Category Archives: Journalism

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 10 March 2000

Hate campaigns in politics are always good fun for onlookers – and the Labour leadership’s assault on Ken Livingstone since he announced he would be running for London mayor as an independent is nothing if not hugely entertaining for most of the population. But in the long run it would make sense for New Labour to lay off the mud-slinging.

Of course, in Labour Party terms, Livingstone has done wrong. He has committed the cardinal sin of declaring that he will stand for elected office against the official Labour candidate – and to make matters worse he has done so after he promised he wouldn’t.

But – like it or not – the voters, and most of the Labour Party in London, think that he has been badly treated by the Labour machine and are minded to use the mayoral election to treat it a lesson. Everything suggests that he is going to win, and that Dobbo will have his day made by not getting the job he didn’t want in the first place.

Opinion polls might not always be accurate, but the 55 percentage point lead that the Guardian’s ICM poll gave Livingstone this week suggests that only a quite extraordinarily dynamic campaign could hope to stop him.

And, despite all the best efforts of the party machine, Dobbo’s campaign has all the momentum of a dead dog. Even if most Labour Party members in London decide not to jeopardise their membership by actively campaigning for Livingstone, hardly anyone is going to lift a finger for Labour’s official candidate. (And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a majority of party members vote for Livingstone.)

This means that, after the votes are counted on 4 May, it is likely that the Government is going to have to work with Livingstone as London mayor – and that Labour as a party is going to have to woo back vast numbers of Livingstone supporters, both activists and voters, before the next general election.

In this light, spending the next eight weeks slagging Livingstone off as a liar, an ego-maniac, a traitor, an extremist and worse is not, to put it mildly, very intelligent politics. It would be more sensible by far for the Labour machine to write off the London mayoral election as an inevitable defeat, run a gracious, low-key (and low-cost) non-campaign and then, as soon as possible after Livingstone wins, find a way of getting him back into the party fold.

There are historical precedents for this. Labour ran magisterial non-campaigns in several by-elections between 1992 and 1997 where the Liberal Democrats were the main challengers to the Tories, most memorably that in Newbury, which was masterminded by Peter Mandelson. And Labour has not always treated its prodigal sons and daughters by casting them into outer darkness for ever.

With all the talk from the Dobbo camp of Oswald Mosley, Ramsay MacDonald, the Gang of Four and Militant, it is easy to forget that many who have left Labour have returned and been forgiven their sins – among them such luminaries as Aneurin Bevan, Stafford Cripps, John Strachey, Jennie Lee and Fenner Brockway.

Given that Livingstone is not planning to set up a political party to rival Labour, has argued for supporters in the Labour Party to stay put and has advocated Dobbo as second preference, there is no good reason that he should not be back inside the party by the end of the year.

Reason has long since ceased to have anything to do with the mayoral race, however. “New” Labour appears to be bent on playing as dirty as possible, and hang the consequences. As things stand, it is no more likely that the party leadership will see the sense of damage-limitation than that Dobbo will be mayor on 4 May.

New Times, March 2000

Paul Anderson reports from Vienna on the opposition to the new coalition between conservatives and the far-right Freedom Party

The police said there were 150,000 people there, the organisers 300,000. Whatever the true figure, the 19 February rally in Vienna’s Heldenplatz against Austria’s new coalition of conservatives and the far-right populist Freedom Party (FPO) was impressively massive.
Four feeder marches converged on the square – chosen as the gathering point because it is where Hitler addressed jubilant Austrians in 1938 following his incorporation of the republic into the Third Reich – after a day of protest throughout the city centre. People were still arriving long after the speeches began.

All sorts braved the miserably wet and windy weather to take part in the demonstration, the culmination of a fortnight of popular protest against the “black-blue” government. There were pensioners and teenagers, trade unionists and artists, Christians and environmentalists, social democrats and anarchists. The mood was determined, peaceful and remarkably upbeat.
One demonstration organiser delighted everyone by distributing fake banknotes to the crowd – a joke against Jorg Haider, the FPO leader, who had claimed the youth wing of the Social Democratic Party had paid youngsters between 1,500 and 1,800 schillings (£75-£100) to come to the rally. Another organiser was cheered wildly when he declared: “You only have to resign and the demonstrations will stop very quickly.”

Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel has dismissed the protest movement against his decision to invite the FPO into coalition with his conservative People’s Party (OVP) as an “emotional outpouring”. “Things will soon calm down,” he told a Swiss newspaper.

But he has good reason to be worried. The latest opinion polls show that support for the OVP has slumped since the formation of the new government, which followed the breakdown of talks between the OVP and Social Democratic Party (SPO) aimed at salvaging the SPO-OVP coalition that had ruled Austria since 1986.

The FPO’s support remains at around the 27 per cent it won in last October’s general election. Then, it narrowly beat the OVP into third place, precipitating a protracted government crisis as SPO leader Viktor Klima, chancellor since 1997, desperately tried to dissuade Schussel from carrying out his threat of walking out of the coalition if his party failed to come second.

In recent weeks, however, there has been a surge in support for the Greens, who have been in the forefront of anti-government protests. Led by the charismatic Alexander van der Bellen, it now has 16 per cent support compared with the 7.5 per cent it won last October. A general election now could well give an SPO-Green coalition a parliamentary majority.

Not that the SPO is currently in the best of shape. In power constantly since 1970, it has not found it easy to adapt to opposition. Although it remains the largest party in parliament, its performance last October, when it took 33 per cent of the vote, was its worst in any general election since 1920. Most worryingly, it lost large swathes of its traditional working-class support to the anti-immigrant FPO and did particularly poorly among younger voters.

Klima resigned last month as SPO leader to be replaced by party secretary Alfred Gusenbauer, who at 40 is the youngest leader the party has ever had. Gusenbauer, a former leader of the SPO’s youth wing and spokesman on overseas development, is a popular and dynamic figure whom many commentators see as the Austrian Tony Blair. He made clear his goal at a press conference after his appointment: “We want to renew the SPO from head to toe and become a party for the youth of our country.”

Opponents of the new government have promised to take to the streets once a week in demonstrations modelled on those that brought down the communist regime in East Germany: they have even adopted the 1989 East German demonstrators’ slogan ‘Wir sind das Volk’ (‘We are the people’). Whether the strategy works remains to be seen, however. Although public opinion seems to be moving in the protesters’ direction – largely  because of worries about the damage to Austria’s reputation caused by the FPO’s arrival in government – the coalition has a comfortable parliamentary majority.

The far-right in Europe

AUSTRIA
The rise of Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party (FPO) has been protracted and by no means smooth. Until the early 1980s, the FPO was essentially a free-market liberal party with a small pan-Germanic right wing. The right, led by Haider, grew in strength after the party leadership entered into coalition with the Social Democrats in 1983, and in 1986 seized control of the party. Under Haider’s leadership, the FPO adopted a stridently anti-immigrant, anti-EU populist rhetoric.  Haider himself made a string of pro-Nazi remarks, praising Hitler’s ‘orderly employment policy’, describing SS war veterans as ‘respectable’ and referring to the concentration camps as ‘punishment camps’. From taking 5 per cent of the vote in the 1983 general election, the FPO won 9.7 per cent in 1986, 16.5 per cent in 1990 and 22.5 per cent in 1994. The party slipped back to 21.9 per cent in 1995 but took 26.9 per cent in last October’s election, beating the conservative People’s Party (OVP) into third place. 

GERMANY
The three far-right parties in Germany – the National Democratic Party (NDP), the Republicans, and the German People’s Union (DVU)-have never won the 5 per cent of the vote in federal elections to win representation in the Bundestag. The NDP is a tiny party of skinhead thugs and out-and-out Nazis, but the Republicans and the DVU – which are scarcely less vehemently racist – have enjoyed some electoral success since German unification. The Republicans, founded in 1983, are currently represented in the state parliament of Baden-Wurttemberg. The DVU, led by the millionaire Munich publisher Gerhard Frey, has found significant support among the young unemployed of former East Germany, its best result coming two years ago in Saxony-Anhalt, where it won nearly 13 per cent two years ago. Many Germans worry that the far right could exploit the current crisis of the Christian Democratic Union to its advantage. 

ITALY
The far-right Italian Social Movement (MSI) consistently won between 5 and 7 per cent of the vote in general elections from the 1950s until the 1980s, but its growth was checked by its nostalgia for Mussolini’s fascist regime and its association with terrorism. Under the leadership of Gianfranco Fini, however, it made a bid for respectability, changing its name to the National Alliance (AN) and dropping most of its overtly fascist political trappings. Largely untouched by the corruption scandals that ripped through Italy’s political class in the early In the 1994 election, the AN took  13.5 per cent of the vote and entered Silvio Belusconi’s short-lived right-wing coalition government; it increased its share of the vote to 15.5 per cent in 1996. The AN, with its core support in the poor south of the country, tends to avoid anti-immigrant populism, which in Italy has tended to be directed by northerners against their southern compatriots as much as against foreigners. Not so Umberto Bossi, leader of the secessionist Northern League (LN), who shared a platform with Jorg Haider at an anti-immigration rally last year. The LN won 10 per cent of the vote in 1996 — and like the Austrian FPO, its supporters are overwhelmingly affluent. 

BELGIUM
The far right in Belgium – particularly in Flanders – is able to exploit not only widespread distrust of immigrants but also the country’s linguistic divisions. The extreme Flemish nationalist Vlaams Blok (VB) first won parliamentary representation in 1978 but has grown alarmingly since the late 1980s, taking 6.6 per cent of the vote in 1991, 7.8 per cent in 1995 and 9.8 per cent in 1999. Its stronghold is the city of Antwerp. The VB demands an immediate halt to immigration and a policy of “national preference”: the other parties in Belgium have responded to its rise by freezing it out of power and enacting tough legislation against incitement to racial hatred. 

FRANCE
In the mid-1980s, the virulently anti-immigrant French National Front (FN), led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, was by far the most electorally successful far-right party in western Europe, winning nearly 11 per cent of the vote in the 1984 European election and 10 per cent (and 35 seats) in the 1986 National Assembly election. Its successes, particularly marked in the south of the country, prompted president Francois Mitterrand to change the electoral system to exclude it from parliament, and in the 1988 National Assembly election, on a similar share of the vote, it won a single seat. But the FN continued to make gains in local government and Le Pen won 15 per cent in the first round of the 1995 presidential election; the party took much the same in the 1997 National Assembly election. In 1998, however, the FN split into two after a leadership battle between Le Pen and his deputy, Bruno Megret, with Megret (who declared that he wanted to become part of the ‘respectable’ right) forming the Republican National Movement (MNR). In last year’s European election, the FN took 5.8 per cent and the MNR 3.3 per cent, with much of the FN’s former support rallying behind ex-Gaullist Charles Pasqua’s Eurosceptic list.

SWITZERLAND
In last October’s general election, the anti-immigrant, anti-EU Swiss People’s Party (SVP) emerged as the most popular party, with 23 per cent of the vote, up from 15 per cent in 1995. Led by businessman Christoph Blocher, who has built up a significant power base in the eastern German-speaking regions of Switzerland during the past decade, it has a single minister (from its moderate wing) in the four-party coalition government. This makes it the only west European far-right party apart from the Austrian FPO currently holding national government office. The SVP, formed in 1971 from a merger of centrist and farmers’ parties, is now organising a petition calling for tougher asylum laws. 

DENMARK
There has been a dramatic growth of support in the past few years for the Danish People’s Party (DF), led by Pia Kjaersgaard. It won 7.5 per cent of the vote in the 1998 general election and recent opinion polls suggest it could double that at the next general election. Anti-EU and anti-immigrant. 

NORWAY
The Progress Party, led by the charismatic Carl Hagen, took second place in the 1997 general election with 15 per cent of the vote. Ultra-free-market in economics, it is also hostile to immigration and virulently anti-EU.

New Times, March 2000

After nearly three weeks of gruelling negotiations, Spain’s two main left-wing parties last month agreed a joint manifesto and a partial electoral pact for the 12 March general election.

The agreement falls short of what Joaquín Almunia, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), had in mind in January when he surprised everyone by offering a pre-election deal to the communist-led United Left (IU), modelled on Lionel Jospin’s socialist-communist ‘plural left’ alliance in France.

Almunia, a centrist pragmatist and close ally of former prime minister Felipe Gonzalez, wanted an electoral pact to cover both houses of parliament, though not joint lists of candidates everywhere. The IU wanted joint lists – and, when Almunia refused to accept them, rejected his suggestion that it stand down candidates for the lower house in selected provinces.

As a result, the electoral pact covers only elections for the senate, the upper house, in those provinces where prime minister Jose Maria Aznar’s conservative Popular Party (PP) had a majority in 1996. Nevertheless, the joint manifesto, along with the IU’s promise of parliamentary support for Almunia becoming prime minister, marks a reconciliation between the two parties that few would have deemed possible three months ago. Both sides gave ground over the contents of the manifesto – the IU by accepting the PSOE’s refusal to raise income tax and its commitment to maintaining Spanish participation in the euro and membership of Nato, the PSOE by agreeing to legislate for introduction of a 35-hour working week.

The day the deal was unveiled, both Almunia and IU leader Francisco Frutos pronounced themselves well pleased with their work. ‘It is very satisfactory,’ said Almunia, ‘as well as being a response to what progressive, left-wing people have been demanding from us socialists and United Left people for some time.’ ‘It is not a matter of patching things over between political parties but of trying to come up with a responsible programme for governing this country from the left,’ said Frutos.

Whether the agreement is enough to secure the left victory on 12 March is doubtful, however. On the evidence of the latest opinion polls, the PP has the support of between 42 and 44 per cent of voters, with the PSOE roughly five percentage points behind and the IU on 7 to 8 per cent. These figures suggest Almunia has at least a chance of ousting Aznar – but only if the left rapprochement encourages tactical voting by PSOE and IU voters and does not scare anyone off.  

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 25 February 2000

I have a sneaking suspicion that if any of the participants in the founding conference of the Labour Representation Committee 100 years ago were alive today they would be horrified by what their creation had become.

This is not, I hasten to add, because New Labour has betrayed the socialism of the founding fathers, as some on the traditional Left would have us believe. There is no doubt that New Labour is not very socialist, certainly as the term was understood a century ago. But then neither were most of the delegates who gathered at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Road to set up what in 1906 became the Labour Party.

What the trade unionists who formed the majority at the conference wanted was simply to get more working men into parliament. (And I mean working men. Women did not have the vote, and there was not a single woman delegate.)

The major problem in British politics, as they saw it, was that the Liberal Party, with which they had hitherto thrown in their lot, was too middle-class. It took the support of the working man for granted and did not stick up for his interests, The Labour Representation Committee was necessary to ensure that that the voice of the working man was heard in the House of Commons.

And if we look at the Parliamentary Labour Party today, what do we see? Plenty of lawyers, lecturers and teachers, and plenty of people who have been professional politicians since their student days. But only a smattering of MPs who can claim in all honesty to come from the working class, let alone to remain part of it. Perhaps the Downing Street Social Exclusion Unit should look into it.

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On a different matter entirely, which idiot was responsible for the cretinous “Out of Europe, Out of Work” campaign just launched by the pro-European pressure group Britain in Europe – with top-level government support – to persuade the British public that leaving the European Union would cost 8 million (later modified to 3 million) jobs?

It is not that I’m in favour of leaving the EU. Far from it: I’m an out-and-out European federalist. But crass scare-mongering is not the way to win the argument for Europe. An intelligent populist would make the case for the European model of welfare capitalism as an alternative to the Wild West capitalism of the United States.

Unfortunately, Tony Blair’s agenda for Europe – labour market deregulation, no tax harmonisation and so forth – is completely at odds with such a message. Someone ought to tell him that, however well it plays with big business, “Support Europe and we’ll help undermine workers’ rights and cut the welfare state” is a real turn-off with voters.

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Finally, I’d like to be the first Tribune columnist to announce that I shall definitely not be voting for Frank Dobson in the London mayoral election. I’ve nothing against Dobbo personally, but the whole Labour selection process was such a disgusting travesty of democracy that the party leadership needs to be taught a lesson. I’ve not yet decided whether to abstain or to vote for Ken Livingstone (if he stands), Malcolm McLaren or the Green bloke. But I’m pretty certain that I’m not going to go out door-knocking for anyone, whatever I do in the privacy of the polling booth.

My hunch is that a large proportion of members of the Labour Party and its affiliated trade unions in London are thinking along similar lines this week. What intrigues me, though, is whether publishing an article in Tribune stating that I intend either to abstain or to vote for someone other than Labour’s official candidate counts as campaigning against Labour. If it does, and I can’t see why it doesn’t, I should by rights be expelled from the party – and so indeed should the editor who asked me to write this column.

I’m so uninvolved in the party these days that being chucked out would mean nothing more than that I’m a few quid a year better off. The editor, I’m told, sees things rather differently.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 11 February 2000

Back in 1996, Labour’s announcement that it would hold a referendum on British membership of the single European currency was hailed by just about every mainstream commentator as a brilliant political gambit.

Not only did it match the Tories for populism on Europe, it also defused a row that threatened to split Labour right up to the very top. At the time, while Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson favoured early British membership of the single currency, Robin Cook was cautious, John Prescott was strongly against and Tony Blair could not make up his mind. The promise of a referendum when the time was right put off the argument until, well, the time was right.

As an out-and-out European federalist supporter of British membership of the single currency, I was unconvinced: it seemed like a fudge of the worst kind over the most important question that would face the next Labour Government, as well as a hostage to fortune.

But I didn’t expect the story to play out as it has. Three years ago, I reckoned that, if we got a Labour Government with a reasonable majority, Blair would come off the fence on the euro, Cook would drop his reservations and – with Prescott grumbling in the background – the referendum would place within a year or so of the general election.

This scenario looked even more plausible after Labour won so massively in May 1997. But then the Government lost the plot completely.

Blair did not come off the fence, and Brown appeared suddenly to change his mind. In autumn 1997, the Chancellor’s press spokesman, Charlie Whelan, famously informed journalists – and drinkers in the Red Lion pub in Whitehall – that British participation in the euro would not happen during this parliament.

Brown then tried to retrieve the situation by declaring that this did not mean that he was against joining in principle, and that Britain would become a member of the euro-club once “five economic tests” were passed. In the meantime, he went on, the government would prepare actively for membership.

The damage had been done, however. After the Red Lion Incident, the political initiative passed to opponents of the single currency. Through 1998, opinion polls showed growing public hostility to joining the euro – and the government responded by effectively withdrawing from the debate. It was not until March last year that Blair gave his first tentative public indication that he would be throwing his weight behind a “yes” campaign (whenever it might happen), and he appeared to recoil even from this after Labour’s drubbing in the European elections.

Last summer, he agreed to support the launch of Britain in Europe, originally intended as the cross-party campaign for membership of the single currency, only if it changed its purpose to promoting the overall benefits of British membership of the European Union. And last month he went out of his way to scotch rumours that the promised euro referendum will take place immediately after the next general election. Meanwhile, Brown has noticeably cooled on euro membership – effectively leaving Cook, who has changed his mind in the opposite direction and now favours early entry, as the only senior member of the cabinet publicly making the case for participation even in principle.

With the opinion polls now showing nearly 70 per cent of voters opposed to joining the euro, the Government’s half-hearted attitude is unlikely to change before the next general election: if New Labour stands for anything, it is for down-playing any policy that target voters dislike. But this in turn makes it extremely unlikely that public opinion will swing behind the euro, which in turn puts in jeopardy the prospects of a referendum even in the next parliament. The last thing any government can afford is a referendum it loses.

Of course, it could be that Labour launches a concerted drive to sell the benefits of belonging to the euro-zone – lower interest rates, faster growth – as soon as it wins a second term. It could be that public support for the euro surges and that the government decides to hold the referendum a couple of years after the election. But somehow I doubt it. If New Labour didn’t dare make the push for participation in the single currency with a Commons majority of 278, is it going to be more courageous with a majority of, say, 50? I hope I’m wrong but, more and more, 1996’s “brilliant political gambit” looks like being the cause of Britain yet again missing the European boat.

Paul Anderson, New Times, February 2000

Five years ago, the prospects for west European social democracy did not look particularly bright.

At the start of 1995, of the five largest countries in western Europe, only Spain had a left-of-centre government – and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), mired in scandal after 13 years in office, looked certain to lose power at the next general election. The British Labour Party had been out of office for 16 years, the German Social Democratic Party for 12. The French Socialist Party was still in disarray after losing power to the right in humiliating fashion in the 1993 National Assembly elections. In Italy the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) was in opposition just as its predecessor, the Italian Communist Party, had always been.

The electoral picture was not entirely bleak. The Party of European Socialists was the largest group in the European Parliament, and social democratic parties were in government in all the smaller west European countries apart from Portugal. Labour in Britain was riding high in the opinion polls under Tony Blair, and the PDS in Italy was cautiously optimistic about doing well when it next faced the voters in a general election.

But Labour and the PDS had flattered to deceive many times before, and several of the social democratic parties governing in smaller countries – the Belgians, the Greeks, the Swedes, the Danes and the Norwegians – were struggling in the opinion polls.

More important, behind social democracy’s electoral weakness there seemed to be a real crisis of ideological confidence.

To simplify somewhat, from the 1950s until the late 1970s social democrats in western Europe’s democracies, whatever the differences in their particular circumstances, had a common project. They were the workers’ party of the Keynesian welfare state consensus that embraced centre-left and centre-right – the democratic socialist alternative to communism. Their role in government was to secure low unemployment at national level by way of demand management and other interventionist economic policies; to redistribute income using progressive taxation and expansion of welfare provision; and to extend workers’ rights.

This common project collapsed as the Keynesian welfare state consensus disintegrated under the combined pressures of inflation, the concomitant rise of free-market economics (not just as policy-makers’ orthodoxy but as populist politics), and the growing power of the financial markets. During the 1980s, sooner or later and more or less explicitly, every west European social democratic party was forced to rethink what it was about.

There were, it seemed, two options, though they were by no means exclusive. One was to become ideology-free, adopting a rhetoric of modernising pragmatism and a practice of patronage (if not corruption). The other was to embrace Europe as the saviour.

From the mid-1980s, particularly after former French finance minister Jacques Delors established himself as president of the European Commission, a new common social democratic project emerged (at least among party leaders) according to which the best means of achieving traditional social democratic goals was to combine economic prudence and defence of the welfare state at home with vigorous pursuit of European economic, social and political integration – a single European currency matched with a growth-oriented European macroeconomic policy (‘Eurokeynesianism’, as it became known), common European social standards and a common democratic polity.

What no one had expected, however, was the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. The fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification not only scuppered the electoral chances of the German SPD but also put the skids under the grand project of European integration. The high interest rates adopted by Germany to deal with the inflationary pressures unleashed by unification forced austerity on every other country aspiring to join the planned single currency – which was a major factor in the French left’s defeat in 1993. Governments of the right then combined to block Delors’ plans tentatively Eurokeynesian plans for expanding the European Union’s capacity for macroeconomic management. By the end of 1994, the social democrats’ late-1980s dreams had been well and truly shattered.

Yet today, remarkably, social democratic parties are in power in all but four west European democracies (Spain, Norway, Ireland and Luxembourg). Crucially Germany, France, Italy and Britain, the four largest countries, all have governments formed by social democrats or in which social democrats are the dominant coalition partner. Although the picture is by no means completely rosy — the Italian centre-left looks likely to lose to the right at the next general election, the Austrian social democrats appear to be on their way out of government and social democrats did poorly overall in last year’s Euro-election — the electoral fortunes of west European social democracy have recovered remarkably.

What has not yet happened, however, is the emergence of a new common west European social democratic project that goes beyond establishment of the single currency.

In the wake of the collapse of Delors-style Eurokeynesianism, the main social democratic parties went their separate ways. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, British Labour, which had been the least enamoured of Eurokeynesianism, turned increasingly to the United States for inspiration, enthusiastically adopting the mantras of labour market flexibility and deregulation. In France, the PS in opposition first swung to the left then, under Lionel Jospin’s leadership, adopted a programme built around job creation through introduction of a 35-hour week, the platform on which it won the 1997 National Assembly election. In Germany, the SPD floundered around after losing the 1994 Bundestag election then rallied behind the Eurokeynesian Oskar Lafontaine before choosing the pro-business populist Gerhard Schröder as its candidate for chancellor in 1998. The preoccupation of the Italian PDS, the first of the ‘big four’ social democratic parties to win power, was introducing the spending cuts necessary for Italian entry into the single currency.

There has, of course, been one notable attempt to give coherence to contemporary social democracy, Blair’s Third Way initiative — essentially an endeavour to find common ground among European social democrats and Clinton Democrats in the US. It has successfully brought together party leaders and intellectuals in a series of high-level seminars, but its limits became apparent after the publication last June of its most substantial statement to date, a joint pamphlet by Blair and Schröder, The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte.

Virtually ignored in Britain, the document caused a major fuss among continental social democrats disturbed by what they saw as its over-enthusiasm for deregulation and market forces. Jospin pointedly made it known that he had declined to sign it, and the left of Schröder’s own party denounced it vehemently, blaming it for the SPD’s poor performance in the Euro-election that immediately followed its publication. By the time of the Socialist International congress in Paris last autumn, Schröder had effectively disowned the pamphlet, and the declaration agreed by that congress (and endorsed by Blair) was noticeably more critical of the impact of globalisation and the power of the markets.

Sweeping ideological statements do not necessarily count for much, and there is a case for arguing that the differences among west European social democratic governments are in practice much smaller than they appear. All are grappling with the same big problems: how to make the euro work, how to reform the European Union in the run-up to its enlargement into eastern Europe, how to ensure that West European labour costs are globally competitive at the same time as preserving strong welfare states, how to tackle social exclusion. And in many areas all are coming up with similar solutions: prudent macroeconomic policies, heavy investment in education and training, reduction of certain welfare entitlements, tax breaks for business and so on.

But it would be wrong to downplay the differences too much. It should not be forgotten that Britain, Denmark, Sweden and Greece are outside the inner core of members of the single currency. On several key questions in the past year or so there have been serious policy disagreements at EU level among the social democratic governments, notably over EU institutional reform, workers’ rights and tax harmonisation, most of which have seen the British government at odds with the rest. There are also real contrasts among social democrats’ policies in those areas that are the sole concern of national governments. Jospin’s keynote policy, the 35-hour-week, is completely at odds with the thrust of the Blair government, while British Labour’s embrace of workfare horrifies many continental social democratic leaders.

Nevertheless, with the euro in place it is difficult to imagine anything but a convergence of social democratic perspectives in the long term, at least among parties in the euro-zone. The big questions are how quickly it happens — and whether Labour plays an active role in the process or watches from the sidelines.

Country by country

GERMANY
The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) returned triumphantly to power in the September 1998 Bundestag election after 16 years in opposition – but for the next year it was downhill all the way for chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s red-green government.

First, the chancellor, a pragmatic pro-business populist, clashed with the Greens over the timetable for phasing out nuclear power and over extension of German citizenship to immigrants not of German ethnic origin. Then, early last year, Schröder and his finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, the SPD’s party chief and darling of its left, had a series of spats in public over the latter’s criticisms of the anti-growth bias of the European Central Bank and his plans to shift the burden of taxation from workers and their families to business. In March, Schröder forced Lafontaine’s resignation and replaced him with the business-friendly pragmatist Hans Eichel, who provoked outrage on the SPD left and in the trade unions with a budget cutting public spending.

Meanwhile, the government’s support for Nato’s military intervention over Kosovo caused further ructions, with a significant minority of the Greens disowning Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer for backing the bombing of Serbia. And after Schröder’s publication of a pro-market joint declaration with Tony Blair, The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte, was followed by a disastrous SPD performance in the June Euro-elections, the SPD was plunged into a summer of controversy over its general direction.

In the autumn, Schröder’s woes were exacerbated by a string of humiliating defeats in state and local elections at the hands of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and – in what was East Germany – the former-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS).

Since then, however, Schröder’s fortunes have improved dramatically. He skilfully won back the support of the SPD left by appearing to distance himself from his joint statement with Blair and by taking interventionist stances on the take-over of the telecommunications giant Mannesman by UK-based rival Vodafone and on the rescue of the construction company Hollzmann. At the SPD national congress in December, he took 86 per cent of the vote in elections to the SPD executive.

Soon after placating the left, he won back some support from business with the announcement of major tax-breaks. And last month he won plaudits all round for the successful negotiation of a joint declaration with trade unions and employers, whereby unions will tie wage demands to productivity gains in return for introduction of retirement at 60.

What has really given the government a fillip, however, is the scandal over political funding that has swamped the CDU in the past three months, destroying the reputations both of former chancellor Helmut Kohl and of his successor as CDU leader, Wolfgang Schäuble. With the German economy recovering at last from the downturn that followed unification, Schröder now appears to have a good chance of winning a second term in office – something that seemed impossible as recently as three months ago.


FRANCE
The French left surprised even itself with its victory in the June 1997 National Assembly election. After dominating French politics in the 1980s as never before under the presidency of François Mitterrand, the Socialist Party (PS) crashed to ignominious defeat in the 1993 National Assembly election and did even worse in the 1994 Euro-election. There were signs of recovery in 1995, when its candidate for the presidency, Lionel Jospin, was beaten only narrowly by Jacques Chirac, and over the next two years the PS rose steadily in the opinion polls. But when Chirac called a snap parliamentary election in spring 1997, essentially as a vote of confidence in himself, few expected Jospin to lead the left into government.

In the event, however, the respectable parties of the right, the Gaullist RPR and the centre-right UDF, suffered massive losses, particularly to the far-right National Front. The PS, promising a massive job-creation programme based on cuts in working time, emerged as far-and-away the largest party, and Jospin cobbled together a PS-dominated coalition government with the French Communist Party (PCF), the Greens, the tiny Radical Socialist Party (PRS) and the Eurosceptic Citizen’s Movement (MDC) as junior partners.

Since then, the government has had a remarkable run of luck. After a long period of recession, the French economy has been growing strongly for the past two years, and the right has been in disarray.

Jospin’s keynote policy, the 35-hour week, at first faced vigorous opposition from employers, but many now acknowledge that it is being introduced in a way that will allow flexible working practices hitherto intolerable to the trade unions.

Similarly, although there have been tensions too inside the ruling coalition – with the PCF objecting strongly to Jospin’s backing for the Nato military intervention in Kosovo and the Greens demanding greater representation in the government after their good showing in the June 1999 Euro-election – Jospin has generally handled relations with his partners with aplomb. He steered clear of a confrontation with the left over the Tony Blair/Gerhard Schröder joint statement The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte by declining to endorse it and emphasising the French left’s more critical approach to the market.

The only major problem for Jospin came at the beginning of last November, when his finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a key ally, was forced to resign in the wake of serious corruption allegations. Yet the demise of DSK appears to have done Jospin no damage in the opinion polls. On current evidence, he has an excellent chance of defeating Chirac for the presidency in June 2002.

ITALY
Italy’s centre-left government, led by the Democrats of the Left (DS) – formerly the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), formerly the Italian Communist Party (PCI) – is technically little more than a month old.

In reality, it is pretty much the same – in personnel, policy and vulnerability to collapse – as Italy’s previous centre-left government, which fell just before Christmas after three tiny parties withdrew their support. DS prime minister Massimo D’Alema was out of office for less than 48 hours before returning to form a new administration containing nearly all the same ministers as the old.

Italy has been notorious ever since the fall of fascism for having governments that collapse as a result of intrigue and are replaced by remarkably similar ones. But since the April 1996 general election the governing coalitions have been built not, as previously, against the PCI and its successors, but around the PDS/DS – until October 1998 with the centrist technocrat Romano Prodi as prime minister and subsequently under D’Alema.

The record of the former-PCI’s first foray into government has been mixed. On one hand, the Prodi/D’Alema administrations have succeeded in their main declared aims of ensuring fiscal stability and of taking Italy into the European single currency. On the other, they have failed to From 1996 to 1998, Italy was governed by a centre-left gova centre-The 1996 election saw the PDS-dominated centre-left Olive Tree alliance, with the centrist technocrat Romano Prodi as prime ministerial candidate, emerge as the largest group in the Chamber of Deputies but without an overall majority. The largest component of the Olive Tree was the PDSAll three governmentThe present government is not very different from the one before last either, although that was led, from April 1996 to October 1998, by Romano Prodi, a centrist technocrat chosen by the PDS-dominated centre-left Olive Tree alliance as its prime ministerial candidate for the April 1996 general election. Prodi’s was the first Italian government to include the PCI or a successor party.

In the April 1996 general election, which gave Italy a left-dominated government for the first time, Rifondazione, created by members of the old Italian Communist Party (PCI) who opposed its transformation into the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) in 1991, won nearly 9 per cent of the vote. That gave Rifondazione 35 seats in the chamber of deputies – enough to make it an essential ally of the PDS-dominated “Olive Tree” coalition whenever the right and the regionalist Lega Nord voted together in parliament.

Until discussions began on the budget, Rifondazione was broadly supportive of the government, flexing its muscles only intermittently. But it consistently made clear that it would not back large-scale reductions in welfare spending merely to allow Italy to take part in EMU. Bertinotti and his party would have lost the substantial credibility that they have patiently built up with working-class voters if they had not used all their leverage over pension rights. Italy’s economy is doing well, and many voters do not see why they should go through yet another bout of austerity.
Equally important, Rifondazione was not the only one playing intransigent over the budget. Bertinotti had made it clear that, although he needed a concession, he was open to suggestions about what precisely it should be – and it is likely that agreement could have been reached had it not been for the inflexibility of PDS leader Massimo D’Alema.

D’Alema was quite happy to see the collapse of the government because he wants an early general election, which he believes would return a PDS-centre government that would not have to rely on the support of Rifondazione – and would thus have far greater freedom of manoeuvre.
He might be right. The main right-wing party, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, is doing poorly in the opinion polls and is tainted with corruption. There is a good chance that the Olive Tree coalition, making the most of the voter-appeal of its latest recruit, Antonio Di Pietro, the investigating magistrate who became a popular hero for his pursuit of political corruption in the early 1990s, would make substantial inroads into the territory formerly occupied by the Christian Democrats.

There is, however, a big problem with D’Alema’s strategy. The president of the republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, who alone has the power to appoint prime ministers and dissolve parliament, does not want a snap election and is doing all he can to create a new government without one. If he succeeds, D’Alema will not be easily forgiven by many in the PDS for the part he played in throwing power away.


SPAIN
Spain holds its next general election on 12 March. Opinion polls suggest small gains for prime minister José María Aznar’s centre-right Popular Party (PP), which has governed with the support of regional nationalists since ending 14 years of Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) government under Felipe González in 1996.

Aznar – the only centre-right leader to express an interest in Tony Blair’s Third Way – wants to make the election a referendum on his economic policies and on his tough stance against the Basque separatist guerrilla group ETA, which abandoned its cease-fire late last year.

Yet, although the Aznar government’s economic record is undoubtedly impressive – it managed to get Spain into the single currency and has seen unemployment tumble – the PP’s lead over the PSOE in the opinion polls last month remained less than 5 percentage points. That is smaller than at the beginning of the campaign in 1996, when it eventually won by just 1 percentage point, so an upset cannot be ruled out.

Leading the PSOE into the election is Joaquín Almunia, a right-wing associate of González chosen as prime ministerial candidate last summer to replace the left-wing populist José Borrell after the latter’s resignation over allegations that two former colleagues had committed fraud.

NETHERLANDS
The Dutch government since 1994 has been what at first seemed a bizarre coalition between the Labour Party (PvdA), traditionally the defender of the welfare state, and two parties committed to cuts in welfare spending, the centrist Democrats 66 and the free-market-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).

But, with the exception of a hiccup last summer after the governing parties lost ground in the Euro-election, the ‘purple coalition’, with the popular PvdA leader Wim Kok as prime minister, has proved remarkably successful. It has presided over a period of strong growth – the Netherlands now enjoys full employment – and its ability to introduce labour market and welfare reforms by negotiating compromises with business and trade unions has won widespread admiration. In the 1998 general election, the coalition was comfortably returned to power (although the PvdA and VVD gained at the expense of D66).

How long the party lasts is a moot point, however. Many commentators say that the economy is in danger of overheating, and there are signs that unions are uneasy about maintaining wage restraint in the face of spiralling corporate profits.

BELGIUM
Last June, Belgians reacted to string of political scandals – the most important over the contamination of food with dioxin – by voting decisively against the Christian Democrats and socialists who had dominated the country’s coalitions for 40 years. The new government, a novel combination of liberals, socialists and greens from both francophone and Flemish linguistic communities, has made much of its intention of cleaning up Belgium’s discredited political institutions – and so far it has enjoyed an easy ride, helped by strong economic growth. It remains to be seen, however, how long the coalition will be able to avoid the francophone-Flemish wrangling that has long characterised federal Belgian politics.

GREECE
The Greek political scene has been dominated since 1981 by the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok), which has spent only four years (1989-93) in opposition. The popularity of the current government, led by prime minister Costas Simitis, suffered as a result of its support for Nato’s military intervention over Kosovo last year. But it has won plaudits for its economic management, presiding over strong economic growth and taking Greece to the brink of membership of the single currency. Pasok is likely to be returned to power, albeit narrowly, in the general election due by October.


PORTUGAL
Last October’s Portuguese general election was undoubtedly a victory for the Socialist Party (PS), which had been in minority government under prime minister Antonio Guterres since 1995, taking Portugal into the single currency and latterly enjoying strong economic growth. But it did not yield the overall parliamentary majority that Guterres, a popular and dynamic centrist moderniser, had hoped for, largely because of a strong showing by the joint list put forward by the Communist Party (PCP) and the Greens. Portugal holds the EU presidency for the first six months of this year and will play a crucial role in determining the shape of the intergovernmental conference on reform of the EU’s institutions that begins later this year.

SWEDEN
The single biggest question facing Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats (SAP), in power with a co-operation agreement with the former-communist Left Party and the Greens, is whether they should back Swedish membership of the single European currency. Prime minister Goran Persson is in favour, and he hopes a party congress in spring will back him – but the result is by no means certain because of worries about what the euro means for Sweden’s still impressively generous welfare state. Even if he gets his way, he could be in trouble if the Left Party and the Greens, both anti-euro, decide to ditch co-operation – and then there is the challenge of winning a referendum.

AUSTRIA
Austria was thrown into turmoil by last October’s general election, in which the far-right anti-immigrant Freedom Party (FPO), led by Jorg Haider, narrowly took second place ahead of the Christian Democrat People’s Party (OVP). OVP leader Wolfgang Schussel had promised to abandon coalition with chancellor Viktor Klima’s Social Democratic Party (SPO) if his party failed to come second, and it took until last month for Klima to persuade the OVP to resurrect the arrangement that has governed Austria since 1986. How long the deal holds is a matter for conjecture. The coalition has presided over strong economic growth and successful entry into the single currency, but it appears tired and out of touch with the popular mood. Ominously, there is no obvious alternative to it that does not involve Haider.

SWITZERLAND
One of only two major west European countries outside the EU, Switzerland has been governed by the same four party coialition, one member of which is the Social Democratic Party (SPS/PSS), since 1959. In last October’s general election, the SPS/PSS slightly increased its share of the vote but the real victor was the conservative SVP/UDC, whose vote increased 6 percentage points on its 1995 showing.


FINLAND
The least Eurosceptic of all the Nordic countries, Finland has been governed by a Social Democrat-led five-party rainbow coalition since 1995. In last March’s general election, the coalition parties had mixed results. The Social Democrats (SDP) slipped badly, but the former-communist-led left alliance, Vasemmistoliitto, kept its share of the vote and the centrist National Coalition Party (Kok) and the Greens increased theirs. Finland was in the middle of its presidential election as New Times went to press, with the SDP’s Tarja Halonen facing former prime minister, Esko Aho, of the opposition Centre Party (Kesk), in the second-round run-off.

DENMARK
The key question in Danish politics is whether to join the euro. Prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen is keen to go in, and his Social Democratic Party, the dominant partner in the centre-left government, is likely to agree with him at its congress this autumn, in which case there will be a referendum on the issue late this year or early next.


NORWAY
Outside the EU since it rejected membership in a 1994 referendum, Norway has been governed since autumn 1997 by a bizarre minority coalition of Christian Democrats, liberals and Euro-sceptics. Most observers expected that the coalition would collapse sooner rather than later, clearing the way for the return of the Labour Party (DNA) to government. Instead, it has persevered, leaving Labour, which dominated the political scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the political wilderness.

IRELAND
After winning nearly 20 per cent of the vote in the 1992 general election, the Labour Party, led by Dick Spring, played a pivotal role in Ireland’s governing coalitons of the mid-1990s – and then slumped to an ignominious 10 per cent in the 1997 election. It is currently in opposition to the centre-right coalition of Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats, which is basking in the warm glow of Ireland’s unprecedented economic growth since it came to power.


LUXEMBOURG
The centre-left Luxembourg Socialist Workers Party (LSAP/PSOL) has been out of power since last June’s general election in which it took a disappointing 24 per cent of the vote.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 7 January 2000

If the past week’s press is to be believed, it seems that campaigners for proportional representation for the House of Commons will not be able to count of the support of Tony Blair in the run-up to Labour’s promised referendum on the issue.

A lot of people in the pro-PR camp appear to be surprised by this, but I am not. I have been sceptical for a long time about the strength of Blair’s commitment to constitutional reform. The three main elements of the constitutional reform programme on which Labour was elected in 1997 – devolution and reform of the House of Lords as well as the PR referendum – were all policies he inherited when he succeeded John Smith as party leader in 1994. And Blair was never very keen on any of them.

In opposition between 1994 and 1997, he consistently gave the impression that devolution was something he was lumbered with. He jettisoned Labour’s tentative plans for elected English regional assemblies and bounced the party into accepting pre-devolution referendums in Scotland and Wales. In 1997, after Labour won its massive general election landslide, the Scots and Welsh voted for devolution, and legislation was duly passed to create the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. But the lengths to which the Labour leadership in London went to ensure both institutions were run by ultra-loyalists made a mockery of the principle of devolution of power.

Similarly, on Lords reform, Labour under Blair has drifted from a clear commitment to an elected second chamber – albeit introduced as the second stage in a two-stage process, the first being abolition of the voting rights of hereditary peers – to a position in which some hereditaries will stay and an elected second chamber appears the least likely long-term outcome.

Meanwhile, the PR referendum has been put off until after the next election – and, although Alastair Campbell this week made it clear (just about) that the promise of a referendum will be kept, it has become increasingly obvious that Blair will not be throwing his weight behind changing the voting system for the Commons.

The key development here is not the fact, splashed all over last week’s papers after a Millbank leak, that many more submissions to Labour’s internal consultation on the Jenkins Commission backed the first-past-the-post status quo than supported Jenkins’ proposed system of “AV-plus”. Nearly all the pro-FPTP submissions were pre-printed postcards delivered to Labour headquarters in a single box by the engineers’ union.

Far more telling is the absence of proposals for PR for local councils from the government’s local government legislation. Nine months ago, the word from Number Ten Downing Street was that Blair had been convinced that, along with elected mayors and cabinet-style council executives, PR was essential to reinvigorate local government – not least as a means of getting rid of corrupt and sclerotic “one-party states”. But when the local government reform package was published at the end of last year, PR was nowhere to be seen.

Why the change of heart? One reason appears to be the implacable opposition to PR of John Prescott, whose giant Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions includes local government among its responsibilities. But there have also been reports – anonymously sourced of course – that Blair himself has now come to the conclusion that PR is a bad thing at any level because it inevitably means doing deals with small parties that wield inordinate power.

This could all be tendentious spin, but I have a hunch that there is more to it than that. Blair has never been an advocate of PR even in private, and in [itals]Realpolitik[end itals] terms there seems to be little reason for Labour to introduce it at either local or national level in the foreseeable future. On one hand, it is at odds with the centralising managerialist thrust of Labour’s council reforms. On the other, the thumping Commons majority given Labour by FPTP grants him an extraordinary freedom of manoeuvre. There appears, moreover, to be little likelihood of that majority being significantly diminished at the next general election.

Yet the case for PR remains as strong as ever. Local PR is necessary not only to tackle the nepotism and unaccountability of local “one-party states” but as a counterweight to powerful council executives. For the Commons, AV-plus is by no means perfect as an electoral system. But it would end three of the worst characteristics of FPTP – the existence of large areas of the country in which vast numbers of people never get an MP from the party they vote for, the focus of all electioneering on affluent voters in a handful of key seats, and the inbuilt bias of the system towards the Tories.

Labour’s neanderthal tribalists should not forget that the 1997 election is only the third time since 1922 that Labour has won a comfortable Commons majority. The Tories have won 11 comfortable majorities in the same period.

Paul Anderson, review of Stafford Cripps: A Political Life by Simon Burgess (Gollancz, £25), New Times, January 2000

For nearly 20 years, Stafford Cripps, who lived from 1889 to 1952, played a crucial role in British left politics.

A successful barrister and country squire, married to an heiress, he came to socialism through Christianity and was head-hunted into the Labour Party by Herbert Morrison in 1929. His rise to political prominence was phenomenal: he was made solicitor general by Ramsay MacDonald even before he became an MP in an early 1931 by-election.

After the debacle of MacDonald’s decision to form a national government and Labour’s subsequent general election humiliation, Cripps turned sharply to the left. For the rest of the 1930s he was far and away the Labour left’s brightest star. He was the leading light in the Socialist League, the main left organisation within the Labour Party. In 1936-37, he played a key role in the Unity Campaign, in which Labour left-wingers joined the Communist Party and the Independent Labour Party to urge left unity against fascism – the only lasting result of which was the founding of Tribune. Subsequently, Cripps was the most senior Labour advocate of an anti-Tory ‘popular front’ – for which he was expelled from the Labour Party in 1939.

Throughout the 1930s, Cripps was staunchly pro-Soviet – he even defended the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 – and largely because of this was chosen by Churchill in 1940 to act as British ambassador to Moscow.

The appointment resurrected his political career. When he returned to Britain in 1942, he was welcomed as the personification of the Anglo-Russian alliance against Hitler – and was in a strong enough position to force his way into the war cabinet as leader of the House of Commons (though not, as he hoped, to oust Churchill).

Cripps served successfully as minister for aircraft production from 1942 to 1945 and was allowed back into the Labour Party just before the 1945 election. In Clement Attlee’s government he was made president of the Board of Trade and then, in 1947, chancellor of the exchequer. In both roles, he proved a prudent pragmatist. When he resigned from the government in 1950, on grounds of ill health, he was widely praised even by erstwhile political enemies for his part in securing Britain’s postwar recovery.

Simon Burgess’s new biography is a competent piece of work, thoroughly researched and generally well written. It is certainly the best life of Cripps so far, particularly on his time in Moscow and his ministerial career.

The problem is that Burgess is so much more sympathetic to Cripps post-Moscow than Cripps pre-Moscow, and his commentary on the 1930s left is marked throughout with exasperation. Although Burgess makes it clear why much of the Labour establishment thought that Cripps was, as Hugh Dalton put it, a ‘dangerous political lunatic’, in his exasperation (understandable as it may be) he never really succeeds in explaining why so many on the left looked on Cripps as an inspirational leader.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 17 December 1999

Since there’s not been much going on to disturb the winter silly season – apart, of course, from the defection of Shaun Woodward to Labour, of which more later – there’s not a lot for it but to ruminate on the date.

Yes, it’s 2,000 years (give or take a few) since the birth of Our Lord, and 100 since the birth of Our Party. Most Tribune readers no doubt think the latter anniversary deserves more attention in these pages than the former – which is fair enough in the light of the Labour leadership’s embarrassment at the antiquity of the organisation it claims to control.

Be that as it may, I’m more concerned about the celebrations of the 2,000th birthday of the man considered by Christians to be the saviour of the human race.

Of course, it’s not really his 2,000th birthday. No one knows exactly when Jesus lived. Indeed, we can’t be entirely sure that Jesus ever lived, though there are documentary fragments suggesting that there really was once a man vaguely answering to the descriptions in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

But even if it is his birthday, what is there to celebrate? I know I’m not alone in finding the central Christian myths of Jesus’s life, from the immaculate conception through the miracles to the resurrection, utterly incredible. And ever since I first started thinking about these things, I’ve been unable to understand why there is still a social convention that people who believe in this nonsense deserve respect for their credulity.

Not that I’m in favour of persecution. We all have the right to believe whatever we want. The point is that we don’t have the right to have our beliefs protected from ridicule or otherwise privileged by the state.

A group of people who expressed the view that little green men from Mars had brainwashed Tribune‘s editor and were dictating its editorial policy on Europe could expect to be greeted with derision. They would certainly not be granted money from the public purse to propagate their barmy theory.

Yet, despite the collapse of Christian observance in the past century, Christianity remains enormously privileged in our society. The blasphemy laws remain on the statute book, bishops sit in the upper house of our legislature and the state pours subsidies into denominational schooling. Even more incredibly, the fashionable liberal view is that the privileges accorded Christianity should be extended to other religions.

But I digress. The main reason for balking at the idea of celebrating 2,000 years or so of Christianity is not the absurdity of Christian beliefs or even the bizarre way they are protected and encouraged in contemporary Britain. Rather, it is the appalling historical legacy of Christianity. Over the ages, millions have suffered under the Christian yoke – most obviously the victims of holy wars and of inquisitions, but also those whose native cultures were destroyed by Christian missionaries and those today who are denied contraception by the teaching of the Roman Catholic church.

To my mind, the most fitting long-term use of the Millennium Dome would be as a memorial to the victims of Christianity – or better still, to the victims of all organised religion. There might not be as many of them as there were victims of twentieth-century totalitarianism, but as I argued in this column a few weeks ago, it’s not the size of the pile of corpses that matters but the very fact that there is a pile.

+++

My pre-millenium blues dissipated a little the week before Xmas with the defection of Shaun Woodward, Tory MP and former Central Office spin-doctor, to Labour. For Tony Blair, I’m sure, it’s rather like Luke chapter 15 verse six – “Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance” – as accurate a summary of Blair’s view of his own party as it’s possible to find. For me, it’s just good news to see William Hague squirming.

Hague is right, though, about one thing. Woodward should resign his seat and fight a by-election. Back in the early 1980s Labour was loud in its demands that the MPs who defected from its ranks to the Social Democratic Party put their apostasy to the voters who originally elected them as Labour representatives. With one exception, they didn’t. But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 3 December 1999

This weekend should turn out to be a bit special for anyone on the British left with a sense of history. Democratic Left, the organisation that used to be the Communist Party of Great Britain, is holding a special conference at the University of London Union. And if its executive committee gets its way, it will decide to abandon the last vestiges of the structure of a political party and turn itself into an umbrella group supporting a variety of radical democratic initiatives, the “New Times Network”.

The dissolution of the official wing of British Bolshevism, a small but highly significant political force for more than 70 years after its foundation in 1920, will be complete.

For every democratic socialist, this is cause to break open the champagne. And you’ve got a chance to do precisely that tonight (Friday), on the eve of the conference, at DL’s “Transformation Party” at the October Gallery in Holborn.

Here I must register an interest. Despite being, in the language of 1917, a Menshevik with anarchist sympathies – I fancy that if I’d been a Russian 70s years ago, even before the CPGB was formed, I would have been rotting in the Lubyanka, though probably with the privileges accorded to a “political” – I am currently deputy editor of New Times, DL’s monthly, which will be at the core of the new umbrella organisation.

The editor, incidentally, is a former Trotskyist who has sold his soul to Menshevism, Kevin Davey, well known to Tribune readers of a certain age for his reviews of obscure French books in the late 1980s. In Russia in the 1930s, he would have been shot.

Of course, the worst that could happen to either of us now is that we’d lose our jobs if the special conference decided to close down New Times. DL is not the CPGB, let alone the Soviet Communist Party of Lenin or Stalin. It is a democratic rather than democratic centralist, organisation, and it has done a lot of worthwhile things: promoting a constructive left engagement with Europe, playing a key role in the campaign for democratic constitutional reform – most recently as a key sponsor of Make Votes Count – and giving succour to democratic reformers in the trade union movement.

But I’ve never joined DL. I’ve always felt that it was too much like the old CP in its pretensions and culture. Everything good that DL has done has been a matter of getting people together from different parts of the political spectrum in ad hoc coalitions to push on key specific issues. Yet despite having only 800 members it has retained all the policy-making structures and petty bureaucratic procedures of a party that believes it has a serious chance of winning state power in the foreseeable future.

There’s a point at which you have to admit the game is up – and unless DL does it now it doesn’t have a future. If it doesn’t concentrate its remaining resources on what it does best, it will simply fade away.

***

On a different subject entirely, I’ve been amazed at the way most of the Labour left has got into a lather about Tony Blair’s discussions of coalition with Paddy Ashdown, revealed the weekend before last by the Sunday Telegraph.

Of course, it wasn’t very pleasant of “Number Ten sources” to go around spreading rumours that Gavin Strang and David Clark were incompetent and likely to be sacked. But wouldn’t the government have shifted to the left if the Lib Dems had joined it?

They would certainly have given momentum to the government in the area of constitutional reform – on proportional representation, on replacing the House of Lords, on regional assemblies in England, on freedom of information – and would have stiffened its resistance to Euroscepticism. They are notably greener than most Labour ministers. And they might well have scuppered much of Jack Straw’s illiberal home affairs legislation and perhaps even some of New Labour’s mean-spirited benefit reforms. Not for the first time, I’ve found myself this past ten days cursing the left’s pig-headed tribalism.