'A Degenerate Semi-Intellectual'

Material Considerations

2011-10-28T12:44:00.000+01:00

“I’d like to introduce the first application

On the agenda tonight

It’s an application for a proposal

Providing a formal indication

Of my designs on your affection.

The material considerations are crucial,

The usual ones for an application of this kind:

The aesthetic dimension, compatibility in its sexual context

The principle of emotional development

And, of course, your assessment of future romantic amenity.

The recommendation before you is one of approval.

The statement of devotion is sound in planning terms

Though the surface adoration management is poor.

Nonetheless, most weight must be placed

On the presumption in favour of sustainable entanglement."

Alas, in love all considerations are material,

And the heart is no Town and Country Planning Act.

Besides, your desire is in a Conservation Zone

And, since your committee’s rejection,

I have no appeal. There is no pining inspector.

On the Fear and the Pleasure of Solitude

2011-08-21T03:27:00.002+01:00

Samuel Johnson, notoriously, hated being alone. Solitude to him not only invariably provoked his bouts of depression, but he saw it as something fundamentally corrupting and suspicious. He described the “solitary mortal” as “certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad”. Solitude to him was “dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue”. In his imagination, one supposes, seclusion was a hothouse producing the febrile, disordered fantasies of cranky, treasonous Whigs and republicans. It was both personally disarming and politically troublesome. As such, he was famously open to entertaining any guest, no matter how slight the acquaintance, until any time of the night. He would often beg the last guest to stay so as to stave off the dreary purdah of his own company, company that the fashionable classes so craved for, for as long as possible.

I think that Johnson’s hearty disdain for isolation reflects a powerful current in the English character. One detects in Johnson’s eighteenth century attitude twinges of the characteristic distrust of such detachment found in the bracing attitudes of pioneering, tyrannical nineteenth century public school headmasters such as Edward Tring of Uppingham, say, or Edward Lyttleton of Eton. To them, a penchant for one’s own company was inherently subversive, a symptom, along with excessive reading and masturbation, of a lurking anti-social tendency that had to be stamped out in the course of the moral formation of the upstanding denizens of Britain and the Empire. Enforced games-playing, the House system, constant supervision and cold showers were enlisted as conscripts in the war against furtiveness, seclusion and sensitivity.

This is far from being the case only amongst the upper classes. Natural suspicion falls in British life upon anyone who displays a proclivity towards solitude, beginning early in life. There is no more damning analysis of a child or adolescent’s character than “he spends an awful lot of time alone up in his room”. Children of all classes who show a fundamental indifference to the company of others are perceived as worrisome, and are usually, in a similar way as the domineering Headmaster of Harrow or Wellington might force recalcitrant students into unwanted games of rugby, dragooned into some communal activity that they are not the slightest bit interested in.

This is usually done with the best of intentions, by the most loving of parents. Excessive isolation is seen to be either a cause or a symptom, or possibly both, of unhappiness and unhealthiness, and therefore in need of remedy. Even my parents made attempts (admittedly fairly desultory and half-hearted ones) to lure me from my self-imposed infant exile from humanity, at one point trying to persuade me of the virtues of joining the Cubs or Scouts. I had no intention whatsoever of engaging with such an organisation, and I’m not even sure if I ever got as far as being forced to attend one meeting. My parents not being the most compulsively social people themselves, and certainly not wanting to force me into anything that would make me unhappy, gave up, mercifully with very little resistance.

I think that this obsession with society (in the literal sense of being in the company of others), with ‘mixing’, is rooted in a fundamental idea that happiness is only achievable through other people. Emotional investments and bonds in other people are the only root to happiness. Because, ultimately, what is the alternative? Some kind of solitary debauchment? Or even worse, knowledge and facts and ideas?

Therein lies the British obsession with the dangers of solitude; the association with, in its broadest sense, subversion. It links into our much-vaunted distrust of intellectuals, who, squirrelled away, scratching into midnight with their treasonous quills, disturb solid moral and political common sense with their over-analysis and perhaps even unpatriotic ways. The solitary, it is always feared, is prone to dis-ease, perhaps with himself but also with the status quo in general. The projections of this dis-ease onto society manifest themselves in some kind of radicalism, either nihilistic or (in an irony noted by the splendidly grumpy Bernard Shaw’s self-description as the ‘antisocial socialist’) socialistic, and the projections onto the individual manifest themselves in morally questionable debauchment, the luxury, superstition and madness of which Dr Johnson was so apprehensive.

However, there is another aspect to this, which links more directly into the obsession with finding fulfilment or happiness primarily or solely through other people. There is a pervasive suspicion that unless one’s primary source of satisfaction is some relationship with another person or other people, particularly but not exclusively a monogamous sexual relationship, one is not a normal human being. Sneaking terror of loneliness projects itself onto the fearful and neurotically hateful attitude towards anyone who lives out the profoundly feared destiny of solitude, a hate which is as much actual or potential self-hatred as anything. This crystallises itself in that extremely common stock-character of British life, real and fictional – the man who lives alone, or perhaps with his mother, his lack of other relationships indicative of or a cover for some seedy and mysterious habit, such as serial killing, wearing mackintoshes into adult cinemas, or listening to Gardeners’ Question Time.

This fear and hatred has heightened in recent years, and not surprisingly. Increasingly, the traditional institutions through which social interaction and stable relationships were initiated and sustained, and loneliness warded off, have been chipped away. The decline of religious observance and Church-going, the break-down of established conventions of marriage and courtship, the decline of the nuclear family, the increased tendency to live alone, and even the decreased vitality of collective institutions of working-class life such as working men’s clubs, pubs, football clubs and trade unions, have given more substance to this terror of solitude. Because the initiation of social interaction and other relationships are less regulated by well-known conventions, the pathways into social bonding and marriage less obvious and negotiated with less certainty and more anxiety, the kernel of our fears has been shown to be more solid than we would like.

Much as this may be seen as a controversial statement, these changes have probably affected men more than, or at least differently from, women. In practice men, most notably heterosexual men, are still usually expected to initiate romantic relationships. You may quibble around this, but any honest assessment of the situation has to conclude that it’s basically true. Therefore, the fact that courtship and marriage are far more marked by uncertainty and less regulated by fixed conventions and rules than they were has had the effect of hitting men harder than women, since this morass of uncertainty is more often negotiated in a proactive way by men. Women have, in general, probably adapted far better, and indeed benefited far more, from the decline of the traditional nuclear family. The collective social institutions of life, particularly working class life, that have been most obviously eroded have been the ones that were male-dominated. I am not suggesting that women do not still suffer from a great deal of injustice and discrimination in other areas, and some of the developments I have outlined are not bad things. However it still seems to me to be the case that the problem of solitude and fear of isolation, as it has intensified in recent decades, has probably disproportionately affected men. It is significant that the stereotypical figure of the weird loner in fiction and reality is most often male in modern culture. The most famous and well-observed fictional representations of these neuroses since the 1960s are of male characters. Mark Corrigan in ‘Peep Show’, David Brent in ‘The Office’, even Rigsby in ‘Rising Damp’, all personify it. The stereotype of the crazy cat-loving spinster still exists, but it is nowhere near as prominent in the modern imagination as the male equivalent.

What is needed to moderate and correct this picture, however, is a sane attempt to appreciate the many pleasures of solitude. I am sure that this is partly a temperamental preference, based on personality as much as any universally applicable argument, but I am unable to function without long periods of isolation, and I’m sure that the benefits of solitude are capable of wider appreciation.

The joys of being away from other people are many. You do not have to regulate your life according to the whims of someone else, whose preferences are never likely to accord with your own. Compromise is much less necessary. You can get on with serious and uninterrupted reading and study. Most of all, you don’t have to constantly fret about others’ perceptions of you. You can be uninhibitedly yourself. If you want to talk to yourself in order to better think something through, or if you want to drink tea out of a pint glass, or eat raw jelly cubes out of the packet, you can do so without having to explain yourself. This may be a recipe for some degree of eccentricity, but by heavens to murgatroid, it sure is liberating.

Furthermore, you don’t have to feign interest in the tedious things that other people have been doing with their day. You can free yourself from the annoyance that is other people. Almost all people annoy me. Even people I like very much or even love often annoy and infuriate me. Most people do so without any compensation. They witter on with their unintelligent, overly sentimental, priggish, petty or ill-considered opinions, feelings or other outpourings, and frankly I could do without it. As my favourite philosopher Schopenhauer put it:

The wise man will, above all, strive after freedom from pain and annoyance, quiet and leisure, consequently a tranquil, modest life, with as few encounters as may be; and so, after a little experience of his so-called fellowmen, he will elect to live in retirement, or even, if he is a man of great intellect, in solitude. For the more a man has in himself, the less he will want from other people,—the less, indeed, other people can be to him.

Schopenhauer may have put it in perhaps excessively strong terms. Despite my argument, I would not claim that I do not get pleasure out of the company of others. On the contrary, excessive solitude can start, as Dr Johnson held, to drag on one’s spirit. So long as people are my kind of people – cynical, with a dry or inappropriate sense of humour, usually but not necessarily politically motivated, resistant to false emotion, unsentimental and so on – I derive can great rewards from them. As such, I wouldn’t quite go to the extreme of Sartre, for whom hell was other people.

However, I can honestly say that when I finally get some time to myself, even after a prolonged period of interaction with people who entertain me, being left alone again gives me a pleasure of relief and contentment that little else can provide. The cool and unhurried thrill of silence, of being able to think and reflect and not be judged or weighed up, is wonderful. Solitude gives one time to reflect, to give one’s own emotions – whether they be happiness or sadness, frustration or industry, desire or contentment - a space to breathe.

Anyone who knows me who has read this far probably thinks that this piece is an extended bit of self-justification for my notorious and spectacular failure with women. My extensive acquaintance with the joys of solitude is partially attributable, no doubt, to just this. However, I nonetheless do take a genuine pleasure in being alone, and I do not mean to suggest that there aren’t pleasures to be had from relationships with other people, whether sexual or otherwise, pleasures that are conducive to the good life. My point is that they are not the only important pleasures, nor even ones without which happiness is impossible.

However, it seems that the fear of solitude in modern culture has reached a point where many people, especially but not exclusively young people, feel anxious or nervous unless they are with other people the whole time, or nearly the whole time. They may not even particularly enjoy the company of those other people, but the presence of someone else, anyone else, is thought superior to solitude. This is an absurd attitude. My presumption is the other way around. I have a presumption in favour of solitude, unless I can see some way in which the presence of another will improve things. It will sometimes thus improve things, but presuming that it necessarily will is often foolish and always ill-advised, in my experience. A more balanced attitude, which re-examines the very real pleasures and benefit of isolation, may do everyone a favour. Even people less misanthropic and grumpy than me.

Maurice Glasman: A Defence

2011-08-06T04:16:00.001+01:00

Maurice Glasman cuts an unconventional figure. It is difficult to imagine anyone further away from the soulless technocrat banalities and bland certainties of New Labour. With his roll-ups, trumpet and cardigans, he is easy to dismiss as some kind of clown.

Some have gone to the opposite extreme, picking up on a few thoughtless remarks, about the EDL and immigration, in order to portray him as a closet racist. His emphasis on tradition has prompted a backlash from some feminists, fearful that he advocates some return to patriarchal domination, and, more generally, from the sniping metropolitan Left of the party, who see any challenge to their liberal assumptions as necessarily having sinister motives.

I have already written a long piece defending ‘Blue Labour’, and I will not repeat its arguments. However, I want to draw out a few points in response to some of the sniping.

Firstly, what did Glasman actually say about the EDL? He said that the Labour Party needs to face up to its “responsibility for the generation of far-right populism”, and attempt to reconnect with the kind of the person that supports the EDL so “that we can represent a better life for them”. In other words, instead of instantly dismissing white working class people who have become disillusioned with our party and turned to racist alternatives, we should attempt to bring them back within the fold by truly representing their interests via a politics of the Common Good that counters the impression that we became in hock to partial interests antithetical to the well-being of the working classes.

In the case of many EDL supporters, this is probably naive – their thoroughgoing violent racism probably makes any such engagement pointless. However, Glasman’s broader point is entirely valid. New Labour, with its attempt to fund social democracy using the unstable wealth produced by accepting the neoliberal consensus, has to partially take the blame for the alienation of the working classes that it is an inevitable result of the concomitants of that consensus, commodification and concentration of power. It is hardly worth denying that this unease has become particularly toxic within the white working classes in the context of profound social uncertainty, fostered by the inherent cosmopolitanism of a global free market. When that alienation is expressed in chauvinistic ways, though we should oppose it with all our might, we nonetheless cannot wish away its causes. Attempting to understand the forces that drive people to the far-right should be commended, not condemned due to the odd clumsy bit of phrasing. Accusing someone descended from immigrant Jews of this is especially implausible. The worst, I think, Glasman can be accused of is naivety and lack of media sense.

Much of the antipathy towards Glasman comes from his emphasis on tradition, on customary institutions and modes of living, which some perceive as being suspiciously conservative. His eschewment of Liberalism and attack on the value of abstract notions in politics instantly raise the hackles of cultural leftists who have increasingly come to see Labour less as a party designed to promote the interests of working people, and more as the political wing of the feminist and LGBT movements. This is hardly surprising, but Glasman’s approach is neither invalid nor reactionary.

To understand why this is, you have to understand how this links into the argument that politics is about nurturing collective practices and institutions that allow people and existing communities to live as ends in themselves, free from the tyranny of capital, and not about abstractions such as ‘Equality’ or ‘Justice’, in which all human relationships and traditions are seen as troublesome impediments to abstract ends. This does not involve accepting all prejudices inherent in a status quo. It does, however, recognise some realities about human beings, such as the fact that people’s particular relationships with places, institutions and traditions are powerful and often inherently valuable, except where they themselves embody other forms of domination – of class, or sexual orientation, or gender.

This view involves taking working people’s preferences seriously rather trying to rationalise them in the name of utilitarian efficiency, of state or market. Where tradition, where patriotism and faith, gives meaning to people’s existences, where those impulses do not spill over into bigotry, we have to respect them and integrate them within the Labour movement. The metropolitan Guardian-reading middle classes of the Labour Party need to abandon their attempts to impose their prejudices on the working class in the name of expunging the prejudices of the latter.

Another source of discomfort is his criticique of the Attlee Government. To many on the Left, this is sacrilege. However, it is useless to pretend that the legacy of that government was perfect. Nationalisation, in which private management was merely replaced by an equally unresponsive bureaucratic elite was not what pre-war socialists had in mind. Integration in the political nation was never enough. Socialism also requires institutions and practices outside of the state to protect working people against capitalism, such as mutuals, credit unions, co-operatives, worker representation on works councils, worker codetermination at board level, and so on. In other words, real democracy. This is a radically Leftist attempt to move on from the tired debates of whether we support ‘state or market’.

That Glasman’s argument represents a genuine attempt, albeit one rooted in history, to address the dilemma of the Labour Party illustrates an important point. Much as people like to carp, where are the alternative ideas? The Right of the party re-heats Blairite dogma and unthinking acceptance of the status quo and is more stale than year-old bread. The statist Left, Hard and Soft, is utterly bereft of anything new to say. It has no coherent political economy. Glasman and Blue Labour have the guts to formulate something paradoxically both old and new, both historic and fresh, that might actually provide an intellectually coherent basis for Labour Party policy. Go away and read Glasman’s essay ‘Labour as radical tradition’ or Polanyi’s ‘The Great Transformation’. If you don’t like it, then what’s your alternative? It’s easy being the critic; let’s see if Blue Labour’s detractors have a meaningful agenda of their own.

A Sceptical Patriotism for the Left

2011-05-10T19:02:00.001+01:00

To many, the idea of left-wing or progressive patriotism is an oxymoron. One immediately thinks of the ‘my country right or wrong’ bone-headed jingoism represented by flag-waving idiots at Tory Party conference or ‘The Last Night of the Proms’. Worse still are the word’s apparently indelible associations with racist, chauvinistic nationalism in the form of the far-right, which has hijacked symbols of national pride such as the flag so successfully since the Second World War.

However, the monopoly of patriotism by the right is not something that leftists can afford to ignore. One of the most persistent and damaging criticisms of radicals is that they are unpatriotic, unfeeling, cold. Burke’s accusation that radicals, in their frigid internationalism, have “benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual" has stuck. The political passions of patriotism seem to be either harnessed by the right or, usually unsuccessfully, neutralised by the left. This will not do. We on the left must revive an older vision of what it truly means to love one’s country, a notion that separates patriotism from the narrower and damaging concept of nationalism, and that focuses on what is truly important in our approach to our national community. In short, we must go back to Enlightenment notions of the true meaning of patriotism, notions that reconcile a heartfelt love of country with ‘internationalist’ ideas of humanity’s common good.

An excellent source of such an Enlightenment idea of patriotism is a now little-remembered political thinker of the late 18^th century called Richard Price. Richard Price was a dissenting minister who supported the radical causes of his age, such as the fight for freedom of the American colonies, and what seemed to him (at least at first) as the historical struggle for the rights of mankind and for humanity’s dignity and liberty represented by the French Revolution. In 1789 Price preached an acute sermon entitled ‘A Discourse on the Love of our Country’, in which he explores what constitutes a true, enduring and magnanimous version of patriotism. His ideas are as relevant today as they were in those heady days, even if the early promise of 1789 dissipated into a factious and quarrelsome nationalistic fervour.

Price critiques what we might call nationalistic or ‘vulgar’ patriotism, which is constituted by a number of doctrines. Firstly, the idea that patriotism implies believing in the objective superiority of one’s own country. This is childish, he opines; “were this implied”, he points out, “the love of their country would be the duty of only a very small part of mankind”. Secondly, vulgar patriotism implies a “spirit of rivalship and ambition” that drives countries to expand and enslave others, “forming men into combinations and against their common rights and liberties” (my italics). In other words, loving one’s own country does not imply waging a war against the rights of humankind in general, since what we share in terms of a common humanity is more important than what divides us. Thirdly, Price attacks the tendency of vulgar patriotism to imply that any critique of a country’s status quo is unpatriotic; that the loyalty of the patriot is to the country as it actually is, not a vision of what the country morally should and could be. “All our attachments”, he argues, “should be accompanied...with right opinions”. One should endeavour to create a country that one can be rightfully proud of, not glorify whatever welter of prejudice and injustice that happens to already exist.

The implication of this critique is an alternative idea of patriotism, what we might call ‘sceptical’ or ‘progressive’ patriotism; a patriotism that is not afraid to critique the existing social, political and economic structures of its country in the hope that one’s love of country can be most eloquently embodied in improving it; a patriotism that does not subordinate the interests of humanity in general to a narrow and factious belligerence; a patriotism that implies fondness and a genuine passion for what is best for one’s country without lapsing into a blind collective self-worship. It is possible to criticise this idea of patriotism as being toothless in its acceptance of the logic that what is most important is not what divides us as human beings but what unites us – in other words, one may argue that it is a watered down internationalism dressed up as ‘patriotism’. Once again, however, I revert to the arguments of Richard Price, who anticipated this objection back in 1789. “We are so constituted”, he pointed out, “that our affections are more drawn to some among mankind than to others, in proportion to their degrees of nearness to us, and our power of being useful to them”. In other words, although our interests should be subordinate to the interests of humanity in general, there is little that we can really do for such a broad and distant concept. Instead, we must harness the natural human instinct to favour the near-at-hand, what we are used to, what we are fond of out of familiarity, whilst not allowing this instinct to degenerate into a damaging chauvinism.

A good way of thinking about this vision of patriotism is the attitude we take to our families in the context of wider society. We prefer and are fond of our families, because we are used to them, and in practice we need an emotional succour and intimacy that implies exclusivity. However, few of us would seriously maintain that our families are objectively superior to all others – the most intelligent, attractive, worthwhile collection of people in the entire country. Furthermore, loving our families does not preclude us from seeking harmonious relations with people from further afield. We can love our families and have important friends and acquaintances from outside it without being inconsistent; loving our own families does not imply that we must hate everyone else’s. Perhaps most importantly, the love that we have for our family members does not preclude us from making honest criticisms of them, because we want the best for them. If our family has problems, then the truly loving thing is not to recklessly ignore them and pretend that everything is fine, but to address honestly the problems. We love our families, but this does not imply a chauvinistic hatred of everyone else, nor does it imply a general benevolence that is too vague to be meaningful.

Progressives must, therefore, love their country like they love their family – both wholeheartedly and sceptically, whilst being both constructively critical and selfless. We must harness the human passion to be attached to the near and familiar while keeping in mind humanity’s commonality and never failing to challenge a monolithic interpretation of what ‘really’ represents the country’s best interests. The Left as a broad movement must be able to say about itself what Harold Wilson said about the Labour Party in the 1960s - “We are not a flag-waving party. But we are a deeply patriotic party, because we truly represent the British people”.

'Conservative in Feeling and Radical in Politics': In Defence of 'Blue Labour'

2011-04-19T03:12:00.005+01:00

The critic Isaac Rosenfeld once remarked that George Orwell was a “radical in politics and a conservative in feeling”, a phrase that I like to steal for myself. However, to describe anyone thus is complete anathema to many of my comrades on the knee-jerk Left. To them, invoking the term ‘conservative’ in any sense is completely verboten. You are, in the lazy world of political labelling, either conservative, i.e. an evil baby-eating monster, or ‘progressive’, which ends up being a kind of watered-down euphemism for (mildly) ‘left-wing’. These terms are seen as being, by definition, polar opposites. Indeed, with the decline of the term ‘liberal’, these two terms are increasingly used to define the central dividing line of politics in the United States, and such a tendency is also discernible in British politics, where Labour politicians too squeamish to use the word ‘socialist’ describe themselves, rather pathetically in my view, as ‘progressives’.

Progress, however, is not central, in my view, to the point of socialist politics. Of course, it is true that historically elements of the Left have attempted to present themselves as the motor of human progress, of technological , scientific and economic advance. Marx claimed that a socialist society would be more efficient than capitalism, since capitalist relations of production fetter the development of productive forces, in stark contrast to the dynamism released by a system in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Many scientists were attracted to Communism in the 1920s and 1930s because they saw state planning and the elimination of the ‘anarchy’ of capitalist production as the rational guarantor of objective human progress. These delusions reached perhaps their final expression in the Soviet Union of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when, in a fit of optimism prompted by the accession of Khrushchev and the apparent economic successes of communism, the Soviet Communist party proclaimed that they would reach ‘communism by 1980’, by which point the Soviet system would finally defeat capitalism by proving how much more efficient, technologically advanced and wealthy it could make human society. The point of Khrushchev’s optimism was not just that Soviet-style socialism was fairer than capitalism, but that it could maximise objective measures of human value, such as wealth or scientific knowledge, more successfully than capitalism.

Of course, this has been shown to be so much verbiage and delusional claptrap. Which kind of social organisation has delivered greatest objective ‘progress’, in the sense of the greatest amount of wealth, technological advance, scientific research, and consumer goods is debatable. The obvious answer is liberal US-style capitalism, but the statist capitalism of many Asian countries or the social-democratic mixed economies of Europe also have a claim to this label. We can, however, say with some certainty that Soviet-style centralised state planning was not, in these narrow terms (and more generally), very successful relative to various models of capitalism.

The point, however, is that the ‘progress’ attendant on capitalist development has not necessarily given rise to more humane, civilised or decent societies. The maximisation of human wealth and utility under capitalism has not been an unalloyed good, for several reasons.

The obvious problem is that the highly unequal distribution of wealth and power that capitalism, particularly Anglo-Saxon neoliberal style capitalism, tends to create has meant that many of the objective benefits of ‘progress’ have not been equally shared out, both in class terms and geographically, and have actually been created via a process of exploitation and economic coercion that is deeply unjust. Capitalism, and especially neoliberal capitalism, perpetuates social injustice and prioritises the needs and desires of shareholders, corporations and the wealthy over the common good and the social rights of the majority, a process exacerbated by globalisation, which intensifies competition and leads to a race to the bottom in terms of welfare standards, labour rights and wages. This is a simplification of the arguments, and the general leftist critique of neoliberalism in these terms is well-known, and hardly needs elaboration here. However, it is a critique that I broadly support. Devising alternatives is trickier, but it seems likely that the most plausible and pragmatic solutions will be based, to some degree, around old-fashioned social democratic principles such as state regulation, collective provision of social goods, a redistributive welfare state, organised labour movements and progressive taxation, adapted to individual cultures and political realities.

However, as a critique of capitalism this is necessary, but not sufficient. What the Left also requires is an appreciation of the limits of ‘progress’ in terms of the mere maximization of simple utilitarian value. It needs to inoculate itself against the philistine disregard for the intrinsic value of the particular, the traditional, and the ‘given’ that is evident both on the Thatcherite economic right and the bureaucratised and distant Left. The Left, in short, needs to marry its concern for egalitarian and justice with a conservative, even ‘romantic’ appreciation of the needs of ordinary human beings for identity and stability; the perspective that can appreciate the value that humans attribute to institutions, places, and social arrangements in terms that go beyond the mere coldly calculating and instrumental.

In order to understand what I mean, it is perhaps best to consider the basic nature of capitalism. Capitalism is, as Marx rightly pointed out, a ruthlessly unsentimental, even revolutionary force. The forces of competition and the unregulated market are no respecters of persons, traditions or institutions. The following quotation from Marx sums this up perfectly:

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”

Under an unregulated capitalist system, objective calculations of such phenomena as profitability, market price, the costs of production and so on are the ultimate determinants of social organisation and social change. Furthermore, as Polanyi was to point out in his work The Great Transformation, places, environments and people are commodified. Human beings are effectively bought and sold on the labour market. Natural resources become raw materials to be traded on the market place. Institutions will only survive so long as they adapt to the rules of the market with its competitive pressures on price and quality.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the overall effect of this is deeply destabilising, and not in any way ‘conservative’. This is what makes many modern Conservatives such bafflingly contradictory figures. Tory MPs from the shires droning on about how the villages in their constituencies have lost their corner shops, or their local pubs or whatever is wearyingly familiar. Strangely, however, the same Tory MP is likely to support Thatcherite economic policies that deregulate markets, unleash competitive pressures, and ultimately allow massive capitalist corporations, who enjoy economies of scale and massive economic power, to destroy small businesses and enterprises. Like, for example, corner shops or local pubs.

Likewise, we can see the destabilising and dehumanising implications of neoliberal capitalism in terms of its effects on human beings. The assumption that human beings are commodities whose labour power can be traded in a market is ultimately based upon a false view of human nature. Humans have their own dynamic that is incompatible with being treated as a mere commodity. Adjustments in the labour market are not mere movements in the demand, supply and therefore the price of an object. They affect the job security, living standards, reasonable human expectations, local connections, mental health, pride, and self-respect of real, flesh-and-bone human beings. Likewise, treating land and the environment as a commodity ignores the impact that the dynamics of the creative destruction of markets has upon the landscapes that we enjoy and ecosystem that we rely on, both of which have an inherent value not easily reduced to the cost-benefit analyses of the bean-counters of late capitalism. As Polanyi argued, land, labour and money are not really commodities. Capitalism depends upon the fiction that they are in order to function, but it will always remain just that: a fiction, which contends against the reality of the inherent nature and particular values of human beings and Mother Nature ultimately in vain.

The root cause of the problem is that the market is incapable of appreciating the particular value embodied in human life, in social institutions and in the environment. By ‘particular value’ I mean inherent value that is difficult or impossible to translate into universal or general terms or a ‘common currency’. I mean the value that inheres in existing institutions or practices for particular people, things that are given, that provoke emotional ties and are not necessarily explicable in utilitarian terms. It arises from the simple fact that most or many human beings have a desire to, in the words of G.A. Cohen “conserve the valuable at the expense of maximizing value” because of their need for stability and identity.

For example, consider an elderly man whose house lies on the route of a new proposed motorway. He has lived in this house for 50 years. His children were born and grew up in it. He lived in it with his wife for many happy years. He is used to it, and likes it just the way it is. It evokes a whole series of memories for him, an intricate network of the associations of a lifetime. The motorway developer, desperate to demolish the house, offers the old man a huge payout to quietly move and let the bulldozers move in. The old man could buy a far bigger, far more expensive and, objectively speaking, far nicer house with the massive sum of money offered. However, he doesn’t want to, because, for all the advantages of having a bigger living room and a built-in dishwasher, it just isn’t the same. The house is a part of his identity, and no amount of money can destroy the personal bond and attachment he has to that house.

Is such a man irrational? I would say not. The idea that he is irrational springs from the mistaken idea that all human value can be reduced to some universal calculus, separate from the individuality and particularity inherent in human nature. As G.A. Cohen puts it, “it is an error to think that being rational about value requires the sort of abstract accounting of it that denies the value of particular things as such”. We can all find traces of the old man's conservative outlook in our own perspective. My own emotional attachments and particularities - to the Labour Party, to old school friends, to the house I used to live in Chelmsford, to my old school, to the films of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, to many of my old books, to Scunthorpe United, to the Railway Tavern (a pub in Chelmsford) and to my old teddy bear - many of them are scarcely comprehensible in any utilitarian or calculating terms, but still incalculably valuable to me.

However, as Cohen also points out, the problem is not just the economic forces of the market, which, in their attempt to reduce all human value to the universal, objective measures of profit and loss ignore the particularities and eccentricities of human value that make life bearable. The pragmatic dictates of state planning are equally problematic. If someone argues that a row of trees, to take a completely arbitrary example, ought to be conserved because of the particular and historic value that they have for local residents, then this argument is likely to cut little ice for council planners next to considerations of function or pleasing the majority. As Cohen puts it, planners will “usually... prefer a general consideration, something that the thing does well, or even the general consideration that a majority want it kept there – which is not, of course, the reason for keeping it there that the members of that majority themselves have.”

Now, the idea of prioritising the conservation of institutions, relationships, objects, environments or practices that have built up personal, customary or emotional values for human beings over ‘progressive’ or ‘objective’ measurements of utility is obviously open to question.

It can be pointed out that many such institutions and relationships may embody injustice or exploitation. Conservatives have used such a defence in order to justify continuing the worst kinds of cruel or unjust social phenomena. For example, Edmund Burke tried to defend the worst abuses of feudalism and the French ancien regime in a similar way, contrasting the supposedly intrinsically valuable trappings of the “age of chivalry” with “that of sophisters, economists, and calculators”. Just because the impersonal relations of the market might have their drawbacks, surely it is better than the partial, arbitrary and deeply hierarchical system that proceeded it?

This argument has some validity, but does not answer the central point, for the simple reason that the ‘conservative’ viewpoint I am defending aims to conserve social relationships and systems that have customary and particular value and as Cohen puts it, “wanting to conserve what has value implies no tenderness towards exploitation and injustice, since they lack value”. Even where unjust things do contain some inherent value, one can maintain a viewpoint that is conservative and simultaneously socialist by prioritising social justice where the conservative and egalitarian points contradict, while bearing in mind that in many cases they will not, and prioritising the conservation of the particular and the customary over the maximisation of utility will actually often tend to coincide with egalitarian aims. For example, protecting small local businesses against the competitive pressures of multinational firms or promoting the co-operative fan ownership of football clubs as an alternative to commercialisation and the depredations of the Abramovichs of this world are cases where the conservative attitude meshes nicely with the egalitarian.

All of this brings me, rather belatedly, onto ‘Blue Labour’, the much talked-about new trend of thinking within the Labour Party championed by Maurice Glasman.

‘Blue Labour’ has attracted a lot of criticism. Some are alarmed about its ‘social conservatism’, others about its economic prescriptions. Let me consider how what I have already said reflects the thinking of ‘Blue Labour’, and answer some of these criticisms of it.

Firstly, the ‘social conservatism’ of Blue Labour closely ties in to the idea of ‘particular value’. Some, faced with the term ‘social conservatism’, have panicked, imagining that this must instantly mean being a homophobe or a racist. What I understand Glasman to understand by it, however, is actually close to Cohen’s ideas about the validity of human beings valuing the customary and the particular in order to give them a sense of security and identity. It is a ‘social conservatism’ that embodies itself in fans of a local football team opposing being taken over by a billionaire investor who will not respect the club’s traditions or ethos. It is a ‘social conservatism’ that manifests itself when people oppose massive, soulless breweries taking over local pubs and turning them into homogenised, bland nonentities that serve a poor selection of badly-kept ale, or closing them down altogether. It is ‘social conservatism’ in the sense of conserving the local, the peculiar and the traditional in the face of the dictates of the market and large corporations. It implies a great deal more economic interventionism than New Labour ever advocated.

It is true that some of the socially conservative attitudes of ordinary people are not so honourable. Some people might think that intrinsic value inheres in being anti-immigrant or homophobic. Glasman and ‘Blue Labour’ are not advocating the validity of such a stance. They are arguing that we should take seriously the desire of ordinary people to have their sense of identity and desire for stability and social security valued over the imperatives of the market, instead of just dismissing these concerns as being ‘backwards’ or primitive, or unrealistic in an age of global neoliberalism. In many cases, this desire overlaps with views that are perfectly understandable and compatible with liberal stances on race or homosexuality. ‘Blue Labour’ advocates stressing these cases, and, as such, focussing on the areas where ordinary working-class people have completely valid concerns about the impact that neoliberal capitalism has on their security, identity and livelihoods. Furthermore, their valid attachments in terms of their local area, their religion or their families, which are natural and understandable, should not be looked down upon by snobby, ‘superior’ liberal-left types, but seen as valuable and compatible with a scepticism about markets and the effects of globalisation that should be central to the Labour Party’s egalitarianism. In some cases unattractive social attitudes may continue to exist, but if the Labour Party focuses on the valid social and economic concerns of working people rather than obsessing about identity politics in a way that is seen by many of them as irrelevant or low priority, then a trade off can be secured – we can win back working class support by taking their concerns about security and identity seriously and endorsing their conservatism when it is just, while in turn they will tolerate the Labour Party’s socially liberal views on many issues.

I know that some have argued that the general attitude of social conservatism, even defined in this sense, is wrong. They argue that it embodies a backward-looking and somewhat myopically nostalgic attachment to things past, when actually the reality is that we could be maximising the value that can be obtained from new institutions, relationships and practices. However, I think this is to completely ignore the reality of how most people, myself included, think and feel. Most people crave continuity, identity and security, and feel a sense of loss when familiar attachments or bonds are destroyed that can never fully be compensated for by the future. No-one can really escape this conservative mentality to some degree. The vast majority of human beings feel a sense of tragic and irreversible loss when, for example, their mother dies that can hardly be compensated for by the thought that you might meet someone else who is as nice tomorrow. Indeed, the family attachment is ‘irrational’ in a sense – looking at it in purely objective and impersonal terms, family bonds are arbitrary and there is no reason why one should have anything in common with one’s father or mother, or value their lives over anyone else’s. Hence Godwin’s famous argument that if you had to choose who to save in a burning house out of your own mother or Fenelon, you should choose the latter, because he has the potential to benefit the whole of society more. However, this attitude is so remote from how most people perceive the world as to make for a wholly unrealistic and emotionally shallow politics. Every ultra-rational utilitarian might deny the value of customary, arbitrary and traditional relationships and attachments in their arguments, but every action and sentiment of their lives belies such an attitude. Even William Godwin loved his mum, and I suspect that if he’d actually had a choice regarding whether to save her life or that of an Archbishop he didn’t know, his decision would not have been entirely consistent with the argument of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

A few extremely confused commentators have suggested that Blue Labour is a cover for a kind of re-heated neoliberalism. Billy Bragg wrote a spectacularly ignorant and ill-informed piece accusing Glasman of pursuing an ‘economically liberal agenda’ in the Guardian recently. Bragg has been losing the plot for some time, as his hilariously naive endorsement of the Lib Dems, not to mention his touching, if completely misguided, faith in the power of electoral reform to re-energise the left has shown. Indeed, Maurice Glasman has ably answered Bragg’s risible argument himself. Nonetheless, I think the economic radicalism of Glasman’s arguments needs emphasising. Glasman is seriously arguing against the dominant neoliberal assumptions of the last 30 years. He stands completely against the tendency of capital to reduce human beings to mere chattel to be bought and sold in labour markets, against the tendency to reduce land and resources to mere private investments, the return on which is to be maximised quite heedless of the social cost. He stands for defending and protecting the intrinsic, unmarketised human value of lives lived unharried by the logic and power of capital. His agenda seems to me to be trenchantly against privatisation and in favour of a considerable re-regulation of capital flows.

I think the source of the deeply puzzling attempts to pigeon-hole ‘Blue Labour’ as a cover for an anti-state or neoliberal agenda is the fact that Glasman is sceptical about the role of the post-1945 bureaucratic state in creating the kind of egalitarian society we socialists yearn for. He points to Labour’s pre-1945 traditions of mutualism, reciprocity and solidarity separate from the state, embodied in radically democratic organisations designed to challenge the domination of capital – co-operatives, trade unions, credit unions and so on. He points to these as an antidote to the excessively elitist and managerial style of elements of the social democratic state. I think the point that he is making here is similar to the critique made by Cohen of central or state planning, in the sense that it tends to be quite insensitive to local, customary and ‘particular’ assessments of value, and tends to make people into passive recipients of state aid, rather than citizens ready to collectively muck in to build the New Jerusalem together.

I would make two points here, one supportive and one marked by a note of caution. Firstly, heresy as it is for me to argue this, Glasman is right to a large extent. The 1945 government did many excellent things and was a great reforming government. However, its approach was undoubtedly too top-down, distant and statist. Its nationalisations, for example, didn’t really contribute much towards socialist aims. Private industries were merely transferred to an unresponsive and arrogant bureaucratic elite, as remote from the concerns of its workers and those who used its goods and services as the old private managers. Many noticed little difference between the old privatised industries and the new nationalised state companies. A genuine way to transfer power to working-class people would have been to have made such companies into co-operatives, responsive to the needs and values of the community at large and their workers, rather than run by the state in the interests of a small unaccountable elite. Democratic self-organisation is more vital, accountable and effective in many cases than top-down statism.

However, the state is, this point notwithstanding, still a great force for good. Making capital and economic power accountable to and working in the interests of ordinary working people is not best done via the state alone, but the state clearly still has a huge role to play in regulating private capital, protecting the rights of organised labour, and the collective provision of social goods, such as in the case of the NHS. Indeed, I strongly suspect that Maurice Glasman would agree with me here. He advocates a great deal more state interventionism in many spheres, since it is obvious that action at the level of the nation state (or indeed, beyond) is necessary to combat the dominance of capital in addition to autonomous democratic movements. It is not a case of either the state or civil society, but of both working to challenge the impersonal destabilisation and commodification of the market.

It strikes me that ‘Blue Labour’ sums up many of the impulses I and other Labour activists have had for some time now. We have become increasingly dominated by a bossy liberal elite who think that the working class should just ‘come to terms’ with globalisation and the rapid, destabilising change that it brings (while the Guardianistas enjoy their comfortable existences), who dismiss traditional social bonds and institutions, and the pastimes and passions of ordinary working class and lower-middle class people, as not being sufficiently ‘progressive’ or avant-garde enough for their tastes, and who often give the impression that the identity politics of the cultural left is more valid than the concerns of working people worried about their jobs, wages or housing. Too many people in the Labour Party live such separate lives from the majority of working people that they end up being insufferably patronisingly towards just those people whom we exist to represent. To put it bluntly, we need more people in the Labour Party who feel comfortable watching a football match, or going down the pub, or using the local library.

So, Blue Labour’s mixture of Cohen-esque conservatism in terms of our social, parochial and familial attachments and radicalism in terms of socialist economics strikes me not only as more coherent than the Conservative Right and liberal Left, not only as intellectually correct and emotionally satisfying, but also as a real vote-winner, marrying the most popular bits of the Labour movement’s traditions and carrying us away from the insufferably metropolitan and liberal emphases (both economically and socially) that have lost us so much support in recent years. Blue Labour might help us to remember that the egalitarian aims of the left are not incompatible, and in some ways are curiously consonant, with the human need for a sense of belonging, a sense of attachment to the familiar and the past, an attachment to family and country, and that being a conservative Socialist is, in many ways, the most consistent position of all.

'Whatever is...': Library fines, hangovers and that Mancunian Jesus

2011-02-21T01:18:00.006Z

It has often occurred to me that many things in life generally considered to be Bad Things are, in fact, Good Things. Leaving aside some of the obvious ones (emotional repression, 2am corner shop £3.99 red wine, Quote Unquote, Martin Jarvis), let’s consider library fines. Few people relish paying library fines, and, speaking as a particular veteran of this eternal book-based war between laziness and fear of embarrassment, I have more reason than most to detest them; the toxic sense of disapproval oozing like radioactive sludge from the fearsome bespectacled shrew of a librarian (why are 90% of librarians now women?), the rapid disappearance of those useful pound coins and fifty pees from the bottom of one’s wallet (so much more usefully spent on wine gums. Or, indeed, wine), the vague sense of self-loathing.

And yet, I put it to you that the library fine is actually a monument to human ingenuity and moral sense.

For a start, one has to wonder – why would they exist, if not without damn good reason? I may not go so far as Alexander Pope and say ‘Whatever is, is right’, but I would say that whatever is, certainly deserves lengthy consideration. Has a successful borrowing library ever existed without a fines policy? Could you get away with returning your scroll to the Great Library of Alexandra late with no fines? I don’t think so. The reason is simple – we are a few library fines away from anarchy.

Human beings, doing good, as they do, usually (but not exclusively) only out of necessity and fear, would, without library fines, almost cease to bother returning books within squinting distance of the return date. To take away the library fine would be to take away a hugely important moral sanction, based, not so much out of fear of pecuniary disadvantage, as out of fear of disapproval. When I return a library book, I’d willingly pay double the fine to avoid the thousand exquisite mental tortures of the look on the face of the librarian. That species of glare, when you hand back a tome and she notices that it was due back in 1974 or whenever, has, etched onto it, that most hateful and soul-grinding of all phrases: ‘I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed’ (a maxim becoming frighteningly near consideration for the epitaph engraving on my headstone).

The exquisite and explosive implication of this sentence is due to the fact that it sets in motion one’s own conscience. Outright anger rarely has much effect on the sinner – if one has done wrong, the only way to penance is through internal realisation, not unreasoning external ire. No alcoholic recovers by being berated – they recover by having their own finer (lesser?) inner sensibility awakened by acceptance – and, in the same way, no library finee is going to find absolution for their borrowing lapses by the lash of the librarian’s tongue (which is, incidentally, why librarianship invariably attracts the passive-aggressive type). The librarian, in many ways the superego of the keen reader, depends upon the existence of the fine for this awesome moral power. The payment of the fine gives her the ritualistic opportunity to highlight one’s transgression. Having to actually mention the lateness of a return in some vulgar overt way would put the onus on her and make her look petty – the fine makes it clear that she is merely impartially upholding the eternal laws of library-based justice, and it is you, importunate reader, who is in the wrong.

Without this admonitory force, libraries would descend into chaos. People would return books later and later. Shelves would empty. Holds and reservations would become meaningless and futile gestures towards the unobtainable. Public libraries would be ransacked.

Library fines would, however, still be a Good Thing even if they did not underpin the system of moral discipline that facilitates the smooth functioning of the library. Their effect cannot be seen in mere utilitarian terms. They are a just and fitting marker of ethic transgression. It is only right that if one does wrong –if one neglects one’s social duty to return one’s books on time, thus upsetting the delicate ecosystem of mutuality, duty and rights that underpins the library - one deserves to be punished. It is a matter as simple as that.

This is all by-the-by. The real subject of my consideration in the category of ‘Things considered Bad which are actually Good’ is the related-but-different phenomenon of the hangover.

It is a seemingly obvious commonplace that hangovers are, basically, fucking awful. P.G. Wodehouse’s categorisation of hangovers into six types (The Broken Compass, The Sewing Machine, The Comet, The Atomic, The Cement Mixer and The Gremlin Boogie, since you ask) says it all. Hangovers, one instinctively reflects, are curious, compressed oceans of pain and disgust, invading your brain with stabbing pricks of light, heightening the senses to agonising degrees, making you feel like an elephant with diarrhoea stamped on and then shat upon your cerebral cortex.

And yet! Look, or rather feel, a little closer and a different impression emerges. I would call myself not a veteran of hangovers past but a connoisseur of hangovers to come. A friend of mine claims that he never gets hangovers (which given how much booze he shifts makes it one of the wonders of the world). I do not envy him.

Firstly, every hangover is a complex thing. It has its shift in moods, its changes in tone, its quirks of personality. Any seasoned aficionado of the hangover knows that each hangover is an individual, a unique phenomenon with a different character. And within this maelstrom of sensation, it seems obvious to me that patches of real pleasure emerge. I cannot be the first to point out the existence of that warm inner glow, that sense of internal displacement and floating tranquillity that makes up the middle part of the truly thumping hangover.

However, not even a masochist like me can ignore the obvious sensual torture that often accompanies the hangover – the lurching stomach, the swimming nausea, the knifing headache. Within the internal moral economy of the hangover, this is only right. The warm buzz only gets it effect from its contrast with the hellish torture of the initial shock and pain.

This illustrates the wider meaning of the hangover. When one is hungover, one languishes within one’s own depravity and sensual excess. One has a constant physical reminder of one’s own stupidity, a lingering moral commentary on the extravagance and squalor of the night before. This internal reminder motivates us, at least temporarily, towards sobriety, towards internal cleanliness, productivity, wholesome and upright conduct. One rarely feels a more bracing tendency towards and love of virtue than when emerging from the self-imposed depths of the hangover. It is only the contrast with the self-degradation of, among other things, the hangover that gives rectitude and diligence their value.

And, to look at it from completely the other direction, the debasement of the hangover ends up as a tribute to the profound joys of the grain and the grape. Nothing is a more eloquent testament to drinking than the fact that, despite it all, despite the nausea and vomiting and pain, we still return. Just as the folly of the Trojan war is the most potent illustration of the beauty of Helen, the pain of the hangover says more about the power of the joy of alcohol than anything else ever could.

As such, the hangover is a moving part in the complex mechanism of human motivation. We get drunk, and enter a wonderful period of openness, relaxation and sociability. We continue getting drunk, in an attempt to prolong the sensation, until we get sick. We wake up hung over. The hangover is a natural self-corrective to our heedless self-indulgence. In reaction, we seek contrast and veer towards the other direction, towards abstinence and sensible behaviour, gaining from this a due sense of virtue. Sensible behaviour soon cloys and makes us desire the release of booze and drunkenness as a suitable (gin and) tonic. An eternal cycle ensues, wherein one state creates the necessary precondition for the experience of the pleasure of its opposite. The smooth, as ever, requires and gains its meaning only from its contradistinction to the rough, in the case of the hangover, to feeling rough.

My point, insofar as there is one, is that we condemn too many things too easily, without duly considering their indispensability in the general scheme, the fact that they are part of and inseparable from the overall phenomenon, which must be understood and valued in its entirety, or not at all.

Consider The Fall, the longstanding band fronted by Mark E Smith (part genius, part utter-fucking-headcase, all Mancunian Jesus). The curious thing about The Fall, other than the fact that it has had more band-members than the average hedgehog has spines, is the sheer mass of music the ban has produced. There are God-knows-how-many Fall albums, singles and EPs. Listening to every Fall song would be the musical equivalent of reading every Charles Dickens novel back-to-back, like Tony Last in A Handful of Dust.

Of the hundreds and hundreds of Fall songs, many are utter snarling gems – Eat Y’Self Fitter, Hit the North, Totally Wired, Oh! Brother etc etc etc . However, the undoubted truth is that there are many, many deeply shit Fall songs, some practically unlistenable. Mark E Smith is such a bizarre, scattergun, addled mind that he tends to produce brilliance or dross.

However, this is the unalterable excellence of The Fall. You can’t cherry-pick The Fall. You have to accept the whole kit and caboodle, or it means nothing. The peak only exists due to the trough. The Fall is everything, or it is nothing.

And just as without the shit, there is no Fall, similarly without the fines there is no Library and without the hangover there is no Drink. With that in mind, let us judge things that are ostensibly Bad more judiciously, and remember that even in the most seemingly harsh and unforgiving concept – say Noel Edmonds – there may be but some scrap of good.

‘How You Played the Game’: The Far Left, the cuts and barren purism

2011-02-15T13:02:00.001Z

Churchill famously said that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. Similarly, I would say that the best argument against the Far Left is a five minute conversation with the average SWP member.

This thought occurred to me whilst at a demonstration this morning protesting against the County Council’s budget cuts at Shire Hall. Some of the protestors had some sense, but some of them, it seemed to me, really are clueless about the realities of politics not only in the current climate, but in general.

Some of them were advocating that all councillors, including Labour ones who are opposed to the cuts, should resign and force by-elections in light of the budget, as if that would achieve anything meaningful. It might provide a few restless SWP activists with an opportunity to vent some of their rage and satisfy their lust for frantic, albeit toothless, activity, but it would not make one iota of difference to the cuts that are coming to bus services, social care and libraries, and it would cost thousands of pounds that councils can ill afford.

Others, overwhelmed with misty-eyed fantasies of romantic 1926-style resistance, advocate a General Strike. Given that a General Strike didn’t work when we had a far larger trade union movement and the realities of the law would mean that any unions involved in sympathy strikes would probably be bankrupted by legal action, this is possibly even further away from a viable or vaguely sane tactic.

In other parts of the country the Far Left argues that Labour councils should attempt to set illegal budgets and not implement any cuts at all, despite huge cuts to their formula grant from central government. This tactic, which worked so well in the mid 1980s (er...), is possibly the stupidest. Due to changes in the law, council officers would merely be legally empowered to implement a legal budget, which would contain huge cuts made with no reference to anyone’s political priorities. It would see a return to ‘grotesque chaos’ and end up being counterproductive, probably hurting the people who we, as Labour councillors, come into politics to protect worse than would otherwise be the case. The argument is seriously put forward that if every Labour council refused to set a legal budget, with mass public support, we could somehow bring down the government. Such unanimity and public support simply does and will not exist, and even if it did, central government still has, ultimately, both the money and the legal power to make any fight between local government and Whitehall so uneven as to be a pointless waste of time.

If we start to blame Labour councillors for the effect of the cuts that are being caused by Eric Pickles’s decision to slash central government funding, we are falling into the neat trap set for us by the government. Their strategy is devastatingly simple, and potentially very effective. They are making the biggest local government cuts in the poorest areas, which are almost uniformly Labour -dominated, safe in the knowledge that Labour councils will have little realistic choice but to try to deal with the huge black holes in their finances by making cuts. Then, Cameron, Clegg and co will turn around and blame Labour councils for the cuts despite the obvious fact that they are being caused by the decisions being made by central government. It will obscure the nature of the cuts in the minds of voters and could allow the government to wriggle out of the blame for the pain that is coming. Our message must be clear – cuts to this degree and at this speed are the result of an ideological, political choice on the part of the Tory-Lib Dem government, and the responsibility rests unambiguously with them, not Labour councillors put into impossible positions by cuts to their grants.

It is hardly surprising that the tactics advocated by the Far Left are, to put it politely, highly ineffective. This is because serious people who are realistic about actually having a concrete impact on the policies of central and local government, who want to actually get rid of this government at some point and implement an alternative, are not in the SWP or the Socialist Party or Workers’ Liberty or the Communist Party or whatever the fringe party de jour is. They are in the Labour Party and always will be, and, as such, they realise that we are constrained by the need to carry the public with us, to convince actual voters of the justice of our cause, and to pursue realistic strategies which may involve compromise and complexity.

The psychology of the Far Left is, in general terms, a mystery to me. The essence of being on the left is, I would have thought, the desire to right the wrongs of the world, to change our society for the better, to make concrete improvements in the lives of ordinary people. This desire necessarily, to me, implies pursuing strategies that might actually result in the achievement of power and the actual real-world implementation of the kind of policies we want. The strategies for implementing change advocated by the Far Left are so unlikely that the only way that anyone can take them seriously is by colossal amounts of wishful thinking. Their thinking goes along the lines of: ‘All it takes is for the revolutionary consciousness of the masses to be awakened, and lo! The glorious day is upon us!’ – if we continue to plug away and make the same old arguments for the same old dogma, eventually everyone will come round to our way of thinking. Anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that this is nonsense. It degenerates into a senseless clinging to the purity of principle at the expense of the acquisition of power, which is utterly useless to the poor, the elderly, working families and the other people whom the left exists to protect. It reduces the left to a toothless pressure group, with as much influence on public policy as that implies.

A Labour veteran – former branch Chair, active in the party for many decades – recently summed up my feelings on Labour politics. He said that the most radical elements of the left, those on the hard-left of the Labour Party, are always the well-off ones who are not greatly affected by government policy. This is a generalisation of course, but if you are at the sharp end – if this cut will hurt you or if that policy is something you rely on – then you are likely to want to a strategy that will actually work. The knowledge that you remained completely faithful to your principles while losing power and letting the Tories in is, to such people, absolutely no consolation at all. As Kinnock said in his famous 1985 speech against Militant, some on the Left end up like “latter-day public school-boys”, since to them “it matters not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game”.

This mental attitude embodied by so many on the Far Left is what Weber called the ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ which, if not tempered with an ‘ethic of responsibility’, leads to people obsessed with the salvation of their own soul but completely heedless of the consequences of their actions. Indeed, it seems to me to be a mutation of the religious impulse, the idea that “the Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord” (to quote Weber again), that what matters is being right, being acceptable to God, not the unworthy temporal concerns of the veil of tears. Unfortunately, politics is not like religion. Religious belief is a matter of saving your own soul according to your individual conscience, whereas politics is necessarily a question of collective change in the real world, which, if it to avoid inane infantilism, must recognise that holding unimpeachable principles and supporting justice does not necessarily lead to good in the world. In other words, the idea that “from good comes only good; but from evil only evil follows” is clearly not true in the world in politics. The actions of good people, if are irresponsible or without a realistic appreciation of actual circumstances, can often, despite the best of intentions, have bad consequences.

I cannot emphasise enough how the Labour Party must avoid lapsing into this attitude, which characterised much of our reaction to the last Tory government. I have only been a councillor for 3 months, but already the reality of being in opposition is getting very boring. Opposition is shit. You have very little power to help people, you oppose and shout and berate and get nowhere, or at best you manage to achieve occasional minor and tactical successes whilst the general course of Tory policy continues unabated. You can only do what we come into politics to do with power. I can only imagine what the 18 years of Tory government last time round was like – it must have been mind-numbingly awful. We cannot fall into the same traps. We must avoid the siren voices on the hard left who want us to make exactly the same mistakes of the 1980s. The Labour Party must remember that it is NOT a pressure group. This is not to say that we need to revert to power without principle, which at times seemed to embody New Labour. Just as principle without power is sterile idleness, power without principle is an utterly soulless and pointless exercise in managerialism. Nonetheless, the danger we face most keenly at the moment is falling victim to the siren voices of the hopeless day-dreamers of the Far Left.

Of course, luckily, most people who are sensible enough to realise this are already in the Labour Party, and those who embody the mindset of the public schoolboy, for whom winning the game is unimportant, are on the Far Left fringes. However, to those on the Left outside of the Labour Party, I leave you with a wonderful quotation from Nye Bevan, hardly a right-winger or a soulless New Labour hack: “I have no time for those who appear to threaten the whole of private property, but who, in practice, would threaten nothing; they are the purists and, therefore, barren.”

The Labour Party and the perils of Cultural Leftism

2011-01-16T22:38:00.002Z

That the Labour Party is in danger of becoming a regional party, almost non-existent outside its heartlands, such as Scotland, the North, south Wales and London, has been much remarked upon. However, another danger, less obvious, is that it also seems to me in danger of becoming, and indeed to a degree already has become, in a sense contrary to its founding spirit, a sectional party dominated by cultural leftism and identity politics. Let me explain.

The Labour Party went through a process under Tony Blair whereby, in his banal attempts to soft-soap the middle classes, it came to retreat from its core commitment to the twin views that socio-economic class is the basic source of exploitation in society, and that the elimination, or at least amelioration, of the privilege and disadvantage attendant on untrammelled capitalism and class division is the historic mission of the left. With the changing social structure of Britain, the decline of post-war class loyalties and consciousness, and the cultural revolution unleashed by Thatcherism, Labour arrived at the self-perception that it was no longer possible to secure election on platforms underpinned by this basic analysis. Not only that, but in an effort to make a virtue of perceived-necessity, Blair and some of his more zealous disciples seemed to come to truly believe that class division and privilege was no longer important.

An unintended and unfortunate consequence of this was that many elements in the Labour Party began, in an act of displacement, to focus more heavily in their analysis of British society on other sources of exploitation and disadvantage, such as homophobia, sexism, and racism. If being poor is not the most important and all-pervading handicap in British society, they seemed to reason, then it must be being gay! Or being a woman! Or being a transsexual! And so on and so forth with myriad other identity tags and labels.

Now, clearly racism, sexism and homophobia, etc, are senseless and do act as sources of disadvantage and discrimination. However, the Labour Party’s cultural leftist wing (exemplified by Harriet Harman) has shown a tendency to elevate these problems unduly. Cultural leftism is, so far as I see it, the idea that certain demographic groups, defined by some inborn or culturally constructed characteristic – being a woman, being gay etc - are more oppressed than others and deserve special favours, with a particular proviso; that being poor no longer counts as a valid identity tag of oppression, or is certainly a less important one.

The brute fact, however, is this. Class is far more important than any other source of disadvantage. Undoubtedly, discrimination against women, and gay people, and black people, and so on, does exist, and is despicable, and of course Labour should oppose sexism, racism and homophobia (a role we have performed honourably since the 60s). However, no amount of quibbling can disguise the fundamental fact that being poor is far more of a handicap than belonging to any of these other identity groups. Many people who are female, or black, or gay live fulfilling lives largely free of obvious oppression and disadvantage in modern British society. Why? Largely, because they are affluent enough to be in a position where they have the resources and opportunities to do what they want to do and realise themselves. Being black or female or gay is not as alienating, restricting or oppressive as simply being poor, and indeed generally the injustices suffered by people on the basis of their race or sexual orientation or gender are intensified by poverty.

This is not really recognised sufficiently in the modern Labour Party, with its obsession with non-class based sectional demographic interest groups – the LGBT movement, feminism, the BAME movement, and so on, manifested in such things as all-women shortlists, and a preoccupation with the number of black or Asian representatives we have, for example. Part of me thinks that this is because we are dominated by middle-class Fabians who, having had little experience of being poor, tend to fall too readily into assuming equivalence between class, and race, sexuality and gender. Whatever the reason, internal hacks or MPs are always mithering about the lack of female or black representation in the Labour Party, and we obsess over identity politics to an inordinate degree, but what about the lack of working class representation in parliament? I do not necessarily mean that we should have ‘all working class shortlists’ (such devices seem to me to be, more than anything, a way of imposing central control on local CLPS, and defining who is or is not working class would be fraught with difficulty), or even that questions of personnel are necessarily all that important, but that the interests of working class people need forceful representation in parliament, and that their interests deserve predominance over questions of identity politics. After all, these interests have, in many ways, been neglected sorely in parliament over the past 30 years, in a way that, for example, the interests of gay people (thanks to the last Labour government) have not.

So we come to a situation whereby there is a perception amongst certain elements of the working class, particularly the white working class, which is not entirely unjustified, that the Labour Party stands for gay people, immigrants, and women, but not so much for them. Now, this does not mean that we should abandon our liberalism on issues of race, gender and sexuality, but that we should divert our focus from that liberalism and concentrate instead on what is to my mind the fundamental founding mission of the Labour Party – to ameliorate the causes and consequences of socio-economic inequality and class division.

This is a difficult task, however, because class divisions are far more nuanced and subtle, and more difficult to solve, than other forms of division. Class-war politics is not really feasible, and we no longer have an homogenous industrial working class base. However, a focus on the bread-and-butter issues that shape the contours of class and inequality in Britain, such as housing, public services, education, the welfare state, rights at work, and so on, formulated in such a way as to take account of the economic anxieties of the middle class (who have lost out hugely in relative terms to a small elite at the top in recent years, and in that sense are, relatively, victims of class division too), is feasible, and it is politically viable. What’s more, if accompanied with a toning down of our apparent obsession with gender, sexuality and race, it would reconnect us with our working class supporters and unite us without forsaking our admirably liberal attitudes.

On the Pleasure of Ironing

2010-12-11T20:08:00.001Z

Many Buddhists claim that the performance of mundane, everyday tasks can help them on their eightfold path to enlightenment. I am not a Buddhist myself, but I when I contemplate ironing, that most heavenly of pleasures, I can see how they may be right.

I currently have a huge pile of ironing dumped in my room. Shirts, trousers, jumpers – almost all of the garments I own – are crumpled on my bed. However, I regard this prospect not with a vague sense of futility and reluctance, but with a frission of anticipation that may make you uneasy.

The first pleasure of ironing is derived from the satisfaction one gets from the careful marshalling of the linen, cotton or silk that is required to expertly purge the garment’s creasing. Any idiot can iron, say, a scarf (if they felt so inclined), with its simple straightness. However, in order to get the sleeves, collars, cuffs, hems and bodies of shirts done nicely, one needs to judiciously and tenderly fold and tug the material into the correct position to iron, otherwise one ends up going over folds and creases and making them worse. This gradual process of easing the material into the right position has a skill and a subtlety to it that makes successful ironing a genuine pleasure – it’s like systematically and clinically peeling a piece of fruit to leave the tender, raw flesh underneath naked and exposed.

The second pleasure is the sensual side. If one uses fragrant ironing water, one’s room becomes filled with the smell of blueberry or jasmine, summer fruits or lily; all of the sweet aromas of the English country garden or orchard brought to you via the industrial steel plates of one’s iron. One’s clothes are softer to the touch, more yielding and balmy, after the caress of one’s trusty steam machine. Nothing beats lying on sheets and bedclothes that have recently been ironed – it produces an unmistakable and irreproducible sensation of freshness and crispness.

Ironing’s other attractions are more psychological. I find much of my existence spent in a state of anxiety about the possibility that I am wasting my life. The ticking of the second hand of the clock thuds into one’s guts the sense that moments spent idling are morally unacceptable wastes of the limited and irreplaceable commodity of time. However, I find this vague and unsettling anxiety assuaged, soothed, even eliminated, by ironing. I find that having completed an ironing session my conscience is settled. I feel that I have not wasted my time, that whatever else I should or could have been doing – writing that definitive biography of Kierkegaard, say, or composing that piano concerto – I would still have had to do the ironing, and therefore I did not iron in vain. Unlike watching the TV or surfing the internet or whatever other mundane tasks one fills one’s life with, it never feels like time wasted, empty or sterile.

This is linked to the fact that ironing is an inherently civilised thing to do. Humans should live clean and hygienic lives. We must clean our clothes. The act of cleaning our clothes makes them creased and untidy, and in order to look respectable they must be ironed. To not do so would be a deviation from civilised behaviour, a sign that one cannot be bothered to uphold decency. The act of ironing is, therefore, never an unproductive use of a couple of hours. It feels to me that if not done, it is another little sign of a society slipping away from firm and common standards, like when people talk loudly about how much they earn or refuse to give up their seat on the bus to an elderly person. I think that the final descent into anarchy or a post-apocalyptic wasteland would, whatever else it heralded, be marked, perhaps most tellingly of all, by the decline of ironing.

Ironing is also a sober and educational act. Although it requires a kind of intuitive skill that is satisfying to practice, it leaves much of one’s conscious mind to other things. As a result, one can listen to the radio or watch a documentary whilst ironing. I have listened to countless editions of ‘In Our Time’ and ‘Brain of Britain’ whilst ironing, in which time I have learnt more than an Oxbridge education ever taught me. One can also think and reflect. Many of my best ideas have occurred to me whilst stoking the steam. Because of this possibility of learning or creating while ironing, the activity becomes doubly significant. Not only is one upholding civilisation by the very act of ironing itself, but one can imbibe knowledge or cogitate at the same time. It is time twice over, time deepened and enriched to a degree almost impossible to imagine in connection with any other activity.

So, to all of you who don’t iron, or see it as a chore, you are missing a subtle and unique pleasure. Your life will be enriched greatly by bearing in mind that to err is human, to iron divine.

No to Noel: Why Christmas is like pissing in a urinal

2010-12-01T19:52:00.001Z

My disillusion with Christmas was a relatively sudden process. Within the space of one or two Christmases it went from being an exciting, comfortable, looked-forward-to occasion to being, frankly, a pain in the arse. Now, I inwardly cringe every year from about mid-November, when the first garish displays appear in the shop and you start to hear Rudolph the sodding Red-nosed Reindeer everywhere you go.

Now, I know what you’re thinking – bah humbug! What a miserable bugger I must be, whinging about the time of peace to the world and goodwill to all men. However, I maintain that there a number of entirely valid reasons to hate Christmas that go beyond the usual lazy soul-searching about its commercialisation.

My first and probably biggest problem with Christmas is the way it introduces an air of forced and sometimes inappropriate jollity to everything. At Christmas, everyone is expected to have a good time, be cheerful and enjoy themselves. This atmosphere of expectation kills any prospect of fun for me. Humour, joy and tenderness will never result if you try to force them – they “simply occur”, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. It’s a bit like trying to piss in a gents’ toilet. The fact that the blokes at the neighbouring urinals are dimly aware of whether you are successfully having a slash or not makes actually performing the act remarkably difficult, as most men who are not blithely unselfaware morons will have noticed.

That the expectation of performance makes performance all the more difficult is not a blindingly original observation. However, it deserves to be pointed out that this problem is compounded in the case of Christmas by the stubborn facts of reality. The vicissitudes of life are unpredictable, and there is no way of guaranteeing that Christmas will not occur at a difficult or challenging time, when all of the plastic, manufactured cheeriness and ‘goodwill’ chafes particularly painfully. Anyone who has had a close family member or friend die near Christmas will testify to this. I remember attending the funeral of a friend held in early January who died around Christmas time. The timing lent it a particularly plaintive and miserable quality. When one knows that one is expected to be happy and cheerful but feels merely despair, the contrast makes the unhappiness all the more difficult to bear.

I remember this particularly during the Christmas that immediately followed my parents’ divorce. My mother had taken the divorce and its circumstances extremely (and understandably) badly. The isolation that she felt that Christmas made enjoying Christmas impossible. What made it all the worse was that she felt guilty about not being cheerful for me, which in turn made her despair even more. It didn’t do much for my levels of merriment either.

There are other reasons to dislike Christmas. Firstly, most heathens like me will feel vaguely bemused by the fact that, although Christmas is a Christian festival, it is culturally engrained that everyone will celebrate it regardless of their actual beliefs. I do not believe that Christ is our saviour who will absolve our sins, and I do not set any store at all by the occasion of the (supposed) anniversary of his birth. However, if I ignored it completely – if I never bought anyone presents, pretended that 25th December is just another day – I would be seen as acting very strangely indeed. Some smart-alecs have in the past suggested to me that as a consistent atheist, I should do just this and ignore Christmas, not even participating in any of its semi-secular rituals like the tree, Christmas pudding or presents. Glib and consistent though this argument is, it is clearly impossible to altogether avoid Christmas within the context of British society and existing social relationships without making life fairly difficult for oneself and probably offending some people whom one loves. So, most atheists have to half-heartedly go through the motions and pretend that Christmas has some significance to avoid greater inconveniences, or else unashamedly confess that Christmas is just a thinly-veiled excuse for everyone to eat and drink too much, which makes the whole thing a very shallow and faintly depressing affair. As for those of other faiths, I expect that Christmas for them must be a pretty tricky affair in Britain, since any small Hindu or Muslim child is going to be naturally baffled, given their likely lack of appreciation of the finer points of religious division, as to why almost all of their peers are receiving presents and having a good time when they are not

Furthermore, Christmas seems to illustrate human folly and cruelty particularly sharply. It is meant to be a time of good-will and peace, when existing wars or injustices temporarily pause. The guns on the Western Front cease, the homeless are treated in a slightly more human way for a day, and so on. Surely, however, all this does is illustrate how absurd and unforgivable human social and political organisation is for the rest of the year? If it takes Christmas for people to stop butchering each other or for people to give a second thought to the desperate, the homeless, and the poor, then what does that say about most people? It seems self-evident to me that all human beings have a duty to act with decency consistently, not merely because they happen to remember, for one day a year, that morality, you know, actually exists. It’s almost as if man’s inhumanity to man is fine, so long as one has the good manners to refrain for a few days around the time when Christ was supposedly born, it being a little gratuitous to juxtapose the (supposed) Christian message of loving kindness so very blatantly with the hypocrisies of our existing societies.

In short, Christmas seems to me to illustrate the painful contradictions of our culture in a stark way. The cheerful expect those with fairly valid reasons to be miserable to suddenly snap out it. Non-Christians have little choice but to adapt and pay lip-service to the celebration of something that they do not believe in, or risk making themselves unpopular or hurting others’ feelings. Those who endorse war and poverty cry crocodile tears for a day over the injustices they do nothing to ameliorate, and a lot to prolong, the other 364 days a year.

Please, fast-forward me to January now...

The Meaning of Bogart

2010-09-11T22:53:00.004+01:00

Is the popularity of Humphrey Bogart currently languishing? In the 1960s, Bogey-worship reached cultish proportions. His persona – the romantic outsider – accorded perfectly with the iconoclastic spirit of youthful rebellion that characterised the 1960s. Having a poster of Bogart on the wall of one’s student bedsit was the modish cliché of the era – he was seen as a more cerebral, more mature James Dean-figure. It seems to me, however, that his iconic status and popularity are seriously diminishing.

He still has his adherents, but, like Existentialism and Northern Soul, he has been going out of fashion since his 60s zenith, even as his reputation as an actor amongst film buffs and critics remains very high, perhaps higher today than when he was alive. Go to a DVD shop, and you’re likely to find little else other than Casablanca and The African Queen. I’ve looked in many book-shops, but acquiring a biography of him is almost impossible without using the internet. You can find endless Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe box-sets in HMV, but Bogie ones are poorly stocked. Shockingly, many of my contemporaries have not even heard of him, or if they have, they have not seen many or any of his films.

This is a very unfortunate state of affairs. To me, Bogart’s work contains a core of moral seriousness, of meaning, that makes him indispensable, absolutely worthy of his iconic status. He is, to put it simply, one of the most compelling figures in the history of film.

Much of his worth, I think, stems from the distinctive ‘Bogie’ persona he crafted for himself, which shaped the scripts he was given and the direction of his films. He was one of very few actors who probably had as much impact on the nature of a picture as the director, simply because of his identity and style. What was this persona, and how did it shape the meaning of his great films? In short, what was the meaning of Bogart?

The first observation to make is that the Bogart persona evolved only gradually, and finds mature expression only in a fraction of the films he made overall. When Bogart first started appearing in films, he was a studio workhorse churning out whatever potboilers the studio demanded in order to earn a bare living. Only gradually did the studios and their writers and directors begin to realise that Bogart was at his most compelling playing certain kinds of roles in certain kinds of films. His partnership with director John Huston really began to draw the best out of him in films such as The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo and The African Queen.

The Bogart persona is defined by two conflicting strands. The first and most obvious aspect of it is his cynicism and apparent selfishness. In film after film he plays characters who, at first sight, are basically jaded, who disclaim any idealistic or romantic notions, who have retreated to a position of self-interest and distrust; who are, in essence, out for themselves, having lost belief in anything bigger than their own individual desires.

The most famous example of this is the character of Rick in Casablanca, who initially tries to tread a path of neutrality between Vichy France/the Nazis, and the Resistance. He is, he proclaims, only interested in making money through his cafe, and, later on, in recapturing the heart of Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), with whom he previously had an affair in Paris. He claims that he has no interest in fighting the Nazis, and is not prepared to help Victor Laszlo (the fine Paul Henreid), heroic resistance leader and Ilsa’s husband, escape from the Nazis – in fact, he wants to use the letters of transit out of Casablanca that he has acquired to escape from Casablanca himself with Ilsa, whom he still loves. As Rick puts it, “I stick my neck out for nobody!”.

It gradually becomes apparent that Rick may not be the cynical bastard he initially appears to be. Laszlo points out that he ran guns to Ethiopia in 1935 to help in the fight against the fascist Italians, and that he fought for the Republicans against Franco in the Spanish Civil War – in other words, previously he has always helped the anti-Fascist cause, the side of right and justice. He also allows the band to play the Marseillaise in the brilliantly tense scene in his cafe when Laszlo initiates an impromptu sing-off against the Nazi officers who are bellowing a German nationalist song, implying sympathy for the Allied cause.

The final act of Rick’s redemption comes in the famous final scene, when, after planning to escape with Ilsa and leave Laszlo to the depredations of the Nazis (indeed, it even seems that he will betray Laszlo by helping the police arrest him), he abruptly changes his mind and lets Laszlo escape. He even takes a personal risk, forcing Renault, the chief of police, to allow Lazlo’s escape at gunpoint. He thus sacrifices his personal desires – his love for Ilsa and desire to escape from the febrile atmosphere of Casablanca – for a greater cause. His reasoning is summed up in his stirring speech in which he observes that Ilsa must leave because she is vital to Victor, “the thing that keeps him going”, and that if she does not leave she’ll regret it, “Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life”. He sums it up by declaring that although he’s “no good at being noble...it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”. In other words, there is something bigger than himself, a cause worth making sacrifices for. His initial cynical posturing is shown up as a sham, a mask used to protect himself against disappointment. This underlying idealism is the second strand of the Bogart persona.

Rick’s final act of sacrifice is, I think, the fundamental point of the entire film. In its message of hope resides the film’s greatness. Its romance depends on an ending which, in a conventional sense, is ‘unhappy’, but which conveys the great moral that there is always a better and more ethical cause and course of action worth pursuing over mere self-interest. We should try to do the right thing, even when it involves sacrifice or transcending our selfish interests. This message derives all its potency in the film from Rick’s, and therefore Bogart’s, persona. It is only because Rick acts in an amoral, self-interested way to begin with that his final act of altruism seems significant and powerful – his change of heart is the film’s dramatic hinge. Without Bogart and its basically moral message, Casablanca would now be a half-remembered old film that no-one watches.

The message and functioning of the Bogart persona work in the same way in another of Bogart’s greatest pictures, To Have and Have Not, which was his first film with Lauren Bacall. The plot is similar to Casablanca. Bogart plays Harry ‘Steve’ Morgan, a jaded fisherman working in Martinique just after the fall of France in the summer of 1940. Martinique being a French colony, it is under Vichy control. The owner of the hotel in which Harry is living is a resistance sympathiser, who asks for Harry’s help in smuggling some resistance leaders to the island. At first, Harry refuses. He is interested only in running his fishing business, and will not risk helping the resistance, since he knows that if he is found out by the Vichy authorities he will end up imprisoned on Devil’s Island. When asked his sympathies by the Police Captain, he answers, “minding my own business”. Once again, he plays the apparently neutral, amoral individualist not interested in “sticking his neck out” for anyone.

However, when his money is confiscated by the Police Captain and he finds himself broke, he agrees to help the resistance in exchange for payment. In transporting the resistance fighter Paul de Bursac and his wife, Harry’s boat is attacked by a Vichy patrol vessel and de Bursac is shot and injured. They cannot get him to a doctor because the Vichy authorities are scrutinising his every move. Morgan, who has some rudimentary first aid knowledge, agrees to remove the bullet and help save de Bursac’s life. The Vichy authorities try to bribe Harry to betray the resistance members, but he refuses. Harry even overpowers the Captain of Police and forces him at gunpoint to free his alcoholic friend whom they are interrogating, as well as signing harbour passes for de Bursac.

Although Harry Morgan agrees to help at first out of financial necessity, he ends up going out of his way to assist the resistance fighters, as the Vichy authorities’ behaviour begins to offend his sense of justice. The mask of indifference and apolitical individualism once again falls to reveal a basic core of nobility. Asked by the incredulous hotel owner ‘Frenchy’ why he is helping them after his initial indifference, Harry answers, “maybe because I like you, maybe because I don’t like them”. To Have and Have Not does not have the grandeur or drama of Casablanca, but the basic message of a sense of justice trumping self-interest and neutrality emerges once again. The world-weary, hard-headed businessman has a change of heart and realises that basic human decency is something work taking risks for.

The third and last detailed example of the Bogart cynic-idealist dynamic I will explore is Key Largo, one of the fruits of the brilliant Bogart-Huston partnership. In this film Bogart plays a Second World War veteran, Major Frank McCloud, who goes to visit the father and wife of an old comrade who died while fighting with McCloud in the Italy campaign, James Temple (Lionel Barrymore) and Nora (Lauren Bacall). They run a hotel in Key Largo. When McCloud arrives, it quickly becomes apparent that the sinister individuals staying at the hotel are not, as they insist, there for a fishing trip, but are instead gangsters led by the notorious fugitive hood Johnny Rocco, played menacingly by Edward G Robinson. The gangsters are there to complete a big deal, and their identity is quickly revealed by McCloud. They drop the fishing trip pretence, and take McCloud, Temple and Nora prisoner at gunpoint.

At first, once again the Bogart character appears to be selfish and insular. When given a chance to shoot Rocco and send the gangsters packing, he refuses, affecting indifference. He pretends not to care, declaring that “one Rocco more or less isn’t worth dying for”. He is cynical about the idea that Rocco might get his comeuppance, shouting to Nora, “Rocco wants to come back to America, let him! Let him be President!” His apathetic and self-serving attitude is summed up by the typical statement that “I fight nobody’s battles but my own”, a sentiment almost identical to that of Rick in Casablanca and Harry in To Have and Have Not.

However, once again Bogie reveals his true colours and reverts back to the side of justice and decency. Rocco humiliates his alcoholic mistress and causes the murder of two innocent native Americans, which snaps McCloud out of his indifference. He had given up his old hope, for “a world in which there’s no place for Johnny Rocco”, but in the face of such cruelty he revives it, firstly by risking his life to help Rocco’s mistress and then by overpowering the gangsters when they force him to pilot their boat back to Cuba, where Rocco lives in exile. Although McCloud has, intellectually at least, given up on his idealistic hope that “we’re fighting to cleanse the world of ancient evils”, his instincts betray his apathy and he does the right thing. As Nora puts it, “your head said one way, but your whole life said another”.

As you can see, the structure of these films is basically the same. World-weary, cynical Bogie, who claims to have given up on his ideals and his belief in moral behaviour (both personally and politically) for a belief in self-reliant, self-serving amoral individualism, is given a choice; does he do the right thing at some personal risk, or act in a callous and selfish way? Does he stick out his neck, or not? Initially, he acts as his jaded persona would imply, but then he always has a change of heart, ends up abandoning his indifference, and does the right thing. Of course, not all of his film follow this structure (although many do, including The African Queen where Charlie Allnut agrees to ‘stick his neck out’ for Rose in her attempt to help the British war effort, despite his misgivings), but the Bogie persona is given its most concentrated expression in the films underpinned by this dynamic of moral redemption and sacrifice.

The appeal of these themes, which are so brilliantly symbolised by Bogart, can scarcely be seen outside of the context of the era in which the films were made. The despair and apathy that constitutes half of the Bogart persona reflects the circumstances of the 30s and 40s. Ravaged by the Great Depression and the initial successes of Fascism, the world reflected and seemed to reinforce the characteristic Bogie cynicism and abandonment of hope. In Casablanca, Rick’s hopelessness is partly a product of his experience of the defeat of the anti-Fascist cause in Ethiopia and Spain. The initial selfishness and indifference of Bogart in all of these pictures symbolises the despair and fear that engulfed the world of Bogart’s era, a world in which it seemed that all the great ideals and causes had been lost, and so personal survival was the best that could be hoped for. Bogart’s recurrent redemption, his consistent changes of heart, reflect the victory of will and hope over despair that crystallised itself in the war effort, and more specifically, in the American context, FDR’s determination to tackle the Great Depression and also enter the war on the Allies side (it is not a coincidence that Bogart was a supporter of the Democrats and campaigned for FDR).The saviour of Bogey’s soul in the films is an allegory for the saviour of the world from the terrors of Fascism and poverty. It is not difficult to see the appeal of such allegories of sacrifice and morality to audiences making their own sacrifices to win the war.

Indeed, there is a sense in which Bogie becomes a personification of the USA itself. His initial reluctance to involve himself in other people’s battles, his self-reliance, seems to me to be a metaphor for American isolationism and reluctance to get involved in the Second World War. His eventual determination to do the right thing reflects FDR’s attempts to bring the USA in the war, and even the Marshall Plan and post-war reconstruction. I may be in danger of reducing Casablanca to a series of crude national stereotypes, but the character of Rick is clearly, on one level, meant to represent America, just as Laszlo represents Occupied Europe and Major Strasser represents Nazi Germany. In Key Largo, Johnny Rocco is clearly a symbol of the thuggishness and cruelty of Nazism, and Bogart’s eventual conversion to standing up to Rocco, to making a “world in which there is no place for Johnny Rocco”, seems to me to be a metaphor for US involvement in the War. There is, of course, a sense in which this narrative is a piece of self-justifying American propaganda, because the USA only entered the war in 1941 by accident, due to Pearl Harbour and Hitler’s stupid decision to declare war.

It is not fair, however, to reduce the appeal of the Bogart persona and his greatest films to crude political allegory. The figure of Bogart the stoical, self-reliant loner, stalked by disappointment and cynicism, resonates on a far more personal level. Bogart’s characters’ selfishness and apathy is always a product of weltschmerz, of disillusionment, and such disillusion is also a product of personal disappointment that has universal appeal. Rick in Casablanca is a haunted figure not just because of the rise of Fascism and the fact that he is tired of lost political causes, but because he has a broken heart after losing Ilsa. There is a very strong indication that Harry in To Have and Have Not has suffered romantic disappointment – ‘Slim’, the love-interest played by Bacall, asks Bogart, “Who was the girl?” A baffled Bogart replies, “Who was what girl?”, to which Bacall responds, “The one who left you with such a high opinion of women”. Charlie Allnut in The African Queen is clearly a depressive loner, one who finds redemption in the arms of Katherine Hepburn. The treatment of love in the key Bogart films doesn’t always seem consistent. Sometimes romantic love itself is presented as the higher, moral end, which Bogey reaches despite his own cynicism, comparable to the higher moral or political end that Bogey always ends up on the side of, and sometimes love is sacrificed for that higher moral or political end – the former is the case in The African Queen and To Have and Have Not, the latter in Casablanca. However, the appeal of the Bogie persona on this more personal level consists, just as in the more political dimension, in the idea of the disappointed idealist reconciled, perhaps reluctantly or even ill-advisedly, but nonetheless admirably, to his original ideals. The ideal is of love and connection to another individual on the personal level, and of moral connection to the wider community via values such as decency, fairness and justice on the political level. Either way, Humphrey Bogart is the cynic as disappointed romantic par excellence. The romance, the idealism, of course, gains its power from the cynicism, the struggle against its irresistible pull. Straightforward idealism untainted by moral ambivalence and conscientious struggle is no idealism at all.

These themes are not all that is appealing about Bogart. His outsider mentality, which permeates from his real personality into his film roles, gives him a rebellious tinge. The characters he played tended to be infused with impatience with pretension and authority – Bogie plays by no rules other than his own. Since we know that Bogart was notoriously outspoken in his dealings with studios, and renowned as a bit of a firebrand, we can once again see Bogart’s fiction and reality merging into one. Furthermore, his persona cannot stand the credulous, emotionally craven or dependent. This gives his roles a sexual charge that is absolutely unmistakable, particularly as it manifests itself in another characteristic that he himself had, that is, attraction to strong –willed, feisty women. This reaches its peak in the films he made with Bacall, which simply fizzle with incredible sexual chemistry. The scenes in which Bogie and Bacall flirt, particularly the scene in The Big Sleep with the outrageous horse-racing innuendo (“A lot depends on who’s in the saddle”) and the scenes in To Have and Have Not with the cigarettes and whistling double entendre (“You just put your lips together and blow”), are probably the most erotically charged scenes in the history of cinema (the sexual aspect of Bogie is reflected in Woody Allen’s excellent picture Play it Again, Sam, in which Bogart appears as a kind of ghostly romantic mentor to Allen’s hopeless neurotic). Another compelling aspect of Bogart was the fact that one also gets the sense that he was an intelligent and interesting person beneath the acting roles. The fact that he was a very good chess-player (the chess scene in Casablanca was his idea), almost of master strength, adds to his almost never-ending layers of cool.

However, the meaning of Bogart, and the basis of his enduring importance, is undoubtedly his cynic-as-disappointed-romantic persona, which is timeless. So long as human beings pitch hope and will against disappointed ideals and disillusion, those classic films will always be tremendous works of art. Indeed, in a world marked by deep uncertainty and instability, in which all the best causes are the lost ones and a fatalism and despair comparable to the 1930s is emerging, maybe Bogart’s time is coming again. I hope so.

Labour confounds expectations in March West

2009-10-09T01:21:00.003+01:00

North East Cambs Labour this evening defied gloomy expectations in a by-election in March West by smashing the Lib Dems and coming a respectable second. The Tory won 830 votes, Martin Field, the Labour candidate, won 460 votes, and the Lib Dem got a measly 250 votes.

Bearing in mind that in the County Elections earlier this year Labour received 177 votes in the same ward/division, and the Tory got 1175, this is a good result. The Lib Dem vote also went down 27 votes from 277. I'm no psephologist, but this is a big swing to Labour.

Previously, on Vote2007.co.uk all of the so-called 'experts' predicted that Labour would get less than 10% of the vote. We actually got 31%, almost double the Lib Dem percentage.

Why did Labour perform so unexpectedly well? Firstly, we fought a hugely energetic and enterprising campaign. Peter Roberts, Labour PPC for North East Cambs, and Chris Jones organised a focused and professional effort, which saw us knocking on 1500+ doors in a month, putting out 3 leaflets and a day of poll, and conducting a decent knocking-up operation on the day. All credit to them for throwing their energy into such a seemingly hopeless cause.

Perhaps the most important factor was the sheer quality of the candidate. Martin Field is a long-serving Geography teacher at the local Neale-Wade community college. He helped set up Young People March, a scheme designed to give youngsters in March something to occupy themselves. He has chaired Fenland Victim Support. He is Chair of Governors at a local primary school. The number of schemes and projects he has selflessly dedicated himself to for the good of the community is tremendous. He is the sort of bloke without whom local communities and civil society would wither on the vine. He's also a really nice man personally, feeding and watering us activists without complaint. Canvassing, it became a running joke that virtually everyone we talked to had either been taught by him, or had children who had done; the reaction to him in this capacity was overwhelmingly positive;he must be one hell of a teacher. If he had been an independent, he would have stormed home to victory.

Another noticeable factor was the quality of the literature we put out. I say without a shadow of a doubt that the leaflets put together by the Roberts/Jones duo were superior to anything the national party managed to put out in the whole Norwich North by-election - glossy, full colour, well-designed, with sharp, to the point copy. I'm not sure whether this says more about Peter and Chris - the Batman and Robin of Cambridgeshire politics - or the national party.

Anyway, the by-election was great fun and a real blow for the Lib Dems. Without the Lib Dems, Labour would have stood a chance of actually beating the Tory. It shows what a spent force the Libs are in North East Cambs, and gives impetus to the argument that only a Labour vote can beat the Tory in Fenland.

Times are Toff for Cambridge University Tories

2009-10-07T22:38:00.000+01:00

Many Cambridge students may have noticed that Cambridge University Conservative Association (CUCA) has been distributing a university-wide ‘Fresher’s Guide’ in the past week or so. Glossy, full-colour and ten pages, it shows just how well-funded the Conservative Association, and indeed the Conservative Party in general, is. Interestingly, on the first page CUCA gives ‘special thanks’ to Jeffrey Archer, presumably for the production of the booklet. Whether the help given was financial or otherwise, it is obviously true that CUCA have been accepting aid from a convicted criminal, perjurer, liar and fantastist, possibly the most discredited and hated man in British politics.

This is nothing to the content of the booklet. It contains articles on the best options for buying champagne in Cambridge, an article giving (extremely pretentious) tips on formal wear, including tips on handkerchiefs as fashion accessories, cummerbunds and bowties, as well as advice on black and white tie, reviews of a range of restaurants including swanky ones most normal students could only dream of attending, and a guide to tying a bow tie. It projects a fantasy image of a gilded, privileged Cambridge that only ever existed, insofar as it did at all, for a small number of extremely wealthy people. It may appear to be tongue in cheek, but given how seriously CUCA members take these absurdities (as I hear from a source I have inside CUCA), it is not.

In the context of a global recession where ordinary working people are losing their jobs and homes, the Tories are clearly most interested in flaunting their wealth and privilege, and frankly it makes me sick. I’m most worried about my mum losing her livelihood and home if her public sector job gets the axe under the Tories. The Tories live in a cloud-cuckoo land where one can ‘save water’ by ‘drinking champagne’, where the colour of one’s cummerbund or silk handkerchief is more important than making a living, where mummy and daddy can pick up the tab for nights of orgiastic excess.

What kind of image does this project to working class freshers or potential applicants to Cambridge? It re-affirms every stereotype bandied about concerning Oxbridge snobbery, elitism and Brideshead-style excess. CUCA is single-handedly going about the task of setting back access by about 70 years. Cambridge, the Tories imply, is a place for ‘people like us’, people who can afford and enjoy posh restaurants, champagne and white tie. It’s not for the likes of you, people from ordinary working class backgrounds – this is the whole message of CUCA’s sermon. In short, they have squarely positioned themselves as a glorified social club for wannabe toffs, social climbers and minor aristocrats.

The Labour Club is campaigning for the People’s Charter, a manifesto for change that will give ordinary working people a fair chance, a sane economy and a new moral start. We are concerned about bread-and-butter issues because we know that life isn’t one long round of white-tie dinners, champagne receptions and aristocratic indulgence for most people. In the context of a Tory Party led by a small clique of Old Etonians who frequented the Bullingdon Club, that bastion of wealth and privilege in Oxford, CUCA’s cavalier and supercilious attitude is perhaps hardly surprising, but it is shocking and shows just how profoundly alienated from the lives of ordinary working people the Tory Party is.

Partisanship, democracy and local elections

2009-09-16T20:48:00.009+01:00

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)

Philistines at the Gate - defend Aunty Beeb!

2009-09-05T23:01:00.008+01:00

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 face – forever, 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

2009-09-05T19:33:00.005+01:00

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.