Category Archives: Journalism

Paul Anderson, review of Blueprint for a Green Economy by David Pearce et al (Earthscan, £9.99), Tribune, 29 September 1989

How much is a clean North Sea worth? What price would you put on the Brazilian rain forest? What is the cost of nuclear power in the light of Chernobyl? Such questions seem strange to us, even slightly mad. Indeed, to most people the idea of giving cash values to measures of environmental quality is not just unfamiliar but wrong. The quality of the environment is the kind of thing that money just can’t buy.

Then again, there is plenty that we now habitually value in money terms that our forebears considered incapable of such treatment — most obviously work.

Many writers influenced by Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism and alienation see the history of capitalism as a seemingly inexorable process of more and more things and activities in more and more places being treated as tradeable commodities. If they are right, it could be merely a matter of time before the idea of pricing the environment is. accepted “common sense”.

Blueprint for a Green Economy, the “Pearce report” given so much publicity last month by Chris Patten, the environment minister, argues strongly that giving money values to costs of “environmental service?, in the context of a market economy, is the best way of ensuring “sustainable development”.

“While there remains a. quite warranted suspicion that the process of money valuation is illicit in some contexts, the reality is that choices have to be made in contexts of scarce resources,” the authors state blithely. “Money as a measuring rod is a satisfactory means of proceeding.” With that minor obstacle cleared, the rest of the book is taken up with discussions of how environmental costs could be calculated and how they could be passed on to producers and consumers, in the form of tax incentives, to ensure that the preservation and enhancement of the environment is taken seriously into account in economic decision-making. The obvious alternative to such a market-based system of environmental regulation, the simple setting’ and enforcing of environmental standards without the aid of market incentives, is given short shrift on grounds of its “inflexibility”.

As Henry Neuburger explained in his economic commentary (Tribune, September 1), this is not exactly a free-market position;: decisions about the standards to be encouraged by the market would be essentially political. Nevertheless, Pearce et al sail far too close to the market wind.

When the air we breathe becomes a commodity, something must be seriously amiss in our relationship to the world.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 29 September 1989

The journalists in the bar at the Green Party conference in Wolverhampton last week, uneasy in their cheap suits and polished shoes, grumbled that the chaos made it impossible to report anything, and the weekend’s papers were unanimous in bemoaning the Greens’ lack of a “professional” hierarchical structure — but the Greens can afford to be just a little pleased with themselves this week.

With the exception of a procedural row that lost two hours of conference time on Thursday, nothing happened in the Wolverhampton Civic Hall to put the party in a particularly bad light. The Greens came across as somewhat anarchic and eccentric, but the rabid extremists warned about by right-wing leader-writers were nowhere to be seen.

The Greens applauded warmly when Sara Parkin, the party’s number-one television star, warned that “parasites” might turn their attentions to the Greens; Jonathon Porritt, the nearest the Greens get to an intellectual figurehead, got a similar reception when he attacked those who accused the party of “authoritarianism”.

The party’s left, the Assocation of Socialist Greens, was routed in policy debates, and there was no sign of either right-wing romantics or hair-shirted Calvinists. The cleancut media professionals who believe the Greens to be “neither right or left but ahead” were in the driving seat, supported by members as reasonable, libertarian and middle class as the old Liberals.

The party’s policies belie this refusal to be situated on the left-right continium. On most issues, the Greens are well to the left of Labour. The one area where the Greens do seem to have a good case for claiming to be “neither right nor left” is their opposition to industrialism; but so vague are the Greens’ proposals that this is a matter less of policy than of attitude.

In the end, the Greens’ insistence on not being “left” is a signal that they want neither to be associated with the grim realities of social democracy and Leninism in power — nor to be submerged by manipulative Trotskyist entrists.

It has worked so far. The Greens have reached parts of the affluent south that. other left parties cannot reach, and up to now Ms Parkin’s “parasites” have steered clear. The party has an openness, enthusiasm and friendliness about it that few labour movement institutions can match, and there is none of the cloying deference before leaders that afflicts all the major parties.

The problem is what happens next. For the foreseeable future, the Greens have no hope, barring a by-election miracle, of winning seats, except in local government.

Labour will not offer them an electoral pact — which in any case the Greens decided at the weekend they did not want.

The media’s cure for the Greens’ ills is a “proper leader”, but the evidence. of Wolverhampton is that having the party represented to the media by people with little or no executive power works perfectly well.

The Greens’ problem is not their internal organisation, even if it could do with being tightened up, but the British electoral system – and there’s nothing they can do to`change that. The Greens face a long, hard voyage and, although only a fool would write them off, the wrecked hulks of the Liberals and the SDP are a terrible warning.

Paul Anderson, Sanity column, September 1989

One of the three Czechoslovaks expelled from Britain for spying in May was Jan Sarkocy, a political secretary at the Czechoslovak em­bassy. The British authorities have not said ex­actly what he is supposed to have done. For all I know, he might be a top-level StB spook who has stolen Britain’s most valuable secrets. I was hoping to ask him, but he called off a lunch date because he was busy packing. Somehow, though, I doubt he was much more than what he said he was – the junior diplomat responsi­ble for relations with peace movements in Bri­tain (and women, he would add sheepishly). Continue reading →

Sanity, September 1989

All is not as rosy as it appears for Britain’s environmentalist movement. It might be growing fast – but both the Green Party and the environmental pressure groups face hard political choices, writes Paul Anderson

Its over-rising concern is the environmental crisis threatening the globe – but the immediate problem faced by the British Green Party is the first-past-the-post electoral system.

Even if the Greens maintain or improve their current nine per cent standing in the opinion polls at the next general election, it is improbable that they will win even the small number of parliamentary seats that centre and nationalist parties have won on similarly small shares of the total vote. Unlike those parties, the Greens’ support is fairly evenly spread throughout the country.

What the Greens need to stand a chance of parliamentary representation at the next election is at least one exceptional showing in a by-election during this parliament. This is by no means impossible. The electorate is as volatile and as disillusioned with the two major parties as it was in the early eighties, when the centre parties surged in the opinion polls and won a string of by-elections: and the centre parties appear to be in terminal crisis.

But the centre parties in the early eighties benefited both from their centrism and from a significant existing parliamentary base even before the creation of the SDP by defectors from the Labour right. The leading figures in the Liberal Party and SDP, for all their rhetoric of ‘breaking the mould’, were all safe, familiar politicians who had been at, or close to, the heart of government in the late seventies. And they had plenty of cash and powerful supporters in the media.

Their Ideology was essentially that of the post-war consensus that dominated British politics until the late seventies, which they believed had been abandoned by Labour and the Tories. The centre parties were advocates of the mixed economy, with state intervention to secure low unemployment and constant high growth, supporters of the welfare state, pro-American in defence policy and in favour of the European Community.

The Greens have none of these characteristics. They are not already in parliament, their politicians are not familiar, and their policies are anything but the stuff of the post-war consensus. They don’t have much money, nor (today’s support in the European elections notwithstanding) the sort of media support that the centre parties enjoyed.

Perhaps most important, the Greens are not quite sure of their political identity. The dominant group in the party is keen to avoid accusations of being left-wing, and emphasises that the Greens are “neither left nor right but ahead”. It points, with justification, to the unpopularity of the hard left, to the environmental catastrophe of “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet bloc, and to the differences between Western social democracy and the Greens on industrial growth. The “Green Greens” believe they should be aiming to pick up votes from the centre and from hitherto apolitical “Green consumers”, mostly middle-class; and they are anxious not to attract the attentions of far-left groups as the German Greens have done.

But there is a vocal minority of Greens arguing against this approach, even If they do not envisage a conventionally left-wing party. “Red Greens'”, organised into the Association of Socialist Greens, point, also with justification, to the radical global redistributive measures at the heart of the Green programme, the Greens’ necessary hostility to market capitalism and the party’s leftist defence and foreign policies. They think that the Greens can best gain votes from disillusioned left-wing Labour voters. Many others in the party less committed to leftism (or indeed overtly hostile) are equally concerned that concentration on Green consumers runs the risk of diluting the fundamental Green message.

These groups can of course be reconciled in the short run by keeping everything vague. In the long term, however, the tension between green consumers and proponents of far-reaching political change are going to be hard to contain. Are the Greens simply a repository for the votes of rich muesli-eating professionals who don’t want a Barratt estate in their village? Or are they a party that stand for massive tax increases to aid the Third World?

None of this means that the Greens have no hope of emulating the centre parties’ early-eighties success; but it does mean that they face an uphill struggle. The tide of public opinion seems to be running in their favour. But in the absence of another Chernobyl or the defection to the Greens of disillusioned Liberal or Labour MPs, it could well be that the best the Greens can hope for is a steady increase in the Green vote both in parliamentary and local council elections, with a concomitant slow growth in membership and strengthening of organisation.

That could mean overtaking the centre parties’ share of the vote at the next general election and a better chance of by-election upsets in the next parliament, and perhaps, in the very long run, the Greens emulating Labour’s growth in the first 20 years of the century. But nothing can be guaranteed – and meanwhile the ecological crisis gets deeper. So what to do in the mean-time? One answer is to press for electoral reform to get Greens into parliament sooner rather than later. But to introduce proportional representation there has to be a majority in favour in the House of Commons. Barring an unlikely conversion to PR by the Labour Party, that won’t happen.

It is thus hardly surprising that many environmentalists are not members of or even voters for the Greens, preferring instead to concentrate their efforts on the environmentalist pressure groups that are trying to influence the established opposition political parties, the government and the media. Indeed, it is the pressure groups, particularly Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, that have been largely responsible for the change in public perceptions of environmental issues that is behind the recent growth in the Green vote and the subsequent attempts of the established political parties to prove themselves environment-friendly.

Paul Anderson, review of A Commitment to Campaign: A Sociological Study of CND by John Mattausch (Manchester, £29.95), Tribune 25 August 1989

Back in the sixties, Frank Parkin did a study of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Middle Class Radicals, that is still on the reading lists of political sociology students in Britain’s universities.

Parkin’s line on the first “ban-the-bomb” movement, based largely on responses to questionnaires put out well after it had passed its peak, was that it was something of an emotional prop for its deviant, alienated, highly educated adherents. It is a measure of how far this analysis hurt that books are still being written to attack it.

Mattausch starts from methodological premises: Parkin was writing before ethnomethodology and phenomenology hit British sociology: overwhelmed by positivism, he never engaged in empathetic understanding of how his “middle class radicals” perceived their project in the context of their everyday lives. In other words, Parkin didn’t spend hours and hours listening to what CNDers had to say and recording it in minute detail.

Mattausch has an important point: it is daft to make grand assumptions about what motivates people without talking to them, and in-depth interviews are undoubtedly the best way of finding out what people think.

But that’s not the end of the story. Doing sociology this way has its own problems. Which people should be chosen for interview, and how should they be chosen? How can the chosen few be considered “typical” of those not interviewed? And what should the interviewees be asked?

Mattausch chose to talk to “grass-roots” CND members and elected officers in two groups, one in a Scottish city and another in the south of England, and interviewed them in most detail about their CND activities and employment, with general political beliefs and ideas about international affairs taking a back seat. Much that comes out of the interviews is interesting, not least the heterogeneity of the CNDers’ broad political views and the disproportionate number of them who work as welfare professionals.

But the overall effect is rather frustrating. His samples are small, and are drawn from only two places, both with very particular political cultures, so it is difficult to draw many substantial general conclusions from his research. More important, the absence from his “interview schedule” of serious questions about attitudes to international affairs severely limits the value of the whole exercise.

Mattausch’s book provides some useful insights into the peace movement, but much of the picture is missing.

Paul Anderson, review of A Flea in Her Ear by Georges Feydeau (Old Vic) , Tribune 25 August 1989

Georges Feydeau was a contemporary of Alfred Jerry and Sigmund Freud, and his work, like Jarry’s and Freud’s, was much admired by later surrealists and absurdists. Eugene Ionesco, for example, described Feydeau as “the true precursor of the Marx Brothers and other American comedians, in whose work everything starts with apparent casualness, only to end up in a state of precipitation — which may well be an accurate caricature of our own agitation, our gallop towards the abyss”.

So why not go for an uncompromising modernist interpretation of A Flea in Her Ear? That is certainly what Richard Jones has tried with his Old Vic production, which goes out of its way to emphasise the serious modern core of Feydeau’s farce.

Out go the stuffy interiors and costumes normally associated with fin de siecle French vaudeville; in come some exquisite sets from the Brothers Quay (an elegant office and the seediest brothel imaginable) and some gloriously improbable over-the-top outfits (at least for the women) by Sue Blanc. Instead of presenting believable characters in an improbable situation, as Feydeau intended, the play becomes the nightmare story of Victor Emmanuel Chandebise’s fantasy of sexual impotence, peopled by ghoulish caricatures. The whole thing is taken at about half the normal farce pace.

All this works particularly well where the caricatures are particularly cruel — as with Kevin William’s psychotic hot-blooded Carlos Homenides De Histangua, Phelim McDermott’s ineffectual Camille Chandebise and Matthew Scurfield’s sadistic brothel-keeper.

There are times when no amount of clowning can make up for the (deliberate) lack of characterisation in Feydeau’s parts and times (remarkably few) when the play is simply too slow but, on the whole, Jones’s unorthodox treatment is both instructive and hugely entertaining.

Paul Anderson, review of For Anarchism by David Goodway (ed) (Routledge, £12.95), Tribune, 4 August 1989

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anarchism had significant influence in radical peasant and working-class movements throughout the world, particularly in southern Europe, Russia and Latin America. But that influence declined rapidly after the Bolshevik revolution. In Russia, the anarchists were the first victims of the Red terror; in Italy, they were eclipsed by fascism; in Spain, they were first skewered by the Comintern then roasted by Franco.

In France and most the rest of the world they slipped slowly into the political margins, unable to compete with the partisans of a “successful” revolution for the allegiance of workers, peasants and intellectuals who wanted more drastic change than that promised by reformist social democracy. By the fifties, although the flame was kept alive by small schismatic groups of intellectuals, anarchism seemed to be finished.

But then came an unexpected revival. From the late fifties, anarchism once again established itself as a current in the radical left — not this time among peasants and workers in societies just beginning to industrialise, but among the young of the developed world, disillusioned by the banal consumerism of the west and repelled by the police states of “actually existing socialism”. In 1968, the anarchist black flag flew above the Sorbonne.

Even in Britain, anarchist groups and magazines blossomed through the sixties and seventies. Few lasted long, and the number of “self-confessed” anarchists at any one time was tiny, as it still is. Paris 1968 and the 1981 riots notwithstanding, revolution in Britain has not been on the cards for at least 60 years, and a revolutionary ideology without even the petty authoritarian organisation of the Leninist sects stands little chance of holding on to most of its adherents.

Nevertheless, libertarian ideas — about decentralisation and democratisation of power, direct action and autonomous self-organisation — have had a massive effect on the left and on wider social movements in the past 30 years. With Leninism appearing more and more bankrupt, libertarianism has been the obvious tradition to turn to for alternatives to orthodox social democracy. Even the Communist Party is saying things today that it would not have looked out of place in Anarchy in the early sixties.

The cover of For Anarchism, a book of essays from the History Workshop Anarchist Research Group, boasts that its contributors demonstrate that anarchism is a “vital, creative tradition which should once more be considered seriously”, so I was looking forward to some analysis of the post-68 impact of libertarian ideas in its pages. But I was disappointed.

David Goodway provides an upbeat introduction on the fortunes of British “true-believer” anarchism in the’past 30 years, but fails to address the question of anarchism’s broad influence; and although the book’s historical studies of turn-of-the-century anarchist thought and practice and its contributions to contemporary political philosophy are interesting enough if you like that sort of thing, they fall far short of fulfilling the blurb’s promise.

Only Tom Cahill, with a piece on co-operatives, and Murray Bookchin, putting the case for eco-anarchism as the basis for any future left, really leave the academic anarchist ghetto to engage with the concerns of the wider world. Neither, however, gets much further than clearing his throat. Give me Colin Ward any day.

Paul Anderson, review of Fallen Angel and the Devil Concubine (Graduate Theatre Company, Almeida), Tribune, 21 July 1989

The Jamaican Graduate Theatre Company’s offering for the London International Festival of Theatre tells the story of two destitute women, one white and one black, thrown together in a tumbledown, one-time colonial mansion in Kingston of which each claims to be the rightful owner. Lettie (Carol Lewis), the black woman, says she was left the house by the woman for whom she worked for 43 years; Katie (Honor Ford. Smith) says that the house was left her by her father.

As the play progresses, with both actresses putting in excellent performances, it becomes increasingly clear that both Lettie and Katie are hiding something. And in the final act each discovers the other’s secret.

Lettie was disgraced after mothering an illegitimate child; Katie was disowned by her family because she eloped with a black man. Both have constructed myths about their pasts to protect themselves against a hostile world. Neither has a convincing legal claim to the house.
This is a didactic piece, pointing to the common experiences of womanhood and poverty that transcend racial and other prejudices, but it is not dire agitprop.

The characters are subtly observed and the dialogue (much of it in patois) fast and funny. And, like nearly everything else in LIFT, it’s very different from anything now being done in the British theatre. Well worth catching.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 14 July 1989

Peter Tatchell (Tribune, July 7) suggests a Labour-Green electoral pact “to establish a radical consensus rather than a centrist one” in British politics. “Both parties should consider an electoral agreement involving a single Labour or Green candidate, fighting on apolitical programme of environmental protection and social justice, plus proportional representation,” he writes.

His proposal is almost certain to be dismissed by the powers-that-be in the Labour Party and, in the end, I suppose I agree with them. The massive Green vote in the European elections does not necessarily prove that the Green Party has arrived as a major force in British politics: 15 per cent in the Euroelections is not the same thing as a string of by-election victories.

And even if the Greens are here to stay, there are good reasons against a pact. Most important, there is no evidence to suggest that any sort of electoral pact actually works in a first-past-the-post electoral system – while there are good grounds for believing that Green voters would not vote Labour and that Labour voters would not vote Green if either were deprived of their first-choice candidate.

But I must admit that I’ve had to force myself to remember these arguments, because a pact with the Greens does look very attractive. Indeed there have been times in the past few weeks when I’ve even considered joining the Greens. That is not just because I’ve spent a great deal of the past decade working in the peace movement and now find the Labour policy review position on defence and foreign policy to be an opportunist mess. My disillusionment is not a matter of a “single issue”. It has as much to do with the whole tenor of the programme that has emerged from the policy review.

Despite a few concessions to the radical democratic environmentalist politics that have been central to the libertarian left inside and outside the Labour Party for more than a decade, it is for the most part a restatement of the sort of centrist technocratic social democratic values and policies that characterised the Wilson and Callaghan governments. The declining faith of the British electorate in the wonders of every aspect of economic “progress”, increasingly shared by ordinary Labour Party members, seems largely to have passed the Labour leadership by.

Labour is now promising a plethora of environmental regulations to control pollution and food safety, measures to conserve energy and encouragement for public transport. But the greening visible in the policy review report is only a small  qualification to its enthusiastic embrace of the “white heat of technological revolution” and its implicit acceptance that nothing need be done about Britain’s permanent state.

Nuclear power generation will continue into the foreseeable future; there are no serious plans for reducing dependence on the private motor car; developing renewable energy sources will not be a priority. “Sustainable growth” doesn’t get a mention in either economic or foreign policy. There’s little on solving the housing crisis or rejuvenating the inner cities.

Decentralisation of democratic power and proportional representation are not on the agenda. With unilateralism gone, there’s nothing that challenges the unaccountable power of the militaryrindustrial complex.

And so I could go on. I’m no hard leftist. I’ve no nostalgic yearning for the “nationalise everything” paternalist centralism of the Fabians and Stalinists of the thirties. Nor have I any sympathy with the Leninist workerist politics peddled by the 57 varieties of Trot or the Campaign Group’s idea that all we need is a Labour government “with socialist policies” and plenty of will-power.

Forced to choose, I’d rather have centrist technocratic social  democracy than a Leninist dictatorship, “Tony Benn in Number 10” or five more years of Margaret Thatcher.

The problem is that I don’t want that to be the choice, but increasingly feel powerless to temper the dominant trend in Labour politics. The intention of the leadership is clearly to push the policy review unamended through party conference this autumn, and opposition is likely to be muted, largely because a big row at this stage would do serious damage to Labour’s chances of being elected to government.

Plenty of other people in the Labour Party feel the same way. Some will remain Labour Party members but put their energies into one of the environmental pressure groups. Others will undoubtedly jump ship to the Greens. I’m not joining them, and will be arguing (albeit unenthusiastically) for staying with Labour. Apart from the purely electoralist argument against joining the Greens or even voting for them, there’s much in their programme (not least their advocacy of a negative-growth siege economy) that is unappealing and unrealistic, even if on balance their stance is a lot more attractive than Labour’s policy review. Nevertheless, if the Labour leadership doesn’t wake up on Green politics, I’ve got a feeling that the argument for staying with Labour will be a lot less persuasive.

Paul Anderson, review of A Rational Advance for the Labour Party by John Lloyd (Chatto, £2.99), Tribune, 30 June 1989

Written before the publication of Labour’s policy review, John Lloyd’s pamphlet, for Chatto’s inaptly named and over-priced CounterBlasts series, has a curiously dated feel to it. It is an eloquent plea for Labour’s leadership to do much that it has already done or signalled its intention to do in the battle for the centre ground: endorse “enterprise” and the market, drop the idea that public ownership is a matter of principle rather than expediency, abandon unilateral nuclear disarmament and antipathy to the European Community, weaken links with the trade unions, and adopt policies to make welfare bureaucracies more “transparent” and accountable — in short, turn Labour into a modern consumer-friendly social democratic party.

There are places where:Lloyd differs from the policy review. He embraces the rhetoric of °democratisation” much more enthusiastically and is much keener on constitutional reform, proposing proportional representation, an elected second chamber and a reduced role for the monarchy. He wants much swifter action to end the block vote than any Labour leader would dare suggest. And he is more open to electoral pacts with the centre parties than are most of the Labour right — at least in public.

Nevertheless, Lloyd must be well pleased. Labour has gone a long way to meeting his demands: only sentimentality now stops Labour from describing itself as social democratic. The right of the party is everywhere triumphant, and the left is marginalised.

But that doesn’t mean that Lloyd’s arguments are very convincing.

Most obviously, on defence and foreign policy, he displays the naive optimism of one who hasn’t yet realised that George Bush is President of the United States: oblivious to the increasingly apparent deadlock in super-power diplomacy, he trots out all the tired old stuff about drifting with the tide of international relations and acting responsibly in international forums to encourage detente, disarmament and development.

But the main problems with his argument are to do with domestic policy. He’s right in some rather trivial ways. Labour should be distinguishing its programme from “free-market neo-liberalism which allocates no place to democratic politics beyond periodic electoral contests” and from “extreme visions or realities of socialism which put politics in charge of everything and allow little or no choice”. But only a few nutters believe otherwise. The key question dividing left and right in the Labour Party is not (and has never been) whether markets should have some role: it is how far markets should be left to their own devices and how far they should be over-ruled.

The Labour left wants democratic politics in firmer control of more markets than does the Labour right. It’s a difference in degree rather than, as Lloyd pretends, a difference in kind, and it’s a difference that has to be argued out market-by-market and control-by-control. Lloyd, however, is effusive about the wonders of markets in general. Markets mean “prosperity” and “choice”, he believes: Labour should be trying to appeal to the beneficiaries of Thatcherism on Thatcherism’s own terms. He seems to have forgotten that markets also mean insecurity, exclusion from prosperity and choice, economic instability, concentration of power and damage to the environment.

Indeed, the environment is the loose thread that threatens to unravel Lloyd’s whole case. Firstly, his assumption that Labour’s priority is to chase “never had it so good” Tory voters into the political centre with promises of more of much-the-same is seriously undermined by the willingness of 15 per cent of the electorate to vote Green in the European elections earlier this month. That shows that a significant proportion of the well-off are beginning to have doubts about the supreme value of ever-increasing consumption.

More important, though, there’s the question of dealing with the environmental crisis itself. Lloyd himself writes that this may “require a profound change in consumption levels and expectations if disasters for at least part of the globe — they are likely to be the already-poorest — are to be averted”. If this is so, as more and more evidence suggests, the necessary changes cannot be managed unless politics is put firmly in command of markets. That doesn’t mean emulating the Stalinist command economies, but it does mean measures as antipathetic to market forces as any advocated in the past 30 years by the Labour left. Lloyd’s recycled centrism simply doesn’t take Green politics seriously.