Tribune column, 30 September 2011
When was a book last published that was a real game-changer for the left in Britain? The 2004 Liberal Democrat Orange Book, edited by David Laws and Paul Marshall, certainly signalled to anyone who was awake that the up-and-coming Lib Dem generation was ideologically at odds with the social-democratic centre-leftists who had dominated their party since its birth in 1987. But that was more an announcement of impending defection from social democracy than a contribution to its cause.
Nick Cohen’s What’s Left?, published in 2007, was seen the same way (wrongly) for its rip-roaring denunciation of the left’s failure to face up to radical Islamism and dictators in the developing world. And going back further, there was The Blair Revolution, by Phillip Gould and Peter Mandelson, first published in 1996, the nearest thing there was to a coherent statement of the New Labour case (which isn’t saying a lot), and before that Will Hutton’s The State We’re In, an improbable best-seller that caught a pro-Europe social democratic mood when it came out in 1995. It’s now available at all good Oxfam shops, a sad reminder of what Labour could have done in government but didn’t.
And, well, that’s it for the past 20 years. It’s not that there haven’t been good left-wing political books published – just that none of the vision-thing left efforts have had any lasting impact. All those collections of earnest essays put out by Demos, the IPPR, the Fabians and the rest are not even on the shelves in Oxfam, though if you’re lucky you can pick them up at the Samaritans.
But I have a feeling that the Purple Book, the collection put out by Labour’s “modernisers” last week, will not be on even the Samaritans’ shelves in 10 years’ time.
It’s not without its strengths. The opinion polling on which most of its contributors base their efforts is as almost certainly better than Mark Abrams’s after the 1959 general election, which convinced Hugh Gaitskell to try to abandon Clause Four of the Labour constitution and Mirror Group to turn the Daily Herald into the Sun. The voters, polled late last year, don’t think that the state has done them proud. After 13 years of Labour in power, the electorate is concerned about waste in public spending above all else.
Which isn't really fair on the last Labour government. It's true that it presided over some disastrous public-spending excesses – most notoriously a raft of IT projects that went way over budget and never worked properly and various ludicrous defence procurement deals. But until the banking crash of 2008, it didn't seem to most observers that it had overspent wildly. As Ed Balls said in an impressive speech on Monday, although Labour had woefully underestimated the level of risk to which the world's banks had exposed themselves, the 2008 crisis was not the product of increasing public spending, most of which had gone on new schools and hospitals that were desperately needed after years of Tory neglect.
By 2009, however, the bond markets were getting itchy about Britain's public debt, and the government decided to rein it in with a phased austerity programme. Meanwhile, the Tories, who until 2008 had backed Labour's public spending plans, changed their line to attack Labour's supposed gross profligacy, and, strongly supported by most of the press, mounted a no-holds-barred election campaign accusing Labour of criminal incompetence. In the circumstances, given the difficulty of getting non-economists to understand the principles of Keynesian demand management, it's not altogether surprising that the message struck a chord with the voters.
But this much has been obvious since at least early 2009. The question is what Labour can do to rescue the situation and re-establish its reputation for economic competence. Here, the Purple Book is for the most part deeply disappointing. Its authors' preferred solutions – a credible debt reduction strategy, a new emphasis on the non-statist, decentralist, co-operative traditions of British social democracy, a renewed appeal to “aspirational” voters in the south and east – have been widely touted before, and some are appealing. A bigger role for co-ops and mutuals in Britain would be a good thing, and everyone knows that Labour won't win another general election unless it wins seats in relatively affluent parts of the country. (This has been true, incidentally, since the 1920s, but never mind.)
The problem is that none of this really addresses the bigger questions raised by the crisis that has engulfed the world economy since 2008. Is a smaller state really the way to deal with the extraordinary power of the markets, or popular worries about insecurity of employment and about pensions, or sovereign debt in the Eurozone? I'm not convinced. Labour's going to have do a much more profound rethink of what it's about than is on display here.
29 September 2011
18 September 2011
WIKILEAKS LESSONS – 2
Nick Cohen has a blistering piece in the Observer about the impact of Julian Assange's decision to publish unredacted American diplomatic material.
The grass or squealer usually blabs because he wants to settle scores or ingratiate himself with the authorities. Assange represents a new breed, which technology has enabled: the nark as show-off.
16 September 2011
HARI'S PROBLEM ISN'T LACK OF TRAINING
The long-running saga of Johann Hari's dubious journalistic ethics seems to have come to an end of sorts with his public mea culpa in the Independent. He admits that he "improved" his interviews by presenting quotations from his interviewees' writings as words spoken to him; and he admits having used a pseudonym to post vitriolic and untrue Wikipedia entries about his critics and perceived enemies. He says that he has returned the Orwell Prize he was awarded in 2009 and that he will be taking a journalism course to learn what he hadn't previously taken in about how journalists should behave.
The Hari affair is small potatoes by comparison with other recent scandals of journalistic ethics.
As far as we are aware, his plagiarism was not on the scale of Jayson Blair, whose ripped-off and made-up reporting so damaged the reputation of the New York Times.
Hari played faster and looser with the quotes and attributions than any journalist ever should, but every journalist knows the temptation to which he succumbed. Whether you're writing news or doing interview features, you have to clean up quotes, and every journalist knows there are times when you have to do quite a bit of interpolation to make an interviewee's spoken words coherent.
Lifting whole sentences (or more) from an interviewee's book or previous interviews and presenting them unattributed as spoken quote is wrong, of course. But no one uses unadulterated verbatim spoken quote for anything written: when did you last see an "um" or an "er" or a "sort-of" or a "like" in a news story except for effect?
Where you draw the line on modifying and improving quotes is, in short, a grey area. Hari went out of the grey and into the black in spectacular fashion, but he's not the first to do so, and he won't be the last. I don't think, one-off, that it's a sackable offence, though if you do it systematically, as Hari appears to have done, it is.
Writing pseudonymous libellous Wikipedia entries about journalistic rivals is a different matter. Anyone can do it, and a couple of morons have done it to me. And if you're found out, it should be out-the-door time, though if you're in the process of a nervous breakdown there are extenuating circumstances that demand that the ejection be humane.
All the same, it's a minor infraction by comparison with the systematic invasion of privacy engaged upon by the News of the World's phone-hackers. I know how Nick Cohen and Cristina Odone feel about Hari's attempts at character assassination, but they're big enough to fight back (as indeed they have done). Nothing Hari has done has endangered anyone's life, and he doesn't seem to have told substantial lies in the interests of governments, corporations or any of the myriad causes he supported.
Which takes us to Hari's punishment or treatment – a year off from the Indy and a course in journalism. I've been teaching journalism for 25 years now, and I think I know what journalism training can do. It can teach you how to write a news story, how to structure a feature, how to lay out a page, how to make a news programme for TV or radio, how to set up a blog, how to do an interview. What it can't do is teach you what is right. Even after the most intensive course on journalism ethics, a plagiarist remains a plagiarist, and I don't know any journalism course that addresses the habit of denigrating one's peers anonymously on Wikipedia. At best, Hari will be made aware of the shades of grey that are everywhere in the business of journalism. He might learn how he should behave, but it won't make him behave any better.
The only way that Hari's doing a journalism course fits the bill is that it's humiliating for him to go back to basics after a decade in the limelight. As rehabilitation, it's useless. As an editor, I would have fired him, end of story.
The Hari affair is small potatoes by comparison with other recent scandals of journalistic ethics.
As far as we are aware, his plagiarism was not on the scale of Jayson Blair, whose ripped-off and made-up reporting so damaged the reputation of the New York Times.
Hari played faster and looser with the quotes and attributions than any journalist ever should, but every journalist knows the temptation to which he succumbed. Whether you're writing news or doing interview features, you have to clean up quotes, and every journalist knows there are times when you have to do quite a bit of interpolation to make an interviewee's spoken words coherent.
Lifting whole sentences (or more) from an interviewee's book or previous interviews and presenting them unattributed as spoken quote is wrong, of course. But no one uses unadulterated verbatim spoken quote for anything written: when did you last see an "um" or an "er" or a "sort-of" or a "like" in a news story except for effect?
Where you draw the line on modifying and improving quotes is, in short, a grey area. Hari went out of the grey and into the black in spectacular fashion, but he's not the first to do so, and he won't be the last. I don't think, one-off, that it's a sackable offence, though if you do it systematically, as Hari appears to have done, it is.
Writing pseudonymous libellous Wikipedia entries about journalistic rivals is a different matter. Anyone can do it, and a couple of morons have done it to me. And if you're found out, it should be out-the-door time, though if you're in the process of a nervous breakdown there are extenuating circumstances that demand that the ejection be humane.
All the same, it's a minor infraction by comparison with the systematic invasion of privacy engaged upon by the News of the World's phone-hackers. I know how Nick Cohen and Cristina Odone feel about Hari's attempts at character assassination, but they're big enough to fight back (as indeed they have done). Nothing Hari has done has endangered anyone's life, and he doesn't seem to have told substantial lies in the interests of governments, corporations or any of the myriad causes he supported.
Which takes us to Hari's punishment or treatment – a year off from the Indy and a course in journalism. I've been teaching journalism for 25 years now, and I think I know what journalism training can do. It can teach you how to write a news story, how to structure a feature, how to lay out a page, how to make a news programme for TV or radio, how to set up a blog, how to do an interview. What it can't do is teach you what is right. Even after the most intensive course on journalism ethics, a plagiarist remains a plagiarist, and I don't know any journalism course that addresses the habit of denigrating one's peers anonymously on Wikipedia. At best, Hari will be made aware of the shades of grey that are everywhere in the business of journalism. He might learn how he should behave, but it won't make him behave any better.
The only way that Hari's doing a journalism course fits the bill is that it's humiliating for him to go back to basics after a decade in the limelight. As rehabilitation, it's useless. As an editor, I would have fired him, end of story.
15 September 2011
BACK TO BUSINESS
It's Battle of Britain Day, and time to revive this dormant blog. I was only sleeping, honest.
7 August 2011
5 August 2011
BLUE LABOUR DESERVES A HEARING
Tribune column, 5 August 2011
It would be difficult to create a more half-arsed political initiative than Blue Labour if you set out to fail.
The small group of academics and politicians that was touted earlier this year as the coming big thing in Labour’s intellectual firmament is now officially finished, according to Jonathan Rutherford on the New Statesman's blog,having produced no more than a (very patchy) e-book of first thoughts.
Oh, no, it's not, counters the group's prime mover and guru, Maurice Glasman, in the print edition of the Statesman, apologising for a series of ill-considered – not to say intemperate – public statements calling for an end to immigration, discussions with supporters of the English Defence League and (implicitly) British withdrawal from the European Union that had drawn the fire both of the Trots and of Peter Mandelson.
Such a pronounced schism at such an early stage does not, shall we say, bode well. But if Blue Labour is indeed all over before it properly started, I'm not crowing. And before Tribune readers reach for the computer keyboard or the green ink to denounce me, I've not been converted either to an intolerance of immigration that makes Migration Watch look liberal, or to consorting with the EDL, or to UKIP-style Euroscepticism.
Blue Labour was and is a dreadful name for Glasman's ideas and his group, and the e-book they published a couple of months ago, The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, is neither coherent nor comprehensive. Indeed, it reads as what it is, a string of papers by a group of people who are interested in pursuing certain themes but haven't quite worked out what they think, with the only really thought-through contribution a schematic and in many respects eccentric essay by Glasman himself that raises more questions than it answers.
Nevertheless, I think that Glasman, for all his extraordinary ability to put his foot in his mouth while dropping a bollock, has some important things to say that need to be said. Dismissing him as a clown or as some kind of far-right infiltrator into Labour's ranks is easy but a big mistake.
His most telling point is that Labour over the past two decades has abandoned any critique of capitalism as a destroyer of social solidarity and community in favour of cheer-leading for its creativity and dynamism. New Labour's unqualified enthusiasm for the “modernising” effects of globalisation, flexible labour markets and free competition has, he argues, left large swathes of the working class utterly alienated from Labour. And the first priority for anyone interested in rescuing Labour must be to reconnect it to working people's lives as they have been and are actually lived. For many of them, a lot that has happened in the past 40 years – breakdown of communities, collapse of secure employment, ever-increasing shortages of affordable housing – has been for the worse, under Labour as well as Tory governments.
Now, the way Glasman fleshes this out is intensely problematic. There are times when he appears to be romanticising a working class that never existed, others when he seems hopelessly notalgic about a world to which we cannot return. His prescriptions, both in terms of organisation and policy, are often wrong. He sees community mobilisation as a panacea, on very flimsy evidence, and seems to think that it can thrive if only the over-mighty technocratic state is cut back. And moving in one leap from the observation that working-class worries about immigration are real and will not go away to the conclusion that immigration should be stopped at once (and that we should leave the EU if it doesn't allow us to stop allowing free movement of labour) is breathtakingly simplistic.
But at least Glasman is asking what Labour is for, and his insistence that it cannot survive if it remains disengaged from the everyday lives of the people that were once its core support makes a lot of sense. An arid, abstractly liberal Labour that fetishes the new, professing that "things can only get better" and turning its back on everything rooted or old, can never inspire a movement – and as Harold Wilson famously (though cynically) put it, the Labour Party is a crusade or it is nothing. And right now? Well, it ain't a crusade.
***
On a different matter entirely, I was shocked to read in the Guardian this week that City of Westminster police's “counter-terrorism information desk” had issued a leaflet urging members of the public to inform on anarchists. “Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police,” it read. “Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchism."
The leaflet was hurriedly disowned by Scotland Yard, which issued a statement saying that it was a poor choice of words by a minion at a single police station (Belgravia, I kid you not) and that all the leaflet should have said was that the Met was looking for information on people who had caused criminal damage to business premises this year. “The Metropolitan police does not seek to stigmatise those people with legitimate political views,” ran the official line.
Oh yeah? I'll wager a fiver that, when the records are opened in 30 years (or whenever), we'll find that a substantial part of Special Branch's anti-terrorism budget since the end of the Cold War has been devoted to keeping track of anarchists … who in that time have been responsible for precisely zero terrorist attacks in Britain, and not a single death.
It would be difficult to create a more half-arsed political initiative than Blue Labour if you set out to fail.
The small group of academics and politicians that was touted earlier this year as the coming big thing in Labour’s intellectual firmament is now officially finished, according to Jonathan Rutherford on the New Statesman's blog,having produced no more than a (very patchy) e-book of first thoughts.
Oh, no, it's not, counters the group's prime mover and guru, Maurice Glasman, in the print edition of the Statesman, apologising for a series of ill-considered – not to say intemperate – public statements calling for an end to immigration, discussions with supporters of the English Defence League and (implicitly) British withdrawal from the European Union that had drawn the fire both of the Trots and of Peter Mandelson.
Such a pronounced schism at such an early stage does not, shall we say, bode well. But if Blue Labour is indeed all over before it properly started, I'm not crowing. And before Tribune readers reach for the computer keyboard or the green ink to denounce me, I've not been converted either to an intolerance of immigration that makes Migration Watch look liberal, or to consorting with the EDL, or to UKIP-style Euroscepticism.
Blue Labour was and is a dreadful name for Glasman's ideas and his group, and the e-book they published a couple of months ago, The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, is neither coherent nor comprehensive. Indeed, it reads as what it is, a string of papers by a group of people who are interested in pursuing certain themes but haven't quite worked out what they think, with the only really thought-through contribution a schematic and in many respects eccentric essay by Glasman himself that raises more questions than it answers.
Nevertheless, I think that Glasman, for all his extraordinary ability to put his foot in his mouth while dropping a bollock, has some important things to say that need to be said. Dismissing him as a clown or as some kind of far-right infiltrator into Labour's ranks is easy but a big mistake.
His most telling point is that Labour over the past two decades has abandoned any critique of capitalism as a destroyer of social solidarity and community in favour of cheer-leading for its creativity and dynamism. New Labour's unqualified enthusiasm for the “modernising” effects of globalisation, flexible labour markets and free competition has, he argues, left large swathes of the working class utterly alienated from Labour. And the first priority for anyone interested in rescuing Labour must be to reconnect it to working people's lives as they have been and are actually lived. For many of them, a lot that has happened in the past 40 years – breakdown of communities, collapse of secure employment, ever-increasing shortages of affordable housing – has been for the worse, under Labour as well as Tory governments.
Now, the way Glasman fleshes this out is intensely problematic. There are times when he appears to be romanticising a working class that never existed, others when he seems hopelessly notalgic about a world to which we cannot return. His prescriptions, both in terms of organisation and policy, are often wrong. He sees community mobilisation as a panacea, on very flimsy evidence, and seems to think that it can thrive if only the over-mighty technocratic state is cut back. And moving in one leap from the observation that working-class worries about immigration are real and will not go away to the conclusion that immigration should be stopped at once (and that we should leave the EU if it doesn't allow us to stop allowing free movement of labour) is breathtakingly simplistic.
But at least Glasman is asking what Labour is for, and his insistence that it cannot survive if it remains disengaged from the everyday lives of the people that were once its core support makes a lot of sense. An arid, abstractly liberal Labour that fetishes the new, professing that "things can only get better" and turning its back on everything rooted or old, can never inspire a movement – and as Harold Wilson famously (though cynically) put it, the Labour Party is a crusade or it is nothing. And right now? Well, it ain't a crusade.
***
On a different matter entirely, I was shocked to read in the Guardian this week that City of Westminster police's “counter-terrorism information desk” had issued a leaflet urging members of the public to inform on anarchists. “Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police,” it read. “Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchism."
The leaflet was hurriedly disowned by Scotland Yard, which issued a statement saying that it was a poor choice of words by a minion at a single police station (Belgravia, I kid you not) and that all the leaflet should have said was that the Met was looking for information on people who had caused criminal damage to business premises this year. “The Metropolitan police does not seek to stigmatise those people with legitimate political views,” ran the official line.
Oh yeah? I'll wager a fiver that, when the records are opened in 30 years (or whenever), we'll find that a substantial part of Special Branch's anti-terrorism budget since the end of the Cold War has been devoted to keeping track of anarchists … who in that time have been responsible for precisely zero terrorist attacks in Britain, and not a single death.
19 July 2011
KINNOCK SHOULD KNOW BETTER
Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock put his foot in it on the Today programme this morning when he told John Humphrys that he favoured regulation of the press to ensure political balance in its coverage, along the lines of the rules governing broadcasting in Britain. Such regulation would spell the death of polemical partisan campaigning journalism – and as a former member of the board of Tribune he should know better.
Which is not to say that there should not be stricter rules to limit concentration of media ownership in order to encourage pluralism, but that's a different issue.
Incidentally, Nick Robinson was telling only a very small part of the story when he said on the same programme that the impartiality rules governing broadcasting were introduced because of lack of bandwidth. They date from the creation of the BBC in the 1920s, and by far the most important reason for them was the fear of the political class that without a politically neutral public monopoly broadcaster, radio in Britain would become as fiercely partisan as the press. Much the same was behind the maintenance of the impartiality rules when the BBC's monopoly was finally broken with the creation of ITV in the 1950s.
Which is not to say that there should not be stricter rules to limit concentration of media ownership in order to encourage pluralism, but that's a different issue.
Incidentally, Nick Robinson was telling only a very small part of the story when he said on the same programme that the impartiality rules governing broadcasting were introduced because of lack of bandwidth. They date from the creation of the BBC in the 1920s, and by far the most important reason for them was the fear of the political class that without a politically neutral public monopoly broadcaster, radio in Britain would become as fiercely partisan as the press. Much the same was behind the maintenance of the impartiality rules when the BBC's monopoly was finally broken with the creation of ITV in the 1950s.
15 July 2011
REBEKAH GOES - NOTHING CHANGES
It's all marvellous television – or would be if the BBC's journalists weren't on strike – but the implosion of News Corporation's damage-limitation exercise in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal doesn't really make a lot of difference to anything apart from News Corp's share price.
The resignation of Rebekah Brooks, following sharply on the closure of the News of the World and the formal abandonment of News Corp's bid for full ownership of BSkyB, is certainly newsworthy. How significant it is remains a moot point. Call me a cynic, but I'd put money on the following. News Corp does a lot of grovelling this week, launches a Sunday Sun in early September and puts together a "revised" bid for BSkyB around the same time. By Xmas we're back to business as usual, maybe with a superficially beefed-up Press Complaints Commission.
The only things that would really change the game would be a statutory press standards regime (unlikely, and also a bad idea) or legislation to ban any company or individual from owning more than a 10 per cent share – say – of outlets in the newspaper or subscription TV markets. But something tells me that serious constraints on media ownership are the last thing on David Cameron's mind.
As for Rebekah, I'm sure she has a future in reality TV.
The resignation of Rebekah Brooks, following sharply on the closure of the News of the World and the formal abandonment of News Corp's bid for full ownership of BSkyB, is certainly newsworthy. How significant it is remains a moot point. Call me a cynic, but I'd put money on the following. News Corp does a lot of grovelling this week, launches a Sunday Sun in early September and puts together a "revised" bid for BSkyB around the same time. By Xmas we're back to business as usual, maybe with a superficially beefed-up Press Complaints Commission.
The only things that would really change the game would be a statutory press standards regime (unlikely, and also a bad idea) or legislation to ban any company or individual from owning more than a 10 per cent share – say – of outlets in the newspaper or subscription TV markets. But something tells me that serious constraints on media ownership are the last thing on David Cameron's mind.
As for Rebekah, I'm sure she has a future in reality TV.
14 July 2011
HAIN IS WRONG ON PR
Shadow Welsh secretary Peter Hain wants the Welsh Assembly elected by first-past-the-post rather than the proportional additional member system,. "The only acceptable option given the AV referendum result is to have all AMs elected by first-past-the-post, and we believe that each of the 30 new constituencies should elect two AMs by that system," he says.
Hain is generally a good thing, but this is reactionary Labour tribalism of the worst kind. (Labour would do much better in Wales under FPTP, probably so well that it would become a permanent ruling party.) The result of the AV referendum was in no sense an endorsement of first-past-the-post, and – contrary to Hain's claims – there is no evidence that Welsh voters find AMS too complicated. The system has worked well in both Wales and Scotland, and there's a strong case for using it for Westminster elections too.
Hain is generally a good thing, but this is reactionary Labour tribalism of the worst kind. (Labour would do much better in Wales under FPTP, probably so well that it would become a permanent ruling party.) The result of the AV referendum was in no sense an endorsement of first-past-the-post, and – contrary to Hain's claims – there is no evidence that Welsh voters find AMS too complicated. The system has worked well in both Wales and Scotland, and there's a strong case for using it for Westminster elections too.
NEWS OF THE WORLD CLOSES: WHO CARES?
The closure of a newspaper is always a sad thing. People lose their jobs and there’s less to buy on the newsstands. But some closures matter more than others.
The end of the News of the World has certainly been spectacular, and it undoubtedly matters in the here-and-now of politics. The fall-out from its phone-hacking is immense: we could be looking at statutory regulation of the press within a year.
But the NoW going doesn’t in itself matter very much. Phone-hacking apart – if we accept that the NoW was the only hacker, which seems unlikely – it wasn’t doing anything journalistically that its competitors weren’t doing or trying to do on more limited resources. The Sunday Mirror, the People and the Mail on Sunday will continue to supply us with coke-and-hookers celeb disgrace stories after the NoW has gone. The NoW wasn't doing anything distinctive.
Even if News International doesn’t launch a Sunday version of the Sun, the closure of the News of the World is small potatoes.
The end of the News of the World has certainly been spectacular, and it undoubtedly matters in the here-and-now of politics. The fall-out from its phone-hacking is immense: we could be looking at statutory regulation of the press within a year.
But the NoW going doesn’t in itself matter very much. Phone-hacking apart – if we accept that the NoW was the only hacker, which seems unlikely – it wasn’t doing anything journalistically that its competitors weren’t doing or trying to do on more limited resources. The Sunday Mirror, the People and the Mail on Sunday will continue to supply us with coke-and-hookers celeb disgrace stories after the NoW has gone. The NoW wasn't doing anything distinctive.
Even if News International doesn’t launch a Sunday version of the Sun, the closure of the News of the World is small potatoes.
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