyone agrees that it will be on 6 May, the same date as the local elections.

I don’t demur on that – but when it comes to the consensus among the commentariat that the election is a done deal, with Labour set for a drubbing after 13 years in office, I’m not so sure.

Of course, Labour’s polling figures are dire, with only a handful of surveys in the past year suggesting anything less than a safe Tory majority. (That one of them was published last weekend, in the Observer, is not that significant: it could be a rogue.) Gordon Brown has been the least popular prime minister since Chamberlain, as David Cairns put it so memorably, for the best part of 18 months now.

And yet … believe it or not, I’m less pessimistic about the election than I have been for ages. The polls might not have moved towards Labour yet, but my hunch is that they will before very long. For the first time in more than six months – since the MPs’ expenses scandal broke, in fact – the government is beginning once more to look as if it knows what it is doing; and if the economy really is in recovery there seems to me to be at least a half-chance that Labour will begin to claw its way back into contention. The Tories are, with a couple of exceptions, an unattractive shower, and their slash-and-burn approach to public spending is seriously scary.

There was very little in last week’s Queen’s Speech that was particularly attention-grabbing, with the possible exception of the (apparently hastily improvised) promise of better care for old people. But the overall thrust of the government’s legislative programme is clear and, if hardly radical, a sign that Labour has not yet run out of steam.

It’s true, as Daniel Finkelstein argued in a column in the Times last week, that the Queen’s Speech will have passed most voters by. But every little helps. Add decisive action on the MPs’ expenses scandal (which is unfortunately by no means guaranteed) and a pre-budget report that makes it clear why the government is right in its economic policy and the Tories are wrong, and it’s by no means inconceivable that Labour will enter the new year trailing the Tories by six or seven percentage points in most of the polls.

That would still be hung-parliament territory, with the Tories as the largest party, but it would not be the prospect of impending disaster with which Labour has been living since spring 2008, and with four months to go before polling day there would be everything to play for. With a little bit of luck and an imaginative and radical manifesto – one promising investment in the railways and in energy, thousands of affordable homes, action to control the City, an elected Lords and proportional representation for the Commons – I really do think that Labour could pull off a spectacular comeback.

***

In the meantime, some potentially good news. The cause of libel reform has been around a long time. I remember banging on about it in Tribune in the early 1990s when the New Statesman came close to ruin (John Major had thrown the kitchen sink at it after it published an article saying there was no evidence for a rumour that he was having an affair) and Michael Foot was at it as long ago as the 1950s, when Tribune was almost forced out of business by a ludicrous libel action from Lord Kemsley, then proprietor of the Sunday Times and the Daily Sketch, that went all the way to the House of Lords. Long before that, reforming the libel laws was one of the mainstays of 18th and 19th century radicalism.

But the cause has been given new momentum by a spate of recent cases in which rich foreign nationals have used Britain’s notoriously plaintiff-friendly defamation legislation to silence legitimate criticism.

Earlier this month, the pro-free-speech pressure groups Index on Censorship and PEN published a report recommending major reform to curb “libel tourism” and cap libel damages – and last weekend Jack Straw told the Sunday Times that he agreed, and that he was going to draw up proposals to change the law.

That is a long way short of a rock-solid promise of action, but it is welcome none the less. As long as reformers keep up the pressure, there’s a better chance of decisively transforming our draconian and antiquated libel laws than at any time in living memory.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 30 October 2009

I meant to write about Christopher Andrew’s authorised centenary history of the security service, MI5, The Defence of the Realm, in my last column – but my copy of the book turned up late because of the postal strikes. And because I’m a busy man and it’s more than 1,000 pages (and that’s not counting the index), I’ve only now finished reading it.

Whatever, it’s still worth a column, because there’s a lot more to it than the first news stories and reviews suggested.

Which is not to knock David Leigh, who made it clear, in a cutting review in the Guardian, that Andrew’s denial of MI5’s plot against Harold Wilson as prime minister is radically at odds with the evidence Andrew himself supplies in the book that senior figures in the security service, most importantly Peter Wright, really did think Wilson was a Soviet stooge and acted to undermine him.

Nor is it to dismiss the critics of The Defence of the Realm who have said that it shamelessly traduces several people who conveniently cannot answer back – notably the late Jack Jones, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union from 1968 to 1976, whom Andrew claims to have been a Soviet agent, largely on the basis of the dubious testimony of the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky.

Andrew’s is an official history – he even joined MI5 in order to write it – and he never misses an opportunity to portray the security service in the most favourable light. He has an unerring eye for headline-inducing allegations, and he reproduces them even when the evidence for their truth is anecdotal.

Nevertheless, The Defence of the Realm is an important and in many ways impressive piece of work, and it would be a mistake to write it off. Andrew has had unprecedented access to the security service archives, and there is a lot he has turned up that is fascinating.

What struck me most forcefully as I read the book was the sheer scale of MI5’s surveillance of what it called “domestic subversion” – otherwise known as the Communist Party of Great Britain and the various revolutionary groups, mainly Trotskyist, to its left.

For more than 40 years after 1945, keeping tabs on the far left was what the security service spent most of its time and energy upon. Although it was originally set up in 1909 as a small secret agency to identify and root out German spies in Britain – revolutionaries were the preserve of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch – during the 1920s the security service found itself increasingly involved in monitoring the activities of members of the Communist Party. The reason was simple: the CP was from its foundation in 1920 loyal to the Soviet regime in Russia and engaged in espionage (or at least some of its members were), and from the mid-1920s the CP was the organisation that most of Britain’s small band of revolutionaries joined.

By the early 1930s, MI5 had taken over Special Branch’s lead role in revolutionary-watching. It built up a comprehensive card index of all CP members and bugged the CP’s headquarters in Covent Garden. The rise of Hitler and then the second world war diverted the service’s attention from this crucial activity – but with the onset of the cold war in the 1940s “domestic subversion” once again became its primary focus. MI5 kept files on all communists, suspected communists and, increasingly from the late 1960s, members of Trotskyist groups: the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers’ Party), the Socialist Labour League (later the Workers’ Revolutionary Party), the Militant Tendency. It infiltrated agents into the CP and the Trotskyist parties, bugged their offices, tapped their phones and intercepted their mail. Most controversially, it monitored organisations in which it believed “subversives” were active – the trade unions, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Labour Party. In the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of people were under MI5 surveillance at any time. It was only with the end of the cold war in 1989-91 that MI5 ceased to plough most of its energies into “domestic subversion” and concentrate instead on its other roles in counter-espionage and counter-terrorism.

Of course, we knew quite a lot of this before, thanks to whistle-blowers (Cathy Massiter, David Shayler) and, in recent years, selective releases of once-secret documents to the National Archives. No one who was active in left-wing politics during the cold war will be surprised that MI5 took a keen interest in “subversives”. All the same, the scope of the intelligence-gathering described by Andrew is really quite breathtaking. The surveillance society is nothing new.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 4 September 2009

And so – we’re into the final straight. This autumn’s political conferences mark the beginning of a very long election campaign that looks likely to end with Labour being defeated next spring. All right, it’s not over until it’s over, you never know what might turn up, and all that.

But the Tory lead in the opinion polls is so consistent and so large that it would take a minor miracle for Labour to win even though the Tories need a very big swing to win a Commons majority.

Which is extremely depressing – and not just because the Tories are such third-rate incompetent reactionaries (though of course they are), but also because Labour seems in such poor shape to bounce back after a defeat.

Labour’s problems start at the top. Let’s assume that Gordon Brown remains Labour leader and PM right up to the election – I’m still hoping he doesn’t, but that’s by-the-way – and that not too many of the current cabinet lose their seats. Brown might do a Jim Callaghan and hang on as party leader for a while, but hunch says that he won’t and that the contest to succeed him will be open – the first Labour leadership election since 1983 in which one candidate is not a shoo-in. My guess is that the main contenders will be Ed Balls and David Miliband, but I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few others have a go: Alan Johnson, Harriet Harman, Jon Cruddas (as long as they’re still MPs), maybe Peter Mandelson (if he can find a way of returning as an MP), perhaps two or three others. OK, it’s not quite a barren field – but none of them exactly gets the juices flowing. There isn’t a Blair or even a Kinnock.

And that, if you like, is the end of the not-so-bad news, because everything else looks dire for Labour. Outside its upper echelons, the parliamentary Labour Party has never been shorter of talent – and that is before the departure of 100 or more retiring MPs and goodness knows how many others who will lose their seats at the general election. Labour MPs’ morale is by all accounts still at rock bottom after the expenses scandal. At the grass roots, Labour is in a terrible state, its membership dwindling and disillusioned and its local government representation weaker than for 30 years. The trade unions are worse led and shorter of cash and activists than at any time in living memory. There is little sign of intelligent life among the left-leaning think-tanks (with the partial exception of Compass) or in most of the left press (present company excepted, of course).

It’s true that there is also no evidence of the deep-rooted ideological disagreements and personal back-biting that did Labour so much damage the last time it was turfed out of government, in 1979. It’s difficult to envisage Labour conference in 2011 embracing withdrawal from Europe, unilateral nuclear disarmament and widespread nationalisation – and I certainly can’t picture four former members of the government defecting from Labour to set up a rival centrist party in January 2012.

But just because it’s not the same as 1979 doesn’t mean that it might not be just as bad. The 1980s were dreadful for Labour, and no one in his or her right mind wants to relive the miners’ strike, Militant, rate-capping and Red Wedge. It was nevertheless when Labour began the long process of rebuilding that culminated in its victory in 1997. The Bennite insurgency of the early 1980s might have been destructive, deluded and transitory, but it brought a whole new generation into Labour politics – and the election defeats of 1979, 1983 and 1987 (along with the defeats of the miners’ and Wapping strikes) forced Labour to rethink and renew its whole programme, for the most part for the better.

In other words, there was sufficient energy and enthusiasm about Labour after 1979 for the party to emerge fitter and stronger from what appeared for several years to be a life-threatening crisis. What’s worrying today is that the never-say-die spirit is so notable by its absence. At every level, Labour seems tired, resigned and confused, and there’s no new generation of activists waiting in the wings.

Maybe that will all change before the election: I hope it does, and that Labour runs a dynamic campaign and wins. Perhaps if Labour loses it will be only by a small margin and it will recover quickly, with a fresh leader and the Tories’ popularity evaporating as they axe public services. But I have a horrible feeling in my bones that we could be in for a long and thankless exile wandering in the wilderness.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 7 August 2009

On the face of it, higher education should count as one of this government’s success stories. Something like 45 per cent of young Brits now go to university – more than double the proportion in the early 1990s – and British universities attract more students from abroad than ever before. Over the past few years there has been serious investment in the infrastructure of higher education. Just about every university has impressive new buildings and revamped lecture theatres and offices.

But all is not rosy in the college quad. The government’s long-standing target of 50 per cent participation in HE among 18-30-year-olds by 2010 is certain to be missed, and, after more than a decade of expanding budgets, universities now face a period of painful belt-tightening. Just as worrying, there are persistent concerns, most recently expressed by Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility and by a House of Commons select committee report published last weekend, that (a) the expansion of higher education has not really opened it up to working-class students; and (b) a lot of students are not getting a good deal.

I have to declare an interest here: for the past nine years I have been a journalism lecturer at City University in London, and for the past five I have been course director and admissions tutor on its biggest journalism undergraduate programme. If City isn’t doing its bit to widen participation and is letting down the young people we recruit, I’m probably at least part of the problem.

Not, I hasten to add, that I think City or I are doing badly on either score. Like any other admissions tutor, I select students on merit – but that’s not just a matter of A-level grades. Anyone predicted to get three As is a shoo-in as long as his or her personal statement is good. But I also jump at the chance of taking on people who have been running football and music fanzines online since they were 14, and I am always open to applications from people who for whatever reason missed out on A-levels in their teens. My students are an extraordinary social and ethnic mix.

And if the students turn up to classes and do the work, they acquire all the skills they need to work as journalists in the real world – the same skills they would get by doing a postgraduate journalism course – along with a solid academic grounding in politics and history (at very least). True, we had a few years when the kit we were using was not quite up to scratch, but that’s all in the past. And OK, I accept that sometimes work is returned a bit late. But on the whole I think we do a decent job.

Of course, this is just me blowing my own trumpet. Where, you might legitimately ask, is the evidence? And that is where the problems start, because there isn’t a great deal beyond the real-life stories of former students with successful careers.

Sure, there has been a lot of research on class and university admissions showing that working-class applicants are less likely to get in than middle-class ones – but none of it is more specific than university by university.

As for the quality of the “student experience”, as we now call it, all anyone has is extraordinarily unreliable. Over the past few years, the annual National Student Survey, an online tick-box-and-comment questionnaire, has become the touchstone of the universities’ “quality assurance” regime. Undergraduates in their final year are encouraged to pass judgment on their years at university – and university managers, my own included, take the results very seriously.

The fatal flaw of the NSS is that it treats students as mere consumers when in fact they are much more than that. Yes, they pay a lot of money to go to university, and they have a right not to be fobbed off with poor teaching, inadequate libraries and overcrowded classrooms. But no one has an automatic right to a good 2.1: you have to work for it. The NSS ignores this rather crucial fact, allowing the lazy and disappointed full scope for anonymous whingeing and blame-shifting. One side-effect is that some universities – not my own – have opted for the quiet life, allowing the numbers of students getting top grades to creep up year by year.

So what’s the answer? The Commons select committee calls for an intrusive inspection regime for universities along the lines of Ofsted, but it’s difficult to see how it could work, simply because most university courses are too specialist to be judged by a generalist inspector. A far better option would be to beef up the role of the traditional external examiner. It might be at odds with the notion of the student as consumer, but in the end the best possible judge of the quality of an academic programme is someone who teaches something similar elsewhere.