Category Archives: Journalism

Three tactics of social democracy? 

If communitarianism really does take hold of Labour’s thinking, is this the way future historians will understand the phases of Labour’s intellectual development in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s?

 Up to mid-1980s: One-nation Keynesian corporatism

Ideological core: The state should spend to ensure that demand is sufficient to allow full employment. Import and exchange controls and nationalisation are useful tools in many circumstances. The keys to social peace are getting the unions to partake in beer and sandwiches at Number Ten and expanding expenditure on the welfare state.

Key areas of dispute: How far Labour should use public ownership as a tool of policy? How much should Labour increase taxes? How much should Labour devalue? Is an incomes policy necessary? Should Britain be a member of the European Community?

Crucial texts: Aneurin Bevan: In Place of Fear ( 1952); Anthony Crosland: The Future of Socialism (1956); Stuart Holland: The Socialist Challenge (1973); Tony Benn: Arguments for Socialism (1979); Peter Hain and Roger Berry: Labour and the Economy (1993)

Mid-1980s to mid-1990s: Euro-Keynesian liberalism

Ideological core: The medium sized nation-state can no longer be master of its own economic destiny: Europe-wide countercyclical policies are necessary to achieve full employment (if it is indeed achievable at all), backed by strong local and regional economic strategies. Nationalisation and exchange controls are no longer feasible tools of economic management. Old-style corporatism is dead, but continental-style union-management cooperation is a good thing. The main role of the nation-state in economics is redistribution through a reformed welfare state.

Key areas of dispute: Does Labour need to go for a fully federal Europe? Is full employment achievable? What extra powers should local government have? Should Labour increase taxes? Should benefits be targeted?

Crucial texts: John Rawls: A Theory of Justice (19 72);Tom Nairn: The Left and Europe (19 73); Alec Nove: The Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983); GLC: London Industrial Strategy (1985); Roy Hattersley: Choose Freedom (1987); Stuart Hall et al: New Times(1989); Ken Coates et al: A European Recovery Programme(1993); Gordon Borrie et al: Social Justice (1994)

Mid-1990s onwards?: Post-Keynesian communitarianism

Ideological core: Macroeconomics is dead: the nation state has very little role in economic management except as provider of training. Even Europe cannot operate a credible counter-cyclical economic policy. The welfare state is not sustainable in its familiar form, and many of its functions must be taken over by the voluntary sector or privatised. Unions have a role as friendly societies for their members but not in what remains of economic policy.

Key areas of dispute: Is there any future for political parties? Should local government powers be reduced? How can the cost of the welfare state be cut? Are there any benefits that should not be targeted? How should single mothers be punished? How can Labour cut taxes?

Crucial texts: Amitai Etzioni: The Spirit of Community(1993); Geoff Mulgan: Politics in a Post-Political Age (1993); Frank Field: A New Agenda for Britain (1993);David Selbourne: The Principle of Duty ( 1994); David Willetts: Civic Conservatism (1994)

New Statesman & Society, 24 February 1995

The Sunday Times‘s KGB smears against Michael Foot are as laughable as they are shoddy. A brief look at Foot’s record soon refutes the Wapping lies, writes Paul Anderson

The Sunday Times has run some reprehensible journalism in the past few years – the Hitler diaries, “Kinnock: the Kremlin connection”, the obsessional claims that the human immuno-deficiency virus does not cause Aids. But nothing quite matches its front page last weekend.

“KGB: Michael Foot was our agent,” announced the splash headline. “Former Labour leader defends cash to Tribune,” ran the tagline. Underneath was a long piece from “home affairs reporter David Leppard”, trailing a two-page feature, running right across the first two inside news pages, that purported to show that Foot had taken money from the Soviet secret police in the early 1960s to subsidise the weekly newspaper he had helped to found in 1937.

And the evidence? Not much. On the front page, Leppard wrote that a Sunday Times investigation had “established” that Foot had regular meetings with Soviet agents in London during the 1960s. “During these meetings,” he claimed, “they occasionally handed over small cash payments of about £150 each time to help Tribune, the influential Labour newspaper of which Foot was then managing director.”

To back up this extraordinary allegation, Leppard quoted (after a fashion) “one well-informed Labour Party source” – anonymous of course – who “said yesterday it was believed that, in the 1960s, Foot had ‘nodded through’ KGB donations of a few hundred pounds to keep Tribune afloat, in return for low-level Labour Party gossip”. And he wrote (conveniently without direct quotation on the money) that Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB defector who has written a book due to start serialisation in – big surprise – the Sunday Times this weekend, had said that Foot had been given the code name “Boot” by the KGB and took money for Tribune until 1968.

Beyond this, there was Viktor Kubeykin, “another retired KGB agent”, who said that he “was told” that Foot had received money in the early 1960s – “something to do with a newspaper”, he added helpfully – and, on page two, Mikhail Lubyimov, former Soviet London embassy press attache and KGB station chief, expelled for spying in 1965, who was quoted as saying: “I’m sure I didn’t give him any money,” although he seemed to agree that Tribune was “targeted” by the KGB. Also on page two, Gordievsky was named as the source (although once again not directly quoted) for the statement that “money was never given directly to publications such as Tribune but always – in a series of small amounts of no more than £150 – through intermediaries who could pose as benefactors”.

The utter shoddiness of the “exposé” is breathtaking. For a start, there’s the credibility of Gordievsky as a witness. Even leaving that aside, his tale as related by the Sunday Times amounts to just two claims. The first, that Foot had a KGB code name and file in Moscow, is no big deal: the KGB opened a file on anyone who had talked, wittingly or unwittingly, to one of its agents. And the second, that Foot took cash as one of the “intermediaries who could pose as benefactors” who funnelled Moscow gold into Tribune, is utterly bizarre. How does the managing director count as an “intermediary” rather than a recipient of a direct payment?

The allegation is, moreover, categorically denied by Foot, who was allowed no chance to rebuff it before publication. And it is unsubstantiated by the statements of the only people named in the piece as sources apart from Gordievsky: both of the Sunday Times‘s other former-KGB-agent sources had explicitly disowned the story to other papers within hours of its appearance. Even the wretched editor of the Sunday Times, John Witherow, recognised that he didn’t have a leg to stand on. The very day of publication, he was kebabbed on the radio by Sheena McDonald: she almost forced him to admit that his paper’s “scoop” was no more than a puff-piece for a serialisation for which it had sold what remains of its soul.

So the evidence is appallingly weak if it can be said to exist at all. The real point however, is that anyone but a political illiterate or a malicious propagandist would not have given Gordievsky’s tale credibility in the first place. Once again, leave aside reputations, in this case of Foot as an incorruptible man of principle: look at the evidence. The Tribune files are available in the British Library; a near-complete set is kept at the Tribune office in Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1. Even the most cursory scan shows that the paper was in no way a fellow traveller of the Soviet Union during the cold war.

Sure, the paper was set up in 1937 as a vehicle for a popular front of communists and socialists against the rise of fascism; sure, it took a pro-Soviet line until the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. Such a position, despite the Soviet Union’s role in destroying the revolution in Spain, despite the show trials, is at least defensible as Realpolitik – certainly more so than the British establishment’s enthusiasm for Hitler at the same time.

But the pact destroyed the Labour left’s faith in the Soviet Union. Even the greenest student of British political history knows that Tribune‘s decisive break with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union took place in 1940, and that Foot, along with Aneurin Bevan, was on the side of those who ditched the communists. It might not suit the ideological prejudices of the Sunday Times, but the reality is that, from then on, Tribune‘s – and Foot’s – relationship with “actually existing socialism” is as honourable as anyone’s.

Of course, the relationship went through several different phases. From 1941 until 1945, Tribune was fanatically in favour of the anti-Hitler alliance with the Soviet Union to defeat fascism – Churchill’s own policy. It was in the forefront of the campaign to open a second front from 1942 onwards – along with Beaverbrook, whose Evening Standard Foot edited at the time. After 1945, it backed nationalisation and planning – just like every continental European Christian Democrat party (though no self-respecting Tribunite would admit it). It called for a “third way” between capitalism and communism in the mid-1940s – and then, after the Soviet overthrow of democracy in Czechoslovakia in 1948, swung decisively behind the creation of an anti-communist democratic alliance between western Europe and the United States.

But the allegations in the Sunday Times relate to what came after. The 1950s were Tribune‘s decade – it was the organ of the Bevanite revolt, resolutely in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament and extension of the nationalisations ofthe 1945 government – and the paper retained its influence well into the 1960s. Throughout, however, it took a position that meshed only rarely (and always tactically when it did) with that of the domestic communists or their masters in Moscow.

The paper’s enthusiasm for Nato was smashed by the nuclear brinkmanship of General Douglas MacArthur in Korea, but its anti-Stalinism was not. As the “quality” press gave “great man” obituaries to Stalin in 1953, Foot himself denounced the Soviet dictator as a monster. “The Nazi- Soviet pact and the frightened sycophancy towards Hitler which Stalin displayed in the two subsequent years,” he wrote, “still stand as out as probably the most grievous and colossal blunder of the century.”

Tribune condemned the Soviet suppression of the workers’ revolt in East Germany in 1953; and in 1956, as the Hungarian revolution was brutally destroyed by Soviet tanks, the paper gave near-unconditional backing to the rebels. “THEIRS IS THE GLORY,” screamed Tribune‘s centre-page spread on 2 November 1956, “the workers of Hungary have struck a blow for freedom.” Tribune was the first left publication in Britain to scotch the communist excuse for the Soviet invasion that the revolution was cover for a fascist putsch, the only one to argue that the workers’ councils at the core of the revolution were an inspiration to socialists everywhere. Only a handful of letters contradicted the line. Soviet stooge? Tell us another.

Through all this, of course, there were a few genuine Labour fellow travellers, and a significant minority on the Labour left harboured illusions about the nature of the Soviet regime. Many more swallowed the idea that socialism was essentially a matter of nationalisation and planning. Unsurprisingly, much of the Labour left, Tribune included, thought that the liberalisation of the Soviet Union, promised but only partially delivered by Khrushchev, really offered a way forward. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the British left hoped for the best and clutched at straws – just as it did with Gorbachev 25 years later. Tribune moved from pessimism into optimism about the future of the Soviet Union.

With the benefit of hindsight, this appears more than a little naive. But Tribune‘s support for Khrushchev was never uncritical – the Soviet abandonment of the superpower test-ban in 1961 drew a stinging condemnation – and, as the thaw froze over again, the paper became increasingly critical (although it was more concerned with domestic politics, the arms race and Vietnam).

When Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, Foot denounced it, under the headline “A CRIME AGAINST SOCIALISM”, in a bruising polemic: “A crime against freedom, a crime against socialism, a crime against history. It will be hard to express the sense of outrage and tragedy which the Soviet action in Czechoslovakia will spread throughout the world.” The rest of the paper’s coverage expressed precisely the same sentiment. Once again, some Soviet stooge.

Meanwhile, Tribune continued to take the odd advertisement from Soviet or Soviet-linked advertisers – a page from Aeroflot here, a quarter from Intourist there – and sometimes (even Gordievsky could count the occasions in the 1960s on his fingers) ran blatantly pro-Soviet pieces – though never by Foot. But the advertising from Soviet sources (which continued right up to 1989) was pathetic by comparison with that from the Central Electricity Generating Board, the Daily Herald or even the Times. The idea that the Kremlin bought Tribune‘s allegiance would be a joke if it had not been given credibility by the Sunday Times smear.

And smear it is. Sure, every journalist talks to all sorts of people, some of whom are morally reprehensible. And sure, the Labour left was a “target” for the Soviet and other eastern bloc security services – not just in the period of the Khrushchev thaw but for many years afterwards. But to talk is not to be taken in by lies, and to be targeted is not to be hit. Nothing can be said against Foot’s integrity or honesty simply because he talked to certain people who wanted to influence him – and that, in the end, is the sum of the charges against him. It is difficult in such circumstances to avoid the conclusion that something vile and poisonously anti-democratic lies behind the Sunday Times story.

There is an uncanny similarity between Gordievsky’s allegations about Foot and the idiocies put about by the Peter Wright wing of the security services in the 1970s. Gordievsky is living on a British intelligence pension: he cannot have acted without the approval of his post-defection bosses. The Foot allegations look suspiciously like a desperate attempt by the establishment to tar the whole libertarian, democratic left with the brush of totalitarianism. This is shabby nonsense that deserves nothing but contempt.

All those leftwingers who have taken the Murdoch shilling in the past decade should hang their heads in shame. And those still on the Wapping payroll should consider their positions carefully. No one with any decency can justify working for a company or an editor that has published a calumny as obscene as the Foot smear, however large the mortgage, however large the circulation of the guilty rag. Meanwhile, if he has the energy, Foot should sue the Sunday Times, Gordievsky, Witherow and Leppard for every penny he can get. He could even (and probably would) give the money to Tribune. The Sunday Times needs to be taught a lesson – and we all need a good gloat.

New Statesman & Society, 13 January 1995

New Statesman & Society leader, 16 December 1994

The remit handed by John Major last week to the new committee on standards in public life looks spectacularly wide-ranging.

Lord Justice Nolan and the nine newly appointed members of the body he will chair are: “To examine current concerns about the standards of conduct of all holders of public office, including arrange¬ments relating to financial and commercial activities, and make recommenda¬tions as to any changes in present arrangements which might be required to ensure the highest standards of propriety in public life.”

Nolan’s brief may read like a radical attempt to address the manifest growth, to the point of corruption, of political patronage. But the Prime Minister’s intention is clear: damage limitation.

Take, for starters, the restriction of the committee’s scope to investigate, as Major put it in the House of Commons last week, “general procedures, rather than . . . individual cases”. Major has made plain that he wants Nolan to steer clear of the specific allegations that have so far resulted in two ministerial resignations (junior Northern Ireland minister Tim Smith and corporate affairs minister Neil Hamilton) and internal investigations – albeit less than half-hearted – into the activities of two cabinet ministers (Home Secretary Michael Howard and Treasury Chief Secretary Jonathan Aitken).

But it is precisely these individ¬ual cases, involving exclusively Conservative politicians, that pushed Major to set up the new committee in the first place. Next, there is the Prime Minister’s assertion that Nolan will not look into the funding of political parties (see below). In response to a question from Peter Shore MP last week – now Labour’s representative on the Nolan committee – Major insisted: “This inquiry will deal with government matters, government appoint¬ments and government behaviour. It has nothing to do with the financing of political parties, which has been dealt with by the Home Affairs Select Committee.”

To thus remove the murky area of Tory Party funding from the committee’s independent examinations makes a nonsense of an inquiry set up in order to quell anxiety over, among other recent scandals, the “cash-for-questions” episode. For if a Tory MP is considered improperly beholden to a company that pays him a few grand to table a parliamentary question, what does that make the obligation owed by the Conservative Party as a whole to those companies that so amply bankroll it? And where does that obligation place the party when it is in govern-ment, and for so long a stretch as the past 15 years?

Added to these omissions is the fact that the body Lord Nolan presides over is simply a committee of inquiry. It has no legal or constitutional powers. Witnesses can be invited to help it with its inquiries, but may not be compelled to appear before it. Following its deliberations, the committee can come up with any recommendations it likes, but implementing any of them will rely on M Ps voting in par¬liament to do so.

But to be fair to Nolan and his committee, they may yet prove themselves to be as awkward as an independent inquiry should be. Nolan himself has already declared that although the investigation of individual cases is up to the Commons Privileges Committee, his own inquiry “will be equally anxious to find out just what has happened, what has gone wrong and what we can learn from it”. We can presume also that two of the party political appointments to the committee – Labour’s Peter Shore and the Liberal Democrats’ Lord Thomson of Monfieth – will do their utmost to ensure that party funding finds its way onto the agenda.

The seven non-politician members of the committee may themselves prove determined to examine whatever “sleaze” issue takes their fancy. As one put it to NSS:” I was struck by the fact that Number 10 phoned me up and asked me to be on the committee without looking into my background at all. They don’t know what I think about anything.”

Another member echoed Labour leader Tony Blair’s accusation that the setting up of the inquiry was “decision-making on the run” on the part of the Prime Minister: “I don’t think Major’s thought it through properly. If you look at our brief, we could actually look at anything we want to. This is a bit of a ticking time-bomb for him.”

But even if the Nolan inquiry does ignore Major’s advice on what it should look at, it is unlikely to get very far. Labour members of the Home Affairs Select Committee, which last year looked at the whole issue of sources of party funding, know only too well that attempting to shed light on Tory Party finances is a difficult game. “Even if Nolan does look at that, whoever the committee asks in to give evidence will just stonewall him, like they did to us,” predicts Chris Mullin MP, a member of the Home Affairs committee. “Nolan won’t get any information out of anyone. It’s a subject the Tories cannot afford to permit anyone to look into.”

Party funding – the elephant in the room

However Nolan ends up interpreting his remit, the first areas the committee will look into are those that have dominated the news over the past fortnight: members’ interests – in particular, gifts to ministers and other MPs – and appointments to quangos.

On these, the Conservatives have themselves acknowledged that it may be time for a tightening of existing rules. But on the bigger questions, it would be wise not to hold your breath. Bankrolling the Tory party Whether or not Nolan looks at the delicate question of funding of political parties is a moot point.

But it is difficult to see how the committee can proceed without considering party funding. The problem, simply put, is that there are good reasons to believe that the Conservatives have systematically taken money from companies and individuals who are in the business of buying influence.

The Tories’ finances are one of the great unsolved mysteries of British politics. They publish only the skimpiest of accounts themselves (which show that the average they raised annually between 1987 and 1992 was £33.7 million, compared with Labour’s average off £15.9 million and the Lib Dems’ of £2.9 million), and they have operated several “front organisations” for channelling funds discreetly into their own coffers-most notoriously British United Industrialists, which was closed down in 1991.

 It is only through the assiduous work of the non-party Labour Research Department, which trawls through companies’ accounts looking for political donations (all companies must by law declare all political donations of more than £200, although many don’t), that a partial picture of the Tories’ corporate backers is available: details of laundered company donations and donations from individuals (often in fact the same thing) are even harder to come by. Of £37.9 million received by Conservative Central Office between April 1987and March 1991, £21.9 million cannot be traced from any published source.

By contrast, all trade union donations to Labour (which make up more than half the party’s income) are declared in the unions’ accounts, and Labour has announced its willingness to declare all individual donations of £5,000 and over. 

What’s known about the Tories is that they have received substantial sums from companies and individuals with commercial interests in government spending and policy decisions. The big corporate donors in the past 15 years include defence, engineering and construction companies that have benefited from large government contracts, tobacco companies that want to prevent legal constraints on advertising their products, and privatised utilities. 

Between 1979 and 1992, the top ten corporate donors to the Tories were United Biscuits (£1 million); Hanson Trust (£852,000);Taylor Woodrow (£837,000); British & Commonwealth (£824,000); George Weston Holdings (£820,000); P&O (£727,500); Forte (£694,000); Westem United Investments (£620,000); Glaxo (£600,000);Trafalgar House (£590,000); Newarthill (£560,000); and Barings (£537,000).

Known individual donors since 1979 include:

• Asil Nadir, disgraced head of Polly Peck and currently a fugitive from British justice in his native northern Cyprus, whose contribution Tory funds totalled £440,000; 

• John Latsis, the Greek shipping magnate and one-time backer of the Greek junta.who reputed to have given £2 million; 

• Octav Botnar, former head of Nissan UK, currently in exile, wanted for defrauding the government of £97million in unpaid taxes, who gave £1 million in the early 1980s; 

• Li Ka Shing, the richest man in Hong Kong who gave £500,000, and Tsui Tsin-tong, another Hong Kong businessman with strong links with China; 

• Harrods boss Mohamed AI-Fayed, who revealed a fortnight ago that he had given a total of £250,000 in the mid-1980s when the government was being lobbied by his arch-rival Tiny Rowland to take legal action against him over the Harrods sale. 

Donors to Tory funds have been rewarded with honours and with positions on government-appointed bodies. Between 1979 and 1993,18 life peerages and 82 knighthoods were given to industrialists connected with 76 companies which between them gave£17.4million to the Conservative Party and its various front organisations. 

Labour MP George Howarth last month produced a study of appointments toquanj thatshows widespread favouringof people associated with companies that have given the Tories. Funding of political parties has long beer source of controversy – and it is unlikely that Nolan committee will be able to come upwii proposals acceptable to all sides if it does address the problem. 

The Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs considered the issue between 1992 and 1994, but split down the middle between its Tory and Labour members when it came to producing a report in March. On the casting vote of its Tory chairman, it endorsed by six votes to five a report proclaiming that little is wrong with the British system of funding, and recommending only improved party accounting practices and a new code of conduct governing donations to parties. 

An alternative report drafted by Labour MP Chris Mullin, rejected by the same margin demanded a string of reforms all directed al Tories: compulsory publication in party accounts of all donations of more than £5,000; a ban on donations from foreign individuals and companies; strict limits on national party spending during general election campaigns; mandatory ballots of shareholders to approve political donations companies; a ban on honours for industrialists whose parties have given to political parties and a ban on political donations by recently privatised companies. If Nolan gets on to this subject, he is likely to find opinion on his committee just as radically divided. 

 MPs for hire: outside interests

One of the questions that Nolan will definitely address is that of MPs’ outside interests-the extent to which MPs use their position to pursue private interests and what can be done to control it. 

This is at the centre of the most recent scandals to have rocked the government-junior Northern Ireland minister Tim Smith and corporate affairs minister Neil Hamilton were both forced to resign from the government after Mohamed Al Fayed’s allegations that he had paid them to ask parliamentary questions while they were backbenchers.

Eariier this year, in a sting operation mounted by the Sunday Times, Tory MPs Graham Riddick and David Tredinnick agreed to table questions for a bogus company for £1,000 a time. Both were suspended as parliamentary private secretaries. 

But there is more to the issue than the specific allegations of “cash-for-questions” currently under investigation by the Commons Select Committee on Privileges. More than 200 of the 651 MPs, most of them Tories, declare in the most recent Register of Members’ Interests that they are employed as parliamentary consultants to lobbying firms and other commercial organisations. 

Many Tory MPs also have substantial interests as directors and shareholders of private companies: most of the 290-plus paying directorships declared in the Register of Members’ Interests are held by Tories. By contrast, all but a handful of Labour MPs receive nothing other than income from occasional journalism and trade-union sponsorship (the latter nearly always passed on to their constituency parties). 

Ministers are covered by strict rules governing their outside interests, laid down in Questions of Procedure for Ministers: on appointment, they are required to resign any directorships they hold (with some exceptions) and to dispose of investments that might give rise to a conflict of interests. 

David Mellor resigned as heritage secretary in 1992 after it was revealed that his holiday was paid for by the daughter of a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and Northern Ireland minister Michael Mates went in June 1993 after questions were raised about his relationship with fugitive businessman Asil Nadir. 

The furore over Jonathan Aitken and who paid his Paris hotel bill has reached fever-pitch because of concerns about a possible conflict of interest between his strong business links with Saudi Arabia and his position as a junior defence minister. 

Rules governing other MPs are much laxer. There is a longstanding practice of the Commons that MPs should declare any relevant material interest when speaking in the House orin committee, and since 1974 they have been required to complete entries for the Register of Members’ Interests. 

The register was set up in the wake of the Poulson scandal “to provide information of any pecuniary interest or other material benefit which a member receives which might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions, speeches or votes in parliament, or actions taken in his or her capacity as a member of parliament”. 

MPs complete their entries themselves and are supposed to declare remunerated directorships of companies, outside employment, any clients for whom they have rendered services as an MP, donations and gifts received (including paid-for foreign trips), and property and share holdings. Crucially, however, MPs are not required to declare how much they get or what precisely they do – and, because the duty to register in full and accurately is not determined by statute, the punishment for failing to comply is whatever the Commons decides its hould be after the Commons Select Committee on Members’ Interests reports on any complaint (which is usually not much).

The result is that the register is less informative than it could be. Nolan is sure to hear calls-rejected by the Members’ Interests Committee last year-both for requiring MPs to declare exactly what they do for what sum, and for making it a statutory duty for MPs to complete the register fully and accurately.

New Statesman & Society, 21 October 1994 


Levitating parliament, an anarchist football match and a Smut Fest mark this week’s ‘Ten Days That Shook The World’ festival. But will the likes of Class War ever move beyond the political subculture, asks Paul Anderson

The right-wing tabloids reacted predictably after the police fed them copies of a leaflet supposedly proving that last week’s Criminal Justice Bill riot in Hyde Park was all the fault of anarchists – in the words of Chief Superintendent Richard Cullen, “a hardcore of six or seven hundred people… the same old faces who try to hijack all these events”.

“Anarchist thugs drew up sick plans to smash cops,” screamed the Sun headline above a story reproducing the leaflet, published by the anarchist group Class War, which urged CJB demonstrators to “have a pop at the bill” and advised: “We should pick our own pitch for the battle.” The Daily Star described the anarchists as “scum” – “the truncheon is the only law they will respect,” it opined – and the Mail splashed “Blueprint for a riot” across its front page, above a lead story billed as the “truth about anarchists who planned the violence weeks before”.

It was all sensationalist nonsense, of course. True, Class War had produced and distributed the leaflet. True, there were a few people, some of them members of Class War, who had gone on the demo “tooled up” and looking for an opportunity to “have a pop” – much to the dismay of the march organisers, many of whom are anarchists or direct actionists themselves but of a non-violent kind (“fluffies”, as Class War newspaper disdainfully calls them). But the idea that a riot can be “organised” in advance by anyone, let alone by a declining group that has at most a couple of hundred supporters nationally, is ludicrous: what happened in Hyde Park, as Tim Malyon and Steve Platt argued last week in NSS, would not have happened had the police not adopted such stupid tactics.

Still, Class War isn’t complaining about the coverage. It never makes a fuss when newspapers claim that it is the shadowy force behind public disorder – which they do regularly. Since the group was set up in 1982, it has been blamed for the 1985 inner-city riots, fighting on CND demonstrations, the 1990 poll tax riot in Trafalgar Square, last year’s fracas on the Anti-Nazi League march in Welling and a whole lot more besides. And each time it has revelled in its notoriety. Anarchists feel good when they are portrayed as outlaws, and anyway it’s a massive hoot when straight-laced hacks take seriously Class War’s comic-book enthusiasm for “working-class” violence againstthecops.

Not that Class War isn’t serious – indeed, it has grown ever more serious in the past few years, acquiring many of the trappings of the Leninist revolutionary groups it so despises: a statement of “What we believe” prominently displayed in each issue of the paper, a national membership organisation complete with national secretary and a tele-phone hotline, and a dire “theoretical” journal (The Heavy Stuff). After 64 issues, Class War the paper is still selling well (it claims a circulation of 10,000), but these days it is more like Socialist Worker than the scurrilous rag it once was, its irreverence dissipated by long boring articles on political strategy. Partly because of this, it needs the publicity. The word elsewhere on the anarchist scene is that Class War has lost its touch and is on the way out. “They’re really just a few dozen old-fashioned lefties these days,” says a former sympathiser from the early 1980s.

One reason for Class War’s problems is that the moving spirit behind the group for its first decade is no longer with it. Ian Bone, a talented publicist whose exploits had included an anarchist punk band and several alternative local papers, formed Class War in 1982 after moving to London from Wales, aided by a handful of kindred spirits associated with the late and much lamented Rising Free bookshop in Islington: it was his sense of humour, his populist instincts and his unerring ability to provoke outrage that gave Class War the paper its distinctive flavour. But he left three years ago after an acrimonious dispute over the group’s political direction. Typically, although he now says he was “completely stale and knackered”, he didn’t go into political retirement for long. Last year, after the annual anarchist book fair in London, he and a few mates decided that it would be a good idea to hold an anarchist festival after this year’s book fair.

The idea caught on, and this weekend London sees the start of “Anarchy in the UK: Ten Days That Shookthe World”, an extravaganza of political meetings, theatrical performances, films, parties and music that is expected to attract several thousand anarchists, including many from abroad. There are more than 100 events listed in the programme: the highlights include a “levitation of parliament” this Sunday, gigs by The Levellers and Conflict (among others), a “Smut Fest” of anarchist strippers and other erotic artistes, an exhibition of “autonomous publishing” at an anarchist centre in Brixton, and an anarchist football contest. Bone has cast his net wide, getting everyone from anarchist academics to practitioners in “Thelemic Magick” to organise discussion meetings.

“I reckon it’s going to be the biggest anarchist get-together ever in Britain,” says Bone, “certainly the biggest gathering of revolutionaries since 1968. It’s really taken off – and the reason is the Criminal Justice Bill. It’s really brought people together – the fucking lot. The great thing about the festival is the sheer diversity. There’s greens, animal rights people, Spanish veterans from the 1930s, even some comrades from Nigeria. The bands have been incredibly supportive. Everyone is going to be there.”

He’s probably right. Although Class War has studiously declined to mention the festival and the current issue of Black Flag, the anarcho-syndicalist magazine, carries an article grumbling about Bone, the event has grown to such a size that no one on the anarchist scene will risk missing it. Class War has organised a rally in London for next Wednesday that conveniently clashes with nothing on the festival agenda apart from a poetry evening and the London Pagans’ Forum.

Fittingly, the fun starts with a big rally tonight (21 October) against the Criminal Justice Bill at Conway Hall. The CJB has had a tremendous mobilising effect on Britain’s anarchists over the past six months, not least because many of its targets – travellers, ravers, roads demonstrators, peace movement trespassers, hunt saboteurs and squatters – are Britain’s anarchists. Most of the time, they constitute less a movement than an untidy collection of disparate groups and individuals communicating with one another little if at all (and then often squabbling). But the campaign against the CJB has forced everyone together. And, although there is no shortage of disputes about how to proceed (most obviously between the likes of Class War and the proponents of non-violent direct action – who include the majority of those who have come from anti-roads, peace movement and hunt-sabbing backgrounds), there’s a real sense among anarchists that they are on a roll.

Whether or not they really are is a moot point. On one hand, there’s no sign that the CJB will be any less of a unifying factor once it becomes an act: if anything, the implementation of its provisions is likely to stimulate the campaign against it. More generally, the rightward drift of Labour in recent years (and Tony Blair’s embrace of social conservatism on the family and civil liberties) and the quite apparent irrelevance of the Leninist sects are both likely to push disaffected young people at the very least into social movements where anarchist notions of the value of self-activity and direct action are taken for granted.

On the other hand, however, there’s no sign that this anarchist revival will be any more sustained than previous ones – or that the current crop of anarchists have much idea of what they are about apart from direct action. British anarchism has had a habit of ebbing and flowing throughout this century, virtually disappearing after the first world war, finding support among the intelligentsia in the late 1930s and 1940s, declining until the first wave of CND revived it, gaining a great deal of support among revolutionary students in the late 1960s, falling back in the early 1970s, returning with CND second time around. There has never been a successful national anarchist federation here; and insofar as anarchist magazines, newspapers, publishers and bookshops survive the ebbs and flows of the me ment, it is through the persistence small groups of individuals.

Most obviously, the continued survival of Freedom, the venerable anarch newspaper first published in 1886, with its associated publishing arm and bookshop, has owed everything to the efforts of Vernon Richards, the current editor, who revived what was then a moribund title in the 1930s and has kept it go with different small groups of collaborators for most of the past 60 years.

But Freedom is not alone in its reliance on dedicated individuals. Peace News, the anarcho-pacifist monthly, would unable to continue without the commitment of its two super-exploited staff; Anarchy, the monthly edited by Colin Ward that was one of the two best magazines of the 1960s anarchist revival, went into terminal decline after he moved in 1970 after a decade in the chair; Solidarity, the other one (which owed as much to libertarian currents in Marxism as to anarchism and which also had much-admired line in pamphlets), only kept going until 1992 only by the super-human efforts of its (latterly three-strong) editorial group, finally succumbing to financial crisis and exhaustion.

Anarchy and Solidarity both made a priority of engaging with events in the real world and, equally important, people and ideas from outside the anarchist ghetto – and nothing remotely as substantial or stimulating has has emerged in recent years from the anarchist milieu. The quarterly Freedom Press journal, Raven, does its best, as does the Glasgow-based magazine Here and Now (which is heavily influenced by situationism), but most anarchist periodicals, from Green Anarchist to Black Flag, are crude agittional tools – some of them laughably quixotic. The same goes most home-grown books and pamphlets from anarchist publishers: the exceptions are the (often excellent) studies of and collections from figures from anarchism’s heroic past.

The problem, simply put, is that British anarchism needs something more than on one hand, the action-oriented sub-culture celebrated by next week’s fest and, on the other, the anarchist intellectuals’ obsession with the creed’s heroes and martyrs – something that reaches beyond the ghetto into everyday life as experienced by people who aren’t hardcore punks, ravers, squatters and travellers.  Until it gets it, the best that the anarchists can hope for are spectacular headlines the tabloid press. But at least they enjoy themselves. An event at which you see Jean Vigo’s movie Zero de Conduite, play football, listen to Captain Sensible and levitate parliament beats Labour conference any day – and has no less influence on what Tony Blair will do when gets to Number 10.