Category Archives: Journalism

Chartist, November-December 1998

There were always going to be losers among sitting MEPs in the selection of Labour candidates for next year’s European Parliament elections.

The elections are to be held for the first time under a regional list system of proportional representation – which means that Labour will win only 43 of the 84 seats in Great Britain, down from 62 under first past the post in 1994, even if it does as well as in the 1997 general election.

But the way that the losers have been chosen has shocked even hardened cynics in the party.

The obvious democratic way to choose candidates would have been by one member one vote ballot of Labour members in each constituency, with rankings determined by the number of votes won by each candidate.

But the party leadership wanted to control the selections, and most sitting MEPs believed they should automatically be given winnable places on the regional lists. So the NEC decided to ditch OMOV in favour of a system that gave the preferences of party members a subsidiary role.

Sitting MEPs were guaranteed places on lists if OMOV “trigger ballots” in their existing Euro-constituencies endorsed them – although they were not promised winnable positions. Every single sitting MEP who had decided to stand again comfortably won the trigger ballot.

Other hopefuls had a more difficult task. First they had to be nominated by a constituency Labour party, then win a place in a national pool of potential candidates in an OMOV Euro-constituency ballot. An NEC-dominated selection panel then whittled down the national pool to a shortlist and finally chose the candidates and their ranking after interviewing the sitting MEPs and the new potential candidates.

The party apparatus claims that the process was rigorous and fair. But even MEPs who have a good chance of winning say that the selection interviews were superficial and based on loyalty tests, with the members of the panel showing little knowledge of the workings of the European Parliament. And the results certainly suggest that MEPs considered awkward by the Labour leadership were singled out for rejection.

Of the 49 sitting Labour MEPs standing again, 12 were given list positions that Labour cannot possibly win even if it does as well next year as it did in 1997. Of these 12, no fewer than 10 were signatories of the famous advertisement in the Guardian, backing retention of Clause Four of the Labour constitution, that appeared the same day in 1995 that Tony Blair met the European Parliamentary Labour Party in Brussels. Another five of the Clause Four rebels will lose their seats if Labour does just a little worse than in 1997 – which is the least that can be expected.

Three sitting MEPs given unwinnable positions – Alex Smith, Michael McGowan and David Morris – have withdrawn as candidates since the lists were drawn up in late September, and a fourth, Christine Oddy, is threatening legal action against the party. Several other sitting MEPs whose only hope is a repeat of Labour’s 1997 performance are quietly seething.

Not that the MEPs are the only ones with a cause for complaint. Only six of the 106 new potential candidates that made it through to the national pool have been given list positions that are winnable.

“We all knew it would be difficult to choose candidates for the new list system,” said one MEP. “But at least if we’d had OMOV it would have been down to party members to decide who they should be and the results would have had democratic legitimacy. The way we actually did them, the selections looked like a giant stitch-up.”

New Times, 30 October 1998

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 12 October 1998

Steve Platt made a lot of good points last week about the left and proportional representation. He’s absolutely right about the debilitating effect on British politics of the combination of ever-more-centralised party machines and a first-past-the-post electoral system for the House of Commons. General elections have been turned into an undignified scramble for the votes of a handful of affluent, socially conservative “swing voters” – “scumbags from suburbia who read the Daily Mail”, as a senior Labour official put it to me some years ago. The result has been the marginalisation of creative thinking and dissident voices in mainstream politics.

So I agree with Platt entirely when he argues that a genuine PR system for the House of Commons, far from condemning us to never-ending coalitions of centre-left or centre-right, could liberate the left by allowing a credible red-green grouping to win parliamentary representation. Just look at Germany.

The problem, however, is that when Lord Jenkins’s Independent Commission on the Voting System reports later this month it is set to propose a system that rules out any such thing.

According to no less an authority than Hugo Young in the Guardian, Jenkins will come out for a hybrid system known as “AV-plus” to be put to voters in the government’s promised PR referendum. Under AV-plus, around 500 MPs would be elected in single-member constituencies by the alternative vote, and 150 or so “top-up” MPs would be added to ensure greater proportionality of results in each city and county.

Supporters of AV-plus say that it is the only option that both satisfies the Jenkins commission’s terms of reference – “broad proportionality, the need for stable government, an extension of voter choice and the maintenance of a link between MPs and geographical constituencies” – and is capable of winning the support of both the Liberal Democrat and Labour leaderships.

They could be right: we shall see. For our purposes here, however, what is important is that AV-plus as described by Young is also designed to keep small parties out of parliament.

For a start, the use of the alternative vote for single-member-constituency MPs would if anything make it more difficult for small parties to win seats than it is at present. Under AV, voters mark their ballot papers not with a single “x” but by numbering their preferences 1, 2, 3 and so on. If no candidate gets more than 50 per cent of first preferences, the bottom-placed candidate is eliminated and his or her second preferences are added to the other candidates’ totals, and so on until one candidate tops 50 per cent. Its main effect is to encourage the election of “least objectionable” candidates – and it has rightly been castigated as a recipe for making our political life even blander than it is now.

What is really disappointing, however, is the proposal for electing the top-up MPs by cities and counties rather than by regions. With top-up systems, the smaller the clusters of single-member constituencies that are being topped up, the larger the share of the vote a party needs to win a top-up seat in any cluster. If, under a regional AV-plus system, a party were to get 10 per cent of AV first preferences but no single-member seats in a region with 40 single-member and 10 top-up seats, it would almost certainly win top-up representation. In an extremely localised AV-plus system, a party winning the same share of first preferences in a city with four single-member constituencies and one top-up seat would not win anything.

Of course, we’ll have to wait to read the small print before coming to firm conclusions. But I’m afraid that the dream of the emergence of a credible new red-green party is going to have to remain a dream (at least for Commons elections) for a little while longer.

Which is not to say that the left should mobilise to trash the Jenkins report or back the status quo in the referendum campaign. Sticking to first-past-the-post would effectively wipe out the prospects of PR for the Commons for a generation – and that would be a disaster.

In spite of last year’s landslide, Labour should never forget that first-past-the-post has not been kind to it: 1997 is only the third time it has won a comfortable parliamentary majority. For all its faults, AV-plus would protect Britain from a repeat of the elective dictatorship of the Thatcher era – a distant prospect now, perhaps, but not necessarily so in five years’ time. However imperfect its proportionality, it would be at least a significant step towards fairness in the electoral system: more votes would count. And once it was in place it could at least be improved.

In other words, it’s a case of supporting the bad against the worse – a bit like voting Labour at election time, in fact.

Paul Anderson, review of Robin Cook by John Kampfner (Gollancz, £16.99), Tribune, 3 October 1998

As instant political biographies go, John Kampfner’s Robin Cook is not bad. Too many examples of the genre are poorly researched, badly written hagiographies. Kampfner’s book is thorough, well crafted and for the most part balanced.

It is particularly good on Cook’s career before he became Foreign Secretary last year. Of course, there are a few errors of fact. Contrary to Kampfner’s belief, Kingsley Martin was not editor of the New Statesman in 1964 when Cook started reading it; and cruise missiles arrived in Britain in 1983, not 1980 as he states. But in context these are minor mistakes: on the important things, Kampfner’s research is meticulous.

His account of Cook’s formative years in the 1960s and 1970s, as student politician, Edinburgh councillor and radical back-bench MP, is superb; and he negotiates with aplomb the intricacies of Labour’s debates and internal power struggles in the 1980s and early 1990s. On Cook’s longstanding anti-militarism, his changing attitudes to devolution and Europe, his Keynesian interventionism in economic policy and his conversion to the cause of proportional representation, Kampfner is excellent.

His most revealing chapter is on Cook’s dithering after John Smith’s death over whether to stand against Tony Blair for the Labour leadership and his belated decision to jump on the Blair bandwagon. There is a strong case for believing that Cook’s failure of nerve was far more important than Gordon Brown’s at the same time. In spring 1994, Brown was in the political doldrums inside the Labour Party because of his caution in economic policy, while Cook’s reputation was riding high on the strength of his handling of the arms-to-Iraq scandal. Had Cook declared his intention to stand early – well, who knows? Kampfner has the sense not to answer this question directly, but he does make it clear that there were plenty of people who took Cook’s chances very seriously.

On Cook as Foreign Secretary, the book is less satisfactory. Kampfner tells the story competently enough, and much of his appraisal of Cook’s first year-and-a-bit in office is fair. He is undoubtedly right that the Foreign Secretary has had a torrid time in the press – particularly over his love life (a story retold here at unnecessary length) but also because of supposed “gaffes” over Kashmir, Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine, and Sierra Leone. It is also incontrovertible that Cook has been frozen out of decision-making on European economic and monetary union and that he has been over-ruled on arms sales to Indonesia. As a loyal member of the government, he has been unable to act in public as a tribune of the Labour left.

But Kampfner is far too ready to write Cook off. The truth is that nothing that has gone wrong for the Foreign Secretary has irreversibly damaged his standing. His bad press over Israeli settlements and Sierra Leone was not deserved; and the worst should soon be over as far as publicity about his love life is concerned. He also has substantial achievements to his name: his role in normalising relations with Europe, his part in restraining the gung-ho instincts of Blair and Bill Clinton over Iraq and his changes to the culture of the Foreign Office.

Perhaps most important, Blair knows that he cannot get rid of him. Cook on the back benches as the figurehead the parliamentary left so obviously now lacks would be a nightmare for the Prime Minister. So he seems guaranteed a senior position for the foreseeable future, most likely continuing as Foreign Secretary but just possibly becoming Chancellor if Gordon Brown proves a disaster. If Blair opts for proportional representation for the Commons, moreover, Cook will become a crucial ally in Cabinet.

All of which is to say that Kampfner’s downbeat conclusion – “The man on whom so many had pinned their hopes in opposition had found himself a victim in government” – could all too easily look dated in a year’s time. I certainly hope so.

New Times, 28 August 1998

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) has learned from bitter experience never to underestimate the powers of recovery of chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Since the liberal Free Democratic Party abandoned Helmut Schmidt’s SPD-led West German government in 1982 to become the junior partner in a coalition with Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, the Social Democrats have lost four general elections in a row to him. In three of those elections, moreover, the SPD lost after holding what seemed to be impregnable leads in mid-term opinion polls.

Will this time be different? Until recently, it seemed inconceivable that Kohl could win the general election on 27 September. In May, the polls showed the SPD, led by the business-friendly populist Gerhard Schröder, supported by some 43 per cent of voters, with the CDU-CSU on 35 per cent. Just about every pundit agreed that even Kohl’s campaigning virtuosity could not possibly close the gap.

Now, however, the crystal ball is cloudier. Polls published in August suggest that the SPD will take around 42 per cent of the vote, with the CDU-CSU between three and five percentage points behind. A quarter of voters are still undecided, and it is unclear from the polls which of the smaller parties – the FDP, the Greens, the former-communist Party of Democratic Socialism and the small parties of the far right – will clear the threshold to win seats in the Bundestag. In short, although Schröder is still the favourite to head the biggest party, Kohl appears to be catching up and there is everything to play for.

The most important reason for the revival of Kohl’s fortunes is Germany’s economic recovery this year, which has led to a sharp drop in unemployment from 4.8 million in January to 4.1 million today. But the chancellor has also been able to exploit controversy inside the SPD over Schröder’s choice as candidate finance minister, Jost Stollman, a millionaire businessman who is not a party member – controversy that Kohl claims shows the SPD remains at heart anti-business. In similar vein, he has made great play of the dangers of SPD tax increases and of the prospects of an SPD coalition with the Greens or the PDS.

Against this, the SPD has promised tax cuts and much more vigorous action to reduce unemployment, along with a reversal of the Kohl government’s unpopular cuts in pension and sickness benefit entitlements. On the vexed question of coalition, Schröder has made it clear that he wants nothing to do with the PDS but has otherwise kept his options open, merely hinting that he would prefer a ‘grand coalition’ with the CDU-CSU to a deal with the Greens.

Kohl has ruled out participation in a “grand coalition”, and so have most other leading figures in the CDU-CSU – the aim being to maximise centrist voters’ worries about the Greens. The gambit might just come off. But if it doesn’t, Kohl’s stance could ironically help bring on the outcome he says he doesn’t want by leaving the SPD with no option but a coalition with the Greens. Then again, the CDU-CSU might change its mind after the election.

All of which makes it hazardous in the extreme to predict the political complexion of the government that will be ruling Germany at the end of this year. Like most of the social democratic left in Europe, I’m hoping for an SPD-Green coalition, which would give the centre-left a predominance in the European Union that it has never enjoyed before. But I shall not be too surprised if my hopes are cruelly dashed.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 3 August 1998

I can’t be the only cynical old leftist who thought Frank Field’s complaint this week that he’d been done over by spin-doctors was just a bit ripe.

There’s no doubt that the usual suspects told journalists some extremely nasty things about him last weekend. But I remember only too well his own enthusiasm for slagging off members of his constituency party who had the temerity, in 1990-91, to try to replace him as their Labour candidate. Of course, then as now, he adopted the pose of St Frank the Martyr, the innocent victim of satanic forces, but the viciousness of his smear campaign against his opponents was remarkable. There are plenty of people in Birkenhead who are no doubt currently feeling pleased that Field has at long last tasted some of his own medicine.

What’s important about his sacking as welfare reform minister, however, is not the spin-doctors’ vulgar abuse but what it says about the government’s social security policy. And here it is possible to have some sympathy for him.

When Field was appointed last year, it was universally taken as a sign that Tony Blair favoured a radical restructuring of social security. Field had a reputation as an innovative thinker on social security, and in the years before the 1997 election had developed a coherent case for replacing the existing mess of pensions and benefits provision with a new system of universal social insurance.

Shorn of a lot of moralistic rhetoric about the importance of self-reliance, the evils of single-parent families and the like, Field’s argument came down to this. The main problem with the social security system as it had evolved under the Tories was that it left a vast number of people reliant on means-tested benefits. Means-testing — which he described as “the cancer within the welfare state” — by its very nature encouraged claimants to lie about their means, discouraged saving and created an unmotivated underclass of welfare-dependents. The solution was to replace means-tested benefits with benefits received as of right. And the only way to do this, given the general unwillingness to pay more taxes, was to make sure everyone contributed to social insurance funds.

Field made a particular point of the applicability of social insurance to pensions, which were a thorny problem for Labour. The Tories had allowed the real value of the basic state pension to decline and had done everything in their power to shift people out of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme introduced by the 1974-79 Labour government.

Labour was committed to reducing poverty among pensioners — but it would take big tax increases to raise state pensions sufficiently to ensure a comfortable standard of living for all pensioners. And raising tax was one thing that Labour had set its heart against. Field’s scheme to replace SERPS with fully funded compulsory second pensions for everyone, which he costed in detail soon before the 1997 election, seemed to the Labour leadership to be the solution to Labour’s dilemma: better pensions for all, but no new taxes.

Or rather, that’s how it appeared when Blair gave Field his government job. Once it came down to thrashing out the detail of welfare reform, however, it was a different story. Within six months of Labour taking office, it was clear that there was an unbridgeable gulf between Chancellor Gordon Brown and Field over what should be done.

For Brown, the priorities were simple: no tax increases and reduction by any means possible of the £100 billion social security bill. He had no quarrel with means testing in principle — indeed, he thought that “targeting” was the best way to get value for money in social security spending. The Chancellor was shocked by the transition costs involved in changing to a wholly insurance-based system. Field’s proposals for compulsory savings sounded to him dangerously like new taxes.

So Brown held up publication of Field’s Green Paper on welfare reform for months while they haggled over its contents — and when it eventually emerged in March this year, six months after Field submitted the first draft, it was clear that the Chancellor had won a crucial political battle. All that remained of Field’s grand scheme was a vague statement of principles.

There was plenty wrong with Field’s original proposals. Any social insurance scheme leaves people without cover, and in an era of endemic employment insecurity the goal of abolishing means testing and providing universal benefits and pensions would be achieved more easily by introducing a citizen’s income and reviving SERPS, all paid for through by raising taxes. Nevertheless, Field’s ideas were better than sticking to the Tory policy of relying on cuts and means-testing to keep social security costs to a minimum. Now he has gone, it’s an open question whether Labour has any alternative to business as usual.

Paul Anderson, Red Pepper, August 1998

Paul Anderson, review of Gordon Brown: The First Year in Power by Hugh Pym and Nick Kochan (Bloomsbury, £16.99), Tribune, 19 July 1998

Try as I might, I cannot for the life of me work out why Hugh Pym and Nick Kochan have written this book. Gordon Brown is certainly an important political figure — or at least he seems to be right now. There is perhaps room in the market for a book-length study of his political career and economic policies that is more serious and more critical than the hagiography by Paul Routledge published earlier this year. But Pym and Kochan have not even attempted to produce such a book. This is an account, pure and simple, of the Iron Chancellor’s first year in power, only slightly more distant from its subject than Routledge’s tome.

It gives a reasonably competent narrative of events, and there is a lot of detail on Brown’s seriousness of character, his obsession with work and his staff — in particular his chief adviser, Ed Balls, and his spin-doctor, Charlie Whelan. If you missed the kite-flying, wavering and intra-Cabinet strife last autumn over whether or not Britain would join the single European currency in the first wave, you can read all about them here. The same goes for the row between Brown and Tony Blair sparked off by Routledge’s biography.

If you have been reading the newspapers for the past year, however, you won’t get much of substance from Pym and Kochan that you don’t know already — though you might find yourself getting extraordinarily irritated with their unyieldingly breathless prose and their addiction to hyperbole. Here, for example, is their account of the drafting of the Chancellor’s Commons statement on the single currency that finally brought to an end the weeks of uncertainty and farce last autumn:

Brown’s familiar speech-writing team was ordered to report for duty. Dr Colin Currie cleared his desk at his Edinburgh hospital and caught the first shuttle down to London. As usual he was put up by Geoffrey Robinson at his flat above the Grosvenor House Hotel, but there was no time to enjoy the Paymaster-General’s five-star hospitality. Currie rolled up his sleeves and joined Balls, Miliband and Whelan in the Chancellor’s private office. In all their years crafting prose from Brown’s machine-gun bursts of ideas this speech was the most difficult. Brown as always paced the room, churning over the momentous challenge before him, striving to channel his thoughts. As Currie remembered it, ‘Gordon is at his best when he is in trouble — his back was really against the wall at that time.’ The speech writers were chivvied and chided as they struggled to capture the ideas flying around them…

This stuff would be just about forgivable if Pym and Kochan stopped occasionally to explain where Brown’s policy ideas have come from or if they rounded off their narrative with a critical prognosis of New Labour economics. They do neither. As with Derek Draper’s asinine Blair’s 100 Days last year, it’s not worth buying this book if you’ve already read the extracts in the Sunday Times.

New Times, 3 July 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Anderson, editorial, New Times, 13 June 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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