GAUCHE

OBITUARIES - 16: DOUGLAS HILL
Paul Anderson, Tribune, 6 July 2007

Douglas Hill, the reviews editor of Tribune from 1971 to 1983, has died after being run over by a double-decker bus as he walked over a pedestrian crossing in north London. He was 72.

A charming Canadian polymath with a razor-sharp but self-deprecating wit, he was a prolific author. The best-selling of his 50-odd books were children’s science fiction and fantasy titles: before the arrival of Harry Potter he was the most popular children’s author in Britain. But he also wrote science fiction for adults and several non-fiction titles, among them an anthology-cum-history of this newspaper to mark its 40th birthday 30 years ago, Tribune 40: Forty years of a socialist newspaper, which remains the only book-length account of the first half of its life.

Born in Manitoba and educated at the universities of Saskatchewan and Toronto, he arrived in Britain in 1959 with his then wife Gail Robinson, becoming an editor at a publishing company. He joined Tribune as reviews editor in 1971, taking over from Elizabeth Thomas. “My intention was to carry on, in my way, what she and others before her had established as the proper roles and obligations of the reviews section of a socialist paper,” he wrote modestly in 1977, but it is no insult to Thomas, herself a great reviews editor, to say that he did much more than that.

Under his stewardship, the reviews pages started to fizz, just as the rest of the paper became increasingly worthy-and-dull in its obsession with the arguments against Britain joining (and then remaining in) the Common Market. His choice of reviewers was inspired in its eclecticism, and the column he wrote most weeks, “Platform”, was the closest the paper has come to emulating George Orwell’s “As I Please” column of the 1940s in its intellectual range and in its humour. Many of the people he recruited as writers are still valued contributors more than 20 years on.

He remained in touch with Tribune long after he left: he wrote reviews until well into the 1990s and was a regular at the editorial lunches organised by Sheila Noble, the paper’s production editor, chief sub and unofficial social secretary. Although he joked about being past-it when I last saw him a few months ago, he looked as spry as he was in the 1980s – and his repartee was as dazzling and as mischievous as ever. His sudden death is a shock, and everyone lucky enough to have known him will miss him. He is survived by his son and his former wife.

EVERYBODY'S FIFTH CHOICE - 2

Paul Anderson writes:

Thanks to Gregg (comments on previous post) for directing readers to Luke Akehurst here and the following details of the first round of voting in the Labour deputy leadership contest:

1st round: MPs, Members, Unions, Total
Benn 4.26, 7.21, 4.93 T:16.4
Blears 4.99, 3, 3.77 T: 11.77
Cruddas 4.63, 5.67,9.09 T 19.39
Hain 4.81, 3.87, 6.64, T:15.32
Harman: 6.54,8.04,4.35 T;18.93
Johnson 8.08, 5.53, 4.55 T:18.16

Now, what this means in terms of real first preference votes, given that there was a 99 per cent turnout among the 371 MPs and MEPs, a 53 per cent turnout among the 180,000 individual members and an 8 per cent turnout among the 3 million affiliated trade unionists is something like this:

Benn 57,000
Blears 36,000
Cruddas 82,000
Hain 59,000
Harman 55,000
Johnson 49,000

OK, all these figures are very rough (and they're exaggerated because of multiple voting, in particular by people who are individual members as well as members of affiliated organisations). But they do suggest that a genuine one member, one vote ballot would probably have yielded a very different outcome (at least if members of affiliated organisations were included, which is a moot point). Hunch tells me it would have gone to Cruddas against Benn in round four — though of course there's no way of telling.

If you exclude members of affiliated organisations, first preferences stack up like this:

Benn 22,000
Blears 9,000
Cruddas 17,000
Hain 12,000
Harman 24,000
Johnson 17,000

With all the necessary caveats, I reckon that would mean Benn by a whisker against Harman in round four...

The Guardian has a neat chart here.

EVERYBODY'S FIFTH CHOICE ...

Paul Anderson writes:

Well, not really — but it does seem that Harriet Harman's victory in the Labour deputy leadership election was far from straightforward. She won only on the fifth round on votes redistributed form John Cruddas; and, according to the BBC website, "In the first round she was first choice among Labour Party members, second choice among MPs and MEPS, but fifth choice of union members." True to form, the Labour Party has not published the actual voting figures on its website: is there anyone out there who can supply them?

ONE MP, 845 MEMBERS' VOTES
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 22 June 2007

At least it’s nearly over. Labour’s deputy leadership contest has been even more uneventful than I expected when I wrote about it last month. It hasn’t set off a serious debate about the future of British social democracy inside the Labour Party — let alone among the voters as a whole. In fact, it has barely engaged even my most political friends. I don’t remember a single discussion of it lasting more than two minutes that went beyond speculation about who will win.

Which of course is the only interesting thing about it, not least because it may well highlight the absurdities of the electoral college Labour uses for leadership and deputy leadership elections.

Labour headquarters and lazy political commentators always describe the party’s means of choosing its leaders as “one member, one vote”, but it’s a bit more complex than that. Every member does have a vote. But, because the electorate is divided into a three-section electoral college, each section with one-third of the total vote, some members have more than one vote because they belong to more than one section. And, more important, the weight of your vote depends on what sort of member you are.

In the first section are Labour MPs and MEPs; in the second individual Labour Party members; and in the third members of affiliated organisations (mainly trade unions). So, because there are 371 MPs and MEPs, 180,000 ordinary members and a little more than 3 million members of affiliated organisations, the vote of each MP and MEP is worth nearly the same as 485 ordinary members’ votes and more than 8,000 affiliated trade unionists’ votes. (These figures are based on the assumption that everyone entitled to vote does so, which of course isn’t so, but you get the picture.)

I’ll accept that this system, adopted in 1993, is less of a dog’s breakfast than the electoral college that preceded it, introduced in 1981. In that electoral college, the unions had 40 per cent of votes, MPs 30 per cent and constituency Labour parties 30 per cent — and neither the unions nor the CLPs were under any compulsion to ballot their members before casting block votes at Labour conference. At least the current electoral college involves the counting of individual votes rather than an aggregation of decisions taken by various committees behind closed doors.

The current system is a dog’s breakfast all the same, however. The only time it has been used before this deputy leadership election was in 1994, when Tony Blair swept to victory in the leadership election and John Prescott won the deputy leadership, with both securing more than 50 per cent of first-preference votes in each of the three sections of the college. But this sort of clear, unequivocal result is by no means guaranteed. The electoral college could also produce a winner who has — say — little support among MPs but strong support among individual members and trade unionists. And in a six-candidate contest the winner could be the fourth on first preferences who picks up a large proportion of second preferences. And so on.

I’m not saying that this weekend will see a messy result, just that it might. And if it does ... look forward to 18 months of Labour doing what it used to do best: arguing about its leadership election procedures. I don’t really want to go there, but if pushed I’d back the leader being elected by MPs alone, with the deputy elected by ordinary members alone — and mandatory annual parliamentary selections. (Just kidding about the last one.)

+++

OK, it's last week’s news, but I’d like to add my tuppence-worth to the controversy over Tony Blair’s assault on the “feral beasts” of the media last week. Having been at the receiving end of the Blairite spin machine during the 1990s, I’m not inclined to sympathy with the man or his way of operating. It was cowardly of him to pick on the poor old Independent and the BBC as his only examples of how the media have dropped the habit of straight reporting: he should at least have fingered the Mail. And he should have made it clear that Rupert Murdoch’s policy of editorial support in return for relaxed media regulation (and no euro) is an outrageous affront to democracy.

But Blair has got a point. The arrogance, cynicism, pack mentality, superficiality, sensationalism and sheer ignorance of much British media coverage of politics are not new, but their ubiquity is. Twenty years ago you could avoid them by shunning the popular national press, local radio and William Rees-Mogg: if you stuck to the qualities, the weeklies, the BBC and ITN you could get your politics straight and in depth. No longer. There is plenty of good political journalism out there, but the smart-arsed, the asinine and the hysterical now crop up pretty much everywhere — and far too much goes unreported. As to why this is so — well, that’s another column.


Footnotes: Gordon Brown is brilliant on Newsnight here. And Hitchens, C does us all proud on Question Time here. Maybe there's some hope after all.

OLD ROMANTICS

Paul Anderson, review of The Offbeat Radicals by Geoffrey Ashe (Methuen, £17.99), Tribune 22 June 2007

The Offbeat Radicals is a book I can imagine being published in the 1930s. It is an erudite introduction for the general reader to a vast swathe of English radical writers from the French revolution to the early years of the 20^th century who would once have been labelled “romantic”. It’s rather like what H. N. Brailsford or G. D. H. Cole used to do.

Footnotes are sparse; précis is the norm. The autodidact who reads it from cover to cover will get a very good idea of what a large number of (broadly speaking) 19^th-century polemicists and poets had to say – some of them, such as Blake and Shelley, read widely today but rarely put into context; others, such as Godwin, Carlyle and Bradlaugh, very much forgotten; still others, such as Morris, acknowledged but largely ignored.

Ashe is a specialist in Arthurian myth and a great enthusiast for G. K. Chesterton. His theme here is the persistence with which, after the French revolution went sour for English radicals, the latter adopted a rhetoric and a way of looking at life that were borrowed from dissident Christian myths of a pre-capitalist world of co-operation, equality and social cohesion. They were alternative medievalists, precursors of “small is beautiful” and dead keen on tradition.

Some Tribune readers will recognise this as an old anti-socialist tune. And indeed Ashe’s target, if there is one, is those who would subsume the Godwins, the Blakes, the Shelleys and so on, right up to William Morris, into a narrative of class struggle and proto-Marxism. My hunch is that he wants to capture them for something mistily and nostalgically Eurosceptic.

If you, like me, are still there with Edward Thompson in your reading of the 19^th century, you will have a problem with this. Although Ashe is right when he argues that there is a tradition of radicalism that goes beyond left and right as we now know them, he underplays the extent to which it influenced working-class culture in the early and mid-19^th century and socialism (and indeed modernism) in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. His calling it “offbeat radicalism” is also annoying: the old tag “romantic radicalism” works much better, not least because it is familiar. (It is also as flexible, if not more so, than his clumsy coinage.)

But these are small points. There is no better recent introduction to the radical writers of 19^th-century England than this. It is beautifully written, difficult to put down, and more books like this should be published.

ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

Paul Anderson, review of Young Stalin by Simon Sebag-Montefiore (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25), Tribune 15 June 2007

The central tenet of Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s account of Stalin’s early life – from his birth in 1878 to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 – is that nearly everyone else has got it wrong as a result of taking Trotsky at his word.

For Trotsky, Stalin was a “provincial mediocrity”, a bit-part player before 1917 whose subsequent rise to supreme power owed everything to his skilful bureaucratic manoeuvring after the Bolshevik revolution. With a couple of exceptions, says Sebag-Montefiore, all those who have written about Stalin have concurred: most biographies deal cursorily if at all with the first 40 years of his life.

He is exaggerating a bit: there’s actually quite a lot on Stalin’s early life even in such pioneering attempts at biography as those by Boris Souvarine (1937) and Isaac Deutscher (1949). But he has got a point. Apart from Robert Tucker’s Stalin as Revolutionary, published more than 30 years ago, most studies of the man baptised Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili have focused almost exclusively on what he did to seize power and what he did once he seized it. How it was that “the pre-1917 mediocrity” became “the twentieth-century colossus” has remained something of a mystery. This book is the first in English to use recently opened archives in Georgia to put flesh on the bones provided by Souvarine, Deutscher and Tucker – and it is an absolute gem.

Even if some of the story is familiar – joyless childhood, training to be a priest in a seminary, conversion to revolutionary politics, Bolshevik underground work, imprisonment, exile to Siberia – Sebag-Montefiore has found an extraordinary amount of new material that gives human colour to his narrative, and he writes with unusual zest and terseness.

The book opens with a brilliant reconstruction of a notorious 1907 bank robbery in Tiflis (now Tblisi) that the young Dzhugashvili organised, and its pace never slows. Sebag-Montefiore handles everything deftly: his subject’s poetry, his love affairs, even the notoriously dry and fractious politics of the Russian empire’s Marxist left in the early years of the last century. Dzhugashvili – he adopted the nom de guerre Stalin only in 1913 – comes across as a complex, dynamic figure: a vicious thug and a charlatan, to be sure, but also a charmer, an accomplished journalist and a much more central figure in pre-revolutionary Bolshevik politics than Trotsky-inspired authorities allow.

Sebag-Montefiore’s account of the influence of Stalin’s experience as a young man on his actions as Soviet dictator is for the most part convincing. For example, it is difficult to disagree with his insistence that the paranoia that set in train the Great Terror of the 1930s was rooted in Stalin’s past in a revolutionary underground milieu riddled with Tsarist secret-police spies and accusations of treachery. (Stalin himself was probably a spook for a spell.)

But there are points on which Sebag-Montefiore takes things too far. Stalin’s being a Georgian undoubtedly made him an outsider in Russia, but did it really predispose him to tribalism and blood feuds? Georgia was the only part of the Russian empire that briefly established a working democracy after 1917, under a Menshevik government that was crushed by Bolshevik force of arms in 1921. Georgia’s most famous son might have embraced psychopathic gangsterism, but it’s hardly a national characteristic.

A CONTEST DOESN'T GUARANTEE DEBATE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 25 Mat 2007

I have never quite worked out why so many people who are involved in politics think that party leadership contests provide a marvellous opportunity for debate. Every time the top post falls vacant in any of our major political parties — and in Labour’s case when the deputy leader goes — the cry goes up that there must be a contest to ensure a debate on the party’s future. Then there’s either a lot of huffing and puffing about how the absence of a contest means that debate has been stifled, or else there’s a contest, in which all the candidates make a point of welcoming the chance for debate that the contest offers.

What rarely if ever happens, however, is any actual debate. Sure, the candidates produce vague personal manifestos, give interviews to the newspapers and the broadcast media, tour the country delivering anodyne speeches and — these days — make fools of themselves on the internet. Sometimes they even appear on hustings platforms with one another. But I can think of only one leadership or deputy leadership contest in any of the major political parties in the past 20 years in which candidates have engaged in substantive discussion of their party’s overall direction.

That was way back in 1988, when Tony Benn and Eric Heffer challenged Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley for Labour’s leadership and deputy leadership. (John Prescott also stood for deputy, but that’s another story.) Against the shift towards the political centre that Kinnock and Hattersley had started since 1983, Benn and Heffer offered a clear left alternative: renationalisation of everything the Tories had privatised, withdrawal from the European Community, no compromise on unilateral nuclear disarmament, no expulsions of Trotskyists from the Labour Party. Labour in those days had a system for electing its leaders in which unions and constituency parties did not have to ballot their members before casting their votes, so the official result showing Benn taking 11.4 per cent of the vote and Heffer 9.5 per cent needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt. But the scale of the left’s defeat was awesome — so awesome in fact that many on the left wondered afterwards whether it might not have been more sensible not to have mounted a challenge.

Since then, Labour has had two leadership and deputy leadership contests and is now having a leadership non-contest and deputy contest; the Tories have had six leadership contests and one non-contest; and the Lib Dems have had two leadership contests. But not one of them has sparked a serious internal debate about a party’s direction.

Although all but the last two of the Tories’ battles in the past 20 years have in the end been a pro-European versus an anti-European (or at least someone thought by supporters to be anti-European), none has been conducted in explicitly political terms: all have been about the personal qualities of the candidates.

Of course, that’s partly because the Tories always do politics that way — but the phenomenon is just as marked with Labour. There were real enough political differences between John Smith and Bryan Gould in 1992, particularly over Europe, but they spent most of their time during the contest (if indeed it should be described as such) agreeing with one another about how crucial it was to reform Labour’s internal structures. In 1994, Tony Blair was as much of a shoo-in as Smith had been two years earlier, with both John Prescott and Margaret Beckett interested only in which one of them became his deputy.

Maybe it would all have been different this time had John McDonnell made it on to the leadership ballot, but I have my doubts. Nothing he could have done or said would have changed his position as a hopeless outsider, and Gordon Brown would have found it easy to avoid giving hostages to fortune. In any case, McDonnell didn’t make it, so all we have is a deputy leadership contest with six candidates, all of whom know that the media will pounce on any hint of their differing with Brown.

I’m already sick of it, and we’ve still got four more weeks. For what it’s worth, as things stand I’m voting for Hilary Benn because I think he talks sense on foreign policy, but I’m also impressed by the things John Cruddas has been saying about Labour’s need to revitalise its appeal to working-class voters — and I’ve always liked Peter Hain. In fact, I’m not going to despair whoever wins.

What I’m not expecting any of them to do is add much to the discussion about what a Brown government should do by way of policy. Nor will any of them have any say in who gets which jobs in that government. The truth is that all the cards are now in Brown’s hands, and nothing forseeable of great importance will happen until he chooses to play them.

EVEN IF ROYAL LOSES, SANITY HAS WON

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 27 April 2007

Small things can cheer you up sometimes, and this week’s small thing for me was that Segolene Royal came second in the first round of the French presidential election. I spent Sunday night feeling pleased.

I’m not entirely sure why it did the trick. It was only the first round, for heaven’s sake, and she has a lot to do to win. She won only 26 per cent of the vote, and only 11 per cent of voters chose far-left no-hopers in the first round and have nowhere else to go. (Note in passing here the pathetic showing by the candidate of the once mighty French Communist Party, who took less than 2 per cent of the vote.)

After that, it’s grim. Royal desperately needs suport from people who backed the centrist Francois Bayrou in the first round — 19 per cent of the extraordinary 85 per cent of voters who turned out — and from supporters of the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen (11 per cent). She’ll get few of the latter (though more than many expect) but her real problem is the people who voted for Bayrou. The opinion polls suggest that more than half of them will vote for the scary Nicolas Sarkocy, the right-wing candidate Royal has to beat in the second round, who got 31 per cent last weekend. As I write, Royal’s plea to Bayrou for a second-round alliance — a daring but desperate move — has not been answered.

At least, though, it isn’t a repeat of 2002, when self-indulgent leftists voting Trot, Stalinist and Green denied the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin a place in the second round, leaving Jacques Chirac to fight it out with Le Pen — with no choice for anyone decent but voting for Chirac as the lesser of two evils. Even if it looks as if Royal has too much ground to make up before the second round, she does have an outside chance, and that in itself is progress on five years ago.

+++

On another subject entirely, I was shocked and surprised by the news last week that the annual delegate meeting of the National Union of Journalists, of which I have been a member for nearly 25 years, has voted to boycott Israeli products.

I can see the rationale for the boycott: I’m no fan of the current Israeli administration, which has done nothing to promote a lasting peace deal with the Palestinians and a lot to reduce the likelihood of such a deal. And I think that it’s perfectly legitimate for the west to put pressure on Israel to return to the negotiating table, give up the West Bank settlements, tear down the wall and so on.

My problem is that I don’t think that the NUJ boycotting Israeli goods is a very clever way of putting pressure on the Israeli government to do these things. The NUJ is tiny, so there is no way that the boycott, even if observed by every one of its members, could have any significant impact on the Israeli economy. Politically, however, the boycott has a much greater impact — and it is entirely counterproductive if the goal is to get the Israeli government back to the negotiating table to talk about a workable two-state solution in Israel/Palestine.

If NUJ members (or indeed anyone else outside Israel/Palestine) are serious about doing their bit to facilitate a lasting peace deal, they should be encouraging dialogue and compromise between Israelis and Palestinians and discouraging confrontation. Boycotting Israeli goods can only do the opposite. On one hand, it gives succour — if only a thimbleful — to Hamas, Hizbullah and all the others who would like to see Israel destroyed and reject all compromise with “the Zionist entity”. On the other, it reinforces (if only a little) the defensive mindset of the Israeli diehards who see nothing but enemies in the outside world.

In my view, rather than boycotting Israel, we should be doing precisely the opposite: arguing for more trade with both Israel and the Occupied Territories, more cultural and educational exchanges, more tourism and so on.

So, much as I respect the role of the NUJ’s ADM in setting union policy, I have no intention of observing the boycott. Indeed, as I write I have a friend searching out a selection of kosher delicacies in Israel that I hope she will deliver when she gets back to Britain next week. I invite the NUJ executive to discipline me for my flagrant and wilful breach of union policy.

+++

The current London Review of Books is a very good one, with half-a-dozen must-read articles — one of them an elegaic review of recent books about the Communist Party of Great Britain by the eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, the only prominent intellectual who stuck with the CPGB to the bitter end.

It is a fascinating piece, nowhere more so than when Hobsbawm claims that during the second world war, British communists “would have gone underground if they had had to, as they did on the Continent ..., and organised resistance to the German occupation”. Not in 1940 they wouldn’t, comrade. That was when the Hitler-Stalin pact was in operation. Remember?

VOTEZ SEGO! - 2

Paul Anderson writes:

Well, the extremely good news from the exit polls from the first round of the French presidential election is that Segolene Royal appears to have made it through to fight the second round against Nicolas Sarkozy — and that now it's all up for grabs.

According to the exit polls, she got something like 25 per cent of the vote, behind Sarkozy on 31 per cent but ahead of the centrist Francois Bayrou on 18 per cent and the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen on 11 per cent. Royal can probably rely on second-round backing from most of the 11 per cent of voters who supported one of the far-left candidates, the Green or the anti-globalisation farmer Jose Bove; and Sarkozy can do the same with the 4 per cent or so who voted for minor right-wing candidates.

But this still leaves a big question mark over which way supporters of Bayrou and Le Pen vote in the second round. Hunch tells me it's going to be very close — but we shall see.

VOTEZ SEGO!

Paul Anderson writes:

The latest polls show Jean-Marie Le Pen now in third place in the French presidential race. If on Sunday the self-indulgent imbeciles of the French left do as they did five years ago and vote "on principle" for various Trots, the Stalinist or that fat peasant who doesn't like MacDonalds, there's now a real danger France will end up again with a run-off between a disgusting Gaullist opportunist and a fascist creep. There's only one honourable way to vote on Sunday: Segolene Royal.

SIGN UP AGAINST THE NUJ BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL

Paul Anderson writes:

Becasue I teach journalism at a university and work as a journalist, I'm a member of two trade unions, the University and College Union and the National Union of Journalists. The former, or rather the previous incarnation of part of it, the Association of University Teachers, voted at an annual conference for an academic boycott of Israel almost exactly a couple of years back – and the decision was overturned by members. Last weekend, the NUJ's annual delegate meeting voted for a journalistic boycott of Israel, a meaningless and self-defeating gesture that will do nothing to promote the interests of either peace or the Palestinians. There's a campaign to overturn the decision starting here. If you're a hack, sign up. I'm with Jonathan Freedland and the Guardian on this.

RIGHT: NOW LET'S GET SERIOUS

Paul Anderson writes:

It's Derby at home this afternoon, and I need some serious beautiful fitba — and victory — to persuade me to renew the season ticket. A propos of which, I ran into Alan Brazil getting off the train home yesterday: "I hate those Norwich fuckers, make no mishtake about it," he told me as we walked over the footbridge at Ipswich station. "I just hope we fuck them next weekend." What a mensch!

IF I WERE TONY BLAIR...

Paul Anderson writes:

Speculation is rife over when Blair will resign. I have no inside info on this (and nor, I suspect, has anyone else who is writing about it). But what if, instead of seeing out the almost inevitable humiliations of the May local government, Scottish and Welsh elections, he quit two days before polling day? That would blow the Labour meltdown off the front pages and confuse everyone about the reasons for it — and it might even bring Labour some electoral advantage. If I were Blair, I'd do it.

TOTALITARIANISM TODAY

Paul Anderson writes:

Been busy, so only just noticed this from Oliver Kamm, but is he right or is he right?

CONTINUONS LE COMBAT!

Paul Anderson writes:

Dig this: special TGV beats the world rail speed record. It's not as sexy as Mallard but I'm sick to death of crap Brit trains. With this one, I'd get to work in half-an-hour...

WELL, ALL RIGHT!

Paul Anderson writes:

Beat this (Freddie King again but no apologies):

STONKING BUDGET

Paul Anderson writes:

OK, it's neutral and tight – but boy, what a headline act: 2p off the basic rate of income tax.

It's true that most of that comes from abolition of the 10 per cent lower band, and I'm not entirely convinced about the benefits of doing it – but it's good enough to stuff Cameron, which I like, and with everything else taken into account it's redistributive from rich to poor, which I like more.

And even with my excessive booze and fags habits I'm told by the BBC ready reckoner that I'm £68 a year better-off. So I'm voting Labour next time, no problem.

WHAT DID YOUR DADDY DO?

Paul Anderson writes:

The plan by UCAS, the universities admissions system, to ask prospective students about their parents' educational background has given rise to some hysterical tripe.

But it is an idiotic scheme. On one hand, as we know from the argument about the feasibility of a graduate tax when student funding was a big issue a couple of years back, there is no way of telling who has a degree and who has not. There is no central database of graduates, and no institution has the means to check university by university. So wannabe students can simply make up their parents' educational histories as they choose.

On the other, as an admissions tutor, I can't help but think that the knowledge that Sparta Sporg's mum is that Ethel Sporg, feminist historian at the University of Neasden, and that her dad did a doctorate in English at Oxford supervised by the legendary Terence Mountebanke, author of Post-Post-Modernism: A Critique, might tilt even the most right-on equal-opportunities leftist in the poor girl's favour.

Wasn't Ethel in the IMG with Tarquin who teaches sociology at Bermondsey? And didn't Terence go out years ago with Julia, who then had an affair with that bloke on the Guardian?

At least Sparta will know about books ... so give her a place, make up the access quota elsewhere on the quiet – and pass the sickbag.

HATTERSLEY ON FOOT

Paul Anderson writes:

Roy Hattersley reviews Kenneth O Morgan’s Michael Foot: A Life (HarperPress, £25) in the Observer today (click here). I have just finished reading the book myself and I’m writing about it elsewhere, so I’ll not say what I think about the tome for now. But I was struck by Hattersley’s vehemence in condemning Foot’s leadership of the Labour Party between 1980 and 1983:

On page 436 (as incredulous readers can confirm for themselves), Morgan examines why and how Michael Foot became leader of the Labour party and concludes, with masterly understatement, that it was not 'in order to win an election'. He was elected 'to keep the party together'. But, dubious though that contention is, it cannot compete for improbability with what Morgan goes on to claim about the way in which Foot discharged that duty: 'This he did with patent sincerity and literary flair.'

In fact, he did not do it at all. He certainly tried. But during the first year of his leadership, Labour suffered a split that was worse than anything in its history except possibly the schism led by Ramsay MacDonald in 1931; and the number of defections from both the parliamentary party and the party in the country were far greater than those that followed the creation of the National Government. And, unpleasant though the fact may be, it was all precipitated by the choice of Foot as leader.

A couple of weeks before Jim Callaghan's resignation, I discussed the party's future with David Owen as we walked from the TUC to the House of Commons. Owen told me: 'It looks as if Denis [Healey] will get it and we'll be all right for another three years.' Last week, to confirm what I remembered, I asked Lord Owen if he would have left a Labour party that was led by Healey. He replied that the thought would not have entered his head. Nobody doubts that Healey would have produced a better election result than Michael Foot managed in 1983. We must not create the myth that Healey's defeat in the leadership election was necessary for the party's welfare.

The crucial votes that guaranteed Healey's defeat came from craven members of the parliamentary Labour party who mistakenly believed that troublemakers in their constituencies would quieten down if an old left-winger became leader. They preferred the certainty of Labour losing the next general election to the risk of being ejected from their safe seats. Their cowardice was compounded by the treachery of a group of Social Democrat defectors who postponed their resignation from Labour until they had voted for the party leader who in their estimation was most likely to guarantee electoral disaster. Morgan identifies three of them. They did not think that Healey was the wrong choice to lead a revival.

Now I don’t want to reopen old wounds – and I was nowhere near the action in 1980 (I wasn’t even in the Labour Party) – but I think Hattersley gets Labour’s mood in 1980-81 completely wrong here. To put it bluntly, he refuses to recognise that the party in the country – both the constituency parties and the unions – had swung (petulantly but decisively) way to the left, and that Healey’s election as leader would have been followed by an even-worse civil-war-cum-schism than the one that ensued under Foot. Which would in turn have resulted in an even-worse electoral defeat than Labour suffered under Foot in 1983.

I don’t buy the story that the Gang of Three would have stayed if Healey had won: their planning for a new party was too far advanced by the time Foot won, and the real reason they left was not Foot but policy on nuclear arms, Europe and mandatory reselection of Labour MPs. I’m not a great fan of the Bennite insurgency of 1979-82, but it was much more than a few troublemakers in the constituencies, and only a leader from the soft left could have kept any sort of lid on it. Foot was the only credible candidate that came close to fitting the bill – and although he had a torrid time as leader (and wasn't very good at certain aspects of the job, not least sorting election manifestos), he did see off Tony Benn and made a start on chucking out the Trots. Morgan, in other words, is right.

BUT IT JUST DON'T WORK ON YOU

Paul Anderson writes:

This is pretty fine (Muddy Waters doing prime-time TV):