Wednesday 16 September 2009

Partisanship, democracy and local elections

I am as partisan politically as the next party activist. I would never seriously contemplate voting anything other than Labour, unless there was no Labour candidate on the ballot paper (which is highly unlikely, as I would probably be the paper candidate myself if I lived in the ward). Even though I have problems, to say the least, with government policy, and am unlikely to ever agree with the party on every issue, I believe profoundly in staying in the party and arguing my case, because there's no other platform for the mainstream social democratic left, and every time someone like me leaves the party, the voice of the left in the party is weakened further. Whatever problems I do have with the party leadership, they pale in comparison with the hatred I have for everything the Tory party does and could ever stand for.

And I undoubtedly think that partisanship is undervalued. It is often criticised on the basis that it means the interests of the country are subordinated to narrow party political concerns - this criticism has been made by numerous commentators in light of the expenses scandal particularly. However, those who attempt to provide an 'apolitical', statesmanlike alternative to the petty squabblings of party politics are usually using this veneer of neutrality to hide some agenda or another - the Jury Team, for example, are funded by Paul Judge, who is a right-wing businessman. The Jury Team claims that its candidates are independents united only by a contempt for the corruption and unpatriotic partisanship of existing parties. However, if that is the case then how can they stand as a legal political party? Why not just stand as independents? What purpose does the Jury Team label serve? If that is not the case and they are another political party, with Paul Judge's backing it does not take a genius to work out what its likely ideological stance will be. The Jury Team either stands for too little or too much. Any candidate or party standing for election must have some position on the issues, and ultimately in competitive elections the Jury Team will succumb to the competitive pressures of party partisanship and be just another party, or it will amount to nothing meaningful.

Partisansip is the price we pay for a relatively accountable democracy. Anti-party political appeals to national unity are the stuff of authoritarians who actually abhor the messy, pluralistic business of competitive elections - witness the various rumoured plots to replace Harold Wilson's governments in the 60s and 70s with a national government under a range of dictatorial nutjobs, and Adolf Hitler's blaming of Germany's problems on the partisan disputes encouraged by Weimar democracy. Yes, sometimes governments will endanger the long-term interests of the country for short-term party advantage, but the alternatives are far worse. Representative democracy is the only game in town, realistically speaking, in large, modern nation states, and despite the much-vaunted decline of the political party, no-one has formulated an alternative means of configuring competing interests and policies in a range of different areas into a platform for governing the country, and then implementing it. Parties as a basis for political organisation and government in a democracy are not perfect, but they are unavoidable.

However, there is an area in which I think there is too much party-orientated partisanship. I can't help thinking that party labels in local elections are often more trouble than they are worth. Now, I am not denying that ideological issues are at stake in local politics - although district/borough councils have been so gutted of important functions that they are nowhere near as ideologically driven as once they were. However, the problem is this. All the parties have effective long-serving local councillors who have developed an excellent relationship with their local community and have the best for their patch at heart. They have the knowledge and experience to provide useful opposition/governance and scrutiny, and to represent their consitutents forcefully. When the national trend goes strongly against their party, they often lose their seats to inexperienced candidates who do not have the experience or skills to do the best job for the people who elected them. Communities lose excellent local servants because too many people use local elections to give incumbent governments a good kicking. Sometimes candidates can buck national trends because of a personal vote, but all too often this is not enough. For example, in my home town of Chelmsford, until 2007 we had two Labour Councillors left, Bill Horslen and Adrian Longden. They were experienced and knowledgeable, and were well-regarded even by Conservatives, who acknowledged that they knew a lot about Marconi and its problems, and forcefully represented their interests. In 2007 they lost their seat to glorified Lib Dem paper candidates, who have little or no idea of the issues facing Marconi, because of the national trend against the Labour Government.

Now, this is a somewhat self-interested line of argument, it could be argued. I am a Labour activist, and Labour has suffered from this phenomenon the most (indeed solely) in recent years. However, in the long run it works both ways. In 96-97 a lot of Labour paper candidates defeated incumbent Tories and subsequently were not the best servants of their wards. It would have been better for local people if long-standing, experienced Tory councillors in basically Conservative areas had kept their seats, because they were the best, most experienced local servants at the time, so long, of course, as this was in the context of the council still being controlled by Labour (jesus, that was a difficult last sentence to write).

So, maybe it would be best if candidates in local elections were not allowed to stand under national party labels. Maybe they could stand as locally-orientated parties on the basis of a local platform, and maybe even local branches of national political parties could campaign for or affiliate to these local parties. The key point is that candidates should not be listed purely on national party labels, because they are then liable to be thrown out on the basis of irrelevant national issues, not local service. It would force voters to actually read candidates' manifestos and vote on local issues important to them, rather than voting lazily on the basis of vague national preferences and prejudices.

(Some credit must go to Tim Worrall, a Tory mate of mine, who floated the idea of reduced partisanship in local politics to me)

Saturday 5 September 2009

Philistines at the Gate - defend Aunty Beeb!

As I expect is the case for many people, the BBC has greatly enriched my life. I get much of my news from the excellent BBC website. Radio 4 is an education in and of itself, and is the source in one way or another of 80% of decent British comedy. The World Service sets the international standard for impartiality and rigour. Test Match Special takes sports commentary to the sublime level of a mixture of Shakespearean farce and Monty Python-esque surrealism. And so on and so forth; there’s no point listing all of the great services and programmes that the BBC produces – sufficient to say, as John Prescott pointed out recently, it costs “39p a day per household for 20 national BBC TV & radio channels, 48 regional radio stations, iplayer and online services”.

It is, however, under attack. This sniping began in the aftermath of the Ross/Brand affair and the subsequent example of the British public “in one of its periodical fits of morality”, to quote Macaulay, albeit a fit provoked by the gutter press, the ‘semi-Nazi comics’ that constitute the tabloid milieu. These attacks came to a head recently with James Murdoch’s boorish assault on the BBC in his speech to the Edinburgh TV festival.

Now, it is utterly transparent why much of the press wants to undermine public and political support for the BBC. The right-wing hacks of Fleet Street have long since auctioned their nicotine-stained, booze-soaked souls to the highest bidder. They are in the pockets of large media corporations that are direct commercial competitors to the BBC, most notably News International in the case of The Times and The Sun, but also The Daily Mail, which is owned by Northcliffe, who owns a string of local news outlets.

James Murdoch’s agenda is similarly blatant. The BBC is the last bulwark against News International’s domination of the British media, and so of course he wants to undermine it. However, just because the motives of Murdoch (junior and senior) and the right-wing press are self-interested does not necessarily make their arguments wrong (though they are). We need to examine why specifically they are specious nonsense.

Murdoch claims that ‘state-sponsored journalism’ and the BBC’s privileged position has a ‘chilling effect’ on competition and consumer choice, the implication being that the BBC’s suppression of competition kills off the commercial sector’s creative impulses and the diversity of the media.

The use of the sinister sounding phrase ‘state sponsored journalism’ is pure scare-mongering, implying that the BBC is some kind of national dinner-lady ladling out pro-government gruel to the masses. Its independence is protected by its status as an autonomous corporation, and, although arguments about its neutrality rage, the fact that some leftists think that it is a bulwark of the establishment and Peter Hitchens thinks that it’s a Bolshevik conspiracy suggests to me that accusations of bias are usually products of the imagination of the critic in question. Undoubtedly there are blind spots – the News Quiz often sounds like a group meeting of Aging Lefties’ Anonymous, and its coverage of the Royals is sickeningly fawning – but the very fact that one can find such contradictory examples of partiality suggests that there is no systematic bias at work, and certainly not a pro-government one.

However, the real flaw in the arguments of Murdoch and his cronies in the press, the real reason that their whining ultimately amounts to an unconvincing mask for their real, self-interested agenda, is that the BBC certainly does not suppress a pluralistic and quality media – in fact, it does the opposite – it saves us from the inane group-think that markets without public agencies and regulations are liable to produce.

For, what is the BBC but a venerable custodian of our critical, literate intellectual culture? When broadcasting is exposed to the full blast of the market, it merely results in a levelling-down populism designed to appeal to a homogenised, ‘focus-grouped’ mediocrity. Surely the mind-numbingly piss-poor nature of the output of ITV in the past twenty years is evidence enough of this. Only a BBC well-funded and allowed to innovate and appeal to niche interests and minority pursuits can protect us from a future that consists of the jack-boot of inanity and crass insensibility stamping on a human faceforever, to paraphrase Orwell.

Take, for example, Radio 4. Radio 4 is one of the last outlets in the UK broadcasting decent, well-researched investigative journalism, serious, balanced news reporting, and high-minded cultural programming. Would ‘In Our Time’, a programme in which Melvyn Bragg picks the minds of world-experts on subjects ranging from Jonathan Swift to Charles Darwin, from metaphysical poetry to experimental physics, exist in a completely marketised British media? Would journalists genuinely interested in getting to the truth and standing up to corporate behemoths get a fair hearing in a world where Rupert Murdoch sat as judge, jury and executioner on every single issue? If we do not stand up for the idea that the BBC exists to make programmes that enrich our national culture, teach us to think more deeply, and challenge us to do and be better, and that it deserves the freedom to do this in a way that allows innovation and originality, even eccentricity, to flourish, then we might as well settle for a future in which the high-point of British cultural identity and vigour is oogling at page three of The Sun.

Of course, the big media ogres are not without political backing. Who is at the vanguard of this cynical attack on the BBC and the Reithian ideals that it stands for? Could it possibly be the Conservative Party? David Cameron lazily reheats tabloid assaults on the Beeb, and Tory ‘Culture’ policy largely consists of attacking the licence fee. Under a Tory government out and out privatisation is surely not far away. The political right-wing has no interest in an impartial BBC appealing to our better interests and exposing the realities of our political culture. A tame media machine knocking out dumbed-down nonsense to the punters will do it just fine. Of course, there is also the more overt political aspect; David Cameron would probably do unspeakable and frankly unprintable things to Rupert Murdoch for the support of The Sun.

So, unless we are prepared to stand up and take political action to protect the BBC, then there is a grave danger that Northcliffe and Murdoch, aided by the toadying barbarianism of Druggy Dave and the Notting Hill mob, will have their wicked way and steal the jewel in the crown of Britain’s intellectual life. This is not just a crusade for intellectual excellence; it is not just something that should worry the Radio 4 listeners among us. The BBC’s protection from market forces allows it to innovate in such a way that tends to promote excellence across the board; it results in the making of programmes that end up being both excellent, and, in the end, popular. This is because creativity needs long-term faith and commitment. Take, for example, Only Fools and Horses, or Blackadder. Both series had poor first series, but were rescued by commissioners who saw promise in these early efforts. Both shows, of course, went onto to be phenomenal popular and critical smashes. The market cannot accommodate such long-term commitment. It is a creature of the short-run. It is for this reason, among many, that the BBC is worth defending. I for one will be on the front line of the defence when the next Tory government begins its inevitable assault on Aunty Beeb on behalf of its corporate cronies.

The Dangers of Dogmatic Dichotomies

Simplifying the world is very easy. Reducing its complexities to overarching Manichean dualisms allows humans, who are inevitably of limited understanding, to gain some degree of intellectual purchase on difficult-to-understand situations. We are all culpable, because such thinking is more satisfying, more easily-digested, more ego-boosting than simply admitting confusion or providing an explanation so qualified and multifaceted that it loses emotional punch and rhetorical power.

However, this reflex has troubling consequences; it can encourage self-delusion, duplicity and dubious moral shortcuts. An obvious example is US foreign policy during the Cold War, which tended to label countries and peoples as being either ‘the Enemy’, godless Communist troublemakers, or ‘the Good Guys’, allies of USA, and therefore naturally friends of liberty. The only relevant factor for judging which category a government or movement fell into was their attitude towards the US and its self-proclaimed ‘values’, although of course the only value that really counted in the end was respect for US capital and hostility towards the Soviet Union. Any regime or government that showed any hostility towards US interference or argued for any economic model different from America’s idea of capitalism was labelled as communist and therefore automatically in the pay of the Soviet Union and obedient to the Kremlin; it was the ‘only’ explanation. Other explanations – a genuine interest in democratic non-communist socialism or an alternative economic model, a desire to maintain national sovereignty, nationalism, religious piety, non-alignment – were ignored or interpreted as covers for the ‘real’ agenda, Bolshevism. So, for example, US analysts in Iran during the 1979 revolution, and indeed during the 1953 Mosaddeq incident, completely misunderstood the situation, constantly looking for Cold War motives and reds-under-the-bed despite the fact that a mixture of Iranian nationalism, Islamism and hostility to the Shah’s regime was far more significant. It didn’t occur to US policymakers that some events could not be forced into the interpretive rubric of the apocalyptic confrontation between the ‘Evil Empire’ and ‘the Free World’.

Something similar happened in Nicaragua, where the US completely, indeed deliberately, misinterpreted the Sandinista movement. Because the Sandinistas were leftists who wanted to extend health, education and agricultural services to the poor and redistribute wealth and land, they were automatically branded ‘Commies’, Nicaragua a Soviet client state. Chomsky has shown in great detail in the ridiculousness of this claim – as he points out, when the US embargo began in 1985, only about 20% of Nicaragua’s trade was with the USSR, which was about the same as the USA, and there is no evidence that Nicaragua had any particular links with the USSR before the US conducted its well-documented campaign of starvation and terror against its people. However, with the US embargo and US-backed Contra terrorist campaign, Nicaragua, which had made extraordinary social progress in terms of combating poverty and extending social services during the first years of Sandinista rule as documented by organisations such as UNICEF and Oxfam, found itself reduced to utter devastation and poverty. It was thus forced to turn to the Soviets, since the USSR was one of the few countries that ignored US pressure not to trade with Nicaragua – for example, it bought Soviet jets to defend itself against US-backed aggression because the US had blocked the sale of all jets from non-Communist countries. In other words, the USA forced Nicaragua into the arms of the USSR via violence and intimidation, and then used this fact as ‘proof’ that Nicaragua was an agent of Soviet imperialism in central America – hence Reagan’s risible suggestion that if the Sandinista movement were not crushed, before long Soviet tanks would be rolling into Texas. Similar claims were peddled in Congress and the US media for years.

This case is different from Iran. In the case of Iran, the US genuinely misinterpreted Mosaddeq and the ’79 revolution – US policy towards Iran has been a notorious disaster area since at least the 1950s, as documented in James Bill’s excellent book ‘The Eagle and the Lion’ - whereas in Nicaragua the US wanted to destroy the Nicaraguan revolution because it feared it would become a model for socio-economic development, thus threatening the interests of US capital in South America, and so it deliberately attempted to force the Sandinistas into the role of Cold War partisan to justify its violent policies to a domestic audience. Most of the US public, media and politicians accepted this interpretation unquestioningly, which suggests that they were used to interpreting everything in terms of the Cold War dichotomy.

However, it is not just the US government and Right in general that is guilty of gross deception and mendacity as a result of a seeing all world events through a distorted lens. The Far Left has an extremely worrying tendency to excuse or ignore atrocities and crimes that cannot easily be attributed to US imperialism, and to oppose all US or Western intervention regardless of the situation.
In the view of many on the Far Left, all crimes and problems in the world can be attributed to US imperialism and the perverted functioning of international capitalism. When it appears that a problem is the result of nationalist passions, murderous dictators or ethnic tensions, this is merely a mask for or distraction from the ‘real’ issue.

Take the Rwandan genocide. Richard Seymour, blogger and SWP member, has written an interpretation of the Rwandan genocide here - http://intercontinentalcry.org/rwanda-a-genocide-that-isnt-over-part-i/ Now, much of what Seymour says is true. Belgian imperialism is largely to blame for the racialisation of the Tutsi/Hutu divide. The instability of world commodity prices and IMF intervention did destabilise the Habyarimana regime. America did back the RPF, and the war did make the genocide more likely. However, the overall message of the article is clear – the idea that the genocide could have prevented by foreign intervention is nonsense – it was caused by foreign intervention! This is used to back Seymour’s crusade against western intervention generally.

This is crazy. Just because the intervention that did take place was largely immoral or indifferent is not a reason why the West should not have intervened– it is a reason why the West should have intervened differently. If, say, the large countries in the UN had pressured for a vastly expanded UNAMIR force early in April 1994, and given it a mandate to stop the violence when it became clear that it was systematic genocide, then Seymour would have been the first to criticise, because ‘all’ western intervention must be to the end of US Imperialism – selfless or sensible Western interventionism is an oxymoron in the eyes of those who see everything as a battle between American imperialism and the brave resistance of the oppressed masses. Seymour’s article is full of criticism for the US, but the genocide itself is entirely skated over. The fact is that ultimately the genocide was the result of a pre-planned strategy on the part of extremist ‘Hutu Power’ racists who had committed many atrocities against Tutsi in the past and wanted a chance to finally wipe them out. Yes, the IMF structural adjustment programme, the vagaries of commodity prices, the immoral policies of the West created a situation where the genocide was more easily carried out, but ultimately the responsibility lies with the ragbag of murderers, racists and madmen in the Akazu, an extremist group connected to Habyarimana’s wife, and the CDR, the party of the Hutu Power racists. Yet the Far Left isn’t interested in this. Most Far Leftists are interested in victims and oppressed people only insofar as it can attribute their suffering to imperialism or capitalism – other atrocities are ignored, and intervention to prevent them scorned as inevitably an imperialist conspiracy, even when the case for saying this is tenuous or non-existent.

Something similar can be said about the break-up of Yugoslavia (the Bosnian war etc), wherein criticisms of Western intervention coming from the Far Left were plentiful, but criticisms of the racist violence of the partisans of a ‘Greater Serbia’ were completely absent. Similarly, the Far Left condemns the idea of intervention in Darfur as imperialist warmongering by traitors on the liberal left (such as that well-known agent of international capitalism Human Rights Watch).

Now, I am not denying the reality of US imperialism. The record of US foreign policy is a bloody and shameful one – overthrowing Allende in 1973 and installing the murderous Pinochet, illegally backing a client terrorist war against Nicaragua in the 80s, support for a whole range of murderous despots in El Salvador, the Vietnam War etc. Often, US intervention can be explained in terms of imperialism, or at the very least cynical and immoral pursuit of national interest at the expense of human rights. However, in certain situations either the pursuit of US national interest happens to coincide with humanitarian objectives, or the US national interest actually isn’t the biggest factor. It’s very difficult to explain, for example, the US-fronted UN intervention in Somalia in the early 90s in terms of US imperialism. The USA had little to gain from such intervention – it was a genuine attempt to create a secure environment for humanitarian operations, protect civilians and prevent a famine. If the USA had taken action in Rwanda by bolstering the UNAMIR force, then it could have prevented the worst of the genocide, and the death toll may have been significantly less than the million or so it ended up as. What imperialist motivation there could have been for such a course is unclear.

The interpretation of US foreign policy as imperialist has some validity of course, I’m not denying that -but not always, and sometimes the crimes of US imperialism are not the only crimes in the world. There’s a tendency among some Far Left intellectuals – Chomsky, much as I respect him and agree with him in some ways, is guilty of this – of saying, when asked about some atrocity that the US is not responsible for or when the thorny issue of US/Western intervention to end some atrocity comes up, that x event – Serbian atrocities in Bosnia, Soviet aggression in Afghanistan in the past, genocide in Darfur or Rwanda, violence in Somalia – is not the ‘real issue’. The ‘real’ issue is this or that policy of the USA. This is insane. It is possible for both US crimes and mistakes to co-exist with other crimes and problems as ‘real’ issues. It is the duty of the Left to condemn atrocities and support action to alleviate them (when feasible) no matter who is responsible.

I’m not denying the complexities of an interventionist foreign policy and I’m not saying that intervention is always right – the failure in Somalia illustrates that even when well-intentioned, intervention always entails unintended consequences, and it is difficult to judge sometimes where imperialism ends and humanitarianism starts. But a blanket-anti intervention attitude is unhelpful, the product of a mindset that sees everything in terms of the great duel between socialism and imperialism. Sometimes that analysis is of very limited use or outright inappropriate. The West did not intervene against Milosevic because he was some kind of socialist, they intervened against him because he was a murdering nutter. I am not a huge fan of US foreign policy, but to take the attitude that anything the US does is by that very fact wrong, and that any enemy of the USA is a friend, is crazy, and product of the simplified self-righteous grandiosity of the Far Left’s analysis of the world. In cases where western intervention can realistically end or disrupt clear cases of systematic murder, genocide or human rights cases, the left has a duty to support such intervention, not just as socialists, but as human beings.

Ultimately, what I’m saying is that in analysing events in the world, we have to take a nuanced, qualified, cautious approach that takes into account many factors and doesn’t try to force every event into this or that interpretive contortion to satisfy ideological dogmatism. The criticism that often a heavy-handed, ideologically-fuelled simplistic rubric is used to interpret world events, rather than a sensitive and flexible one, is one that applies to elements of both the Right and Left.