THE MOST IMPORTANT BY-ELECTION SINCE …

The result in Eastleigh has provoked a lot of commentary – which is hardly surprising, because the by-election was hyped as the most important in living memory by rather a lot of people who should have known better.

Yet what Eastleigh actually shows is rather banal. The Liberal Democrats hung on after a backs-to-the-wall by-election campaign in a constituency they had held with a comfortable majority in 2010 in which they completely dominate local government – but they did so despite haemorrhaging support. The other government party, the Tories, also haemmoraghed support. And the beneficiary was UKIP, which came second, not Labour, which came fourth.

If the result had been different by just a little, of course, it might have been a game-changer. But, er, it wasn’t. Eastleigh means business as usual. David Cameron faces a little more pressure from the right of his party to be more like UKIP – but that pressure has been there for a long time. And the failure of the Tories in Eastleigh means that he has no practical option but continue to keep the coalition with the Lib Dems going just as before for the foreseeable future. (That in turn makes an electoral pact between Cameron and Nick Clegg before the next general election more likely, though that’s another story.)

UKIP’s performance in Eastleigh was impressive, to be sure, but it was in line with national opinion polls – and it is no clearer today than it was four weeks ago whether it will prove capable of mounting a credible general election campaign in 2015.

As for Labour, its poor result is hardly a disaster even though its campaign was inept. Several senior figures raised unrealistic expectations that Eastleigh was Labour’s chance for a big breakthrough in the south of England – and selecting John O’Farrell as candidate was not very clever. He’s funny as a writer and affable as a human being, but he was an outsider parachuted into a campaign dominated by local issues, and no one in the Labour camp seems to have thought that there might be quite a few hostages to fortune in his writing. The hoo-hah over his admission in his 1998 book Things Can Only Get Better that he had momentarily regretted that the IRA did not kill Margaret Thatcher was not the main reason for Labour’s poor showing, but it didn’t help. Whatever, the upshot is that Labour still needs to show that it can win in the south.

At least, though, there was a proper by-election special on the BBC…

THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS INVESTIGATE

NICK CLEGG: Danny, I’ve heard rumours that Chris Rennard has been a bit naughty! Will you have a word?
DANNY ALEXANDER: Righto, Nick!

Later …
DANNY ALEXANDER: Chris, I’m told there are rumours you’ve been a bit naughty! Are they true?
CHRIS RENNARD: No, but I resign on grounds of ill health.
DANNY ALEXANDER: Splendid, Chris, I’ll pass that on!

Later still ... 
NICK CLEGG: Did you have a word with Chris?
DANNY ALEXANDER: Yes. He says there's no truth in the rumours and has resigned.
NICK CLEGG: Phew, that's a relief!

Some years later on TV …
MARGOT BONHAM CARTER (former Lib Dem candidate): That rotter Chris pinched my bottom! I told him off and then went home.
PAMELA ASQUITH (former aide to Nick Clegg): I felt his fingers fondly caressing my thigh as we discussed alternatives to the council tax after dinner at his flat. He was really creepy, so I immediately called a taxi back to Tooting.
MARIGOLD THORPE (Lib Dem leader of Pendon council): When he suggested we went upstairs for a 'pervy quickie' at the conference hotel, I burst into tears and ran off to my room.
ANONYMOUS (Lib Dem activist): I went over to his house to see his collection of Lib Dem Focus newsletters. But I thought he was revolting and left after a drink.

Back at Lib Dem HQ
NICK CLEGG: This is a crisis! We must make a statement! Danny, do you remember the rumours about Chris?
DANNY ALEXANDER: Rumours? I’m sure the first I heard was when Margot and Pamela went public on TV.
NICK CLEGG: Oh, I thought I heard something vaguely before and told you about it. Never mind! If we both tell everyone what we remember, I’m sure the truth will out!

NO LABOUR SELL-OUT ON LIBEL REFORM!

The threat Labour is posing to the libel reform bill is breathtakingly dumb and cynical.

It is a small piece of legislation that would curb some of the worst idiocies of our libel law – making it just a little more difficult for charlatans and foreign billionaires to suppress legitimate criticism – and was making its way through parliament with cross-party support.

Then up pop Labour Lords Puttnam and Falconer to amend the bill with a lot of proposals based on Lord Justice Leveson’s report on press regulation – which get the support of the Labour leadership. No matter that their proposals are utterly illiberal where they are not entirely irrelevant (they include the creation of a body that would vet material before publication, which is outrageous): they know that their action endangers the entire bill, because the government will withdraw support for it if amended. Indeed, the sole purpose of their intervention appears to be to embarrass David Cameron for wavering over Leveson.

There’s 24 hours for Labour to change tack and drop this opportunistic wrecking move: the Lords vote tomorrow. If Labour doesn’t withdraw, it will lose all credibility with journalists … and it wouldn’t want that, would it? Read Nick Cohen, John Kampfner and Tim Luckhurst.

IRAQ STARTED A DISMAL DECADE

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” wrote William Wordsworth of the French revolution. “But to be young was very heaven!” And to quite a lot of people, the same seems to apply to having gone to the giant London demonstration of 15 February 2003 against British participation in the war to topple Saddam Hussein.

 I’ve lost count of the pundits who have told us how it changed their lives and opened their eyes and nothing was ever quite the same again. Yes, it was massive, the biggest demo in London maybe ever – 1 million, 2 million? No one knows. We came from all over, all sorts of people. It was an extraordinary mobilisation, and it felt good to be part of a giant crowd.

But that was it. We came, we hung around in office-land, we eventually got to Hyde Park. A month later, Robin Cook resigned from Tony Blair’s cabinet and there was a backbench Labour revolt in the House of Commons. Then Britain went to war.

In short, the demo failed. OK, it might have been more effective – a Tory MP on the platform, perhaps, or a bit of direct action? – but the brutal truth is that a lot of us turned out to say we didn’t want war, and the government, which had won a big majority in 2001, ignored us, as was its democratic right.

So why is everyone talking about it ten years after? It’s not just the convenience of anniversaries for editors. Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, framed by the day of the protest, captures the unease that made the Iraq war a watershed for liberals and leftists. Should we be opposing the overthrow of the most murderous tyrant of the late 20th century? Or should we be backing an imperialist adventure that has every prospect of failing? It was a defining moment, and the arguments continue to this day, filled with passionate intensity.

At the time, it seemed that the scale of opposition to war might prove fatal to Blair’s premiership. But it turned out to be only a nagging wound for New Labour. For all the sound and fury, Blair won another general election in 2005, and Iraq played only a small role in the manoeuvring by Gordon Brown that eventually ousted him.

The war did, however, prove critical for the confidence and credibility of the left in the Labour Party. It was riven over the war but also committed to maintaining Labour in power. Cook’s resignation speech won a standing ovation in the Commons, but most Labour MPs who agreed with him stuck with Blair. Individual Labour Party members opposed to war drifted out of the party, and the anti-war cause became the property of the Liberal Democrats, the Leninist far left (the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of Britain and George Galloway), the mosques with whom the far left had allied, and the Greens.

None of them managed to capitalise on the political collapse of the Labour left. The Lib Dems won 62 seats in the 2005 general election, the biggest haul for a centre party since the 1920s but only 10 better than 2001, then jettisoned two leaders before turning to the free-market right. George Galloway won Bethnal Green for Respect after a campaign directed at traditionalist Muslims, but Respect soon split after a bust-up between Galloway and the SWP. Galloway resurrected his Bethnal Green strategy to win a by-election victory in Bradford last year, but it’s hard to see that as more than a one-off. The Greens retained the European Parliament seats they won in 1999 in 2004 and 2009 and won representation on local councils, though it wasn’t until 2010 that they got their first MP (and that had little to do with Iraq).

Meanwhile, Labour lost power in 2010 to the most reactionary government we’ve had since the 1930s. Iraq was not a major factor in the defeat – at least by comparison with the MPs’ expenses scandal, immigration and the press trashing of Brown and Labour’s record on economic policy. But it was a factor, and it was an issue in the leadership election that followed. Ed Miliband won in part because, conveniently, he’d not had anything to do with the decision to go to war.

The war marked the start of a dismal decade for the British left. Can we move on, please?

MR CAMERON GOES TO AMRITSAR

The Amritsar massacre of 1919 is rightly remembered as one of the great outrages of the British empire in its twilight years. Brigadier Reginald Dyer, the local British army commander in the northern Indian city, nervous that the natives were restless and thinking they needed to be taught a lesson, ordered his troops to fire live rounds from rifles and machine guns into an exuberant but unthreatening crowd celebrating a Sikh festival. By the time Dyer’s men had exhausted their ammunition, at least 400 and perhaps as many as 1,000 of the revellers had been shot dead, with thousands seriously wounded.

It was not the only crime of empire or even the greatest – but it was the most brutal and public of the immediate post-first-world-war years, and the news of it, transmitted through the mass-circulation press, horrified Indian and most informed British opinion (to say nothing of the anti-imperialist Americans). Not so the British government, then a Conservative-Liberal coalition led by David Lloyd George, which procrastinated while inquiries and disciplinary procedures dragged on, eventually, more than a year afterwards, when it had no other option, putting up Winston Churchill, the most right-wing Liberal of the day, to explain in the Commons that it had decided that the massacre was a bad thing.

He did so reluctantly but well, against the protests of the Tories and their supporters in the press: it was the only time in the interwar years that Churchill did not take the most reactionary line available on India. The diehard Tory Morning Post, lately distinguished by publishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as documentary evidence of the conspiracy behind Bolshevism, put the hat round after Dyer was disciplined to make sure he had a bounty when he got home, and Dyer remained a hero of the diehards until his death in 1927. Rudyard Kipling, who was of course much more than a diehard, said that Dyer had saved India.

In the circumstances, I think that anyone associated with the Tory party should be grovelling whenever they go to India. “I renounce my party’s despicable history, its tame press and the horrors of British imperialism” was not, however, the message that David Cameron gave when he sort-of apologised (by saying that it was rather awful but Churchill had said sorry already) this week.

WILKO PRAISES AAAARGH! PRESS TITLE

Anna Chen went to see the great Wilko Johnson this week -- and this is what he said about her book of poems (click on ad on the right to buy it!).

BRITISH LENINISM IS DEAD

The economy is in free-fall, the government is stumbling from crisis to crisis, Labour is somnambulant … but what has the British left been talking about this past month? Online transsexuals bullying the feminist journalist Suzanne Moore about an article in the New Statesman – and an extraordinary bust-up in the Socialist Workers Party over an allegation of rape against a senior male member.

The storm over the ugly threats to Moore has had more media coverage – in part because Julie Burchill responded to them by accepting a commission to write an incendiary piece for the Observer lampooning what she called “a bunch of dicks in chicks’ clothing”. Her article, which is very funny, was removed from the paper’s website by its editor, John Mulholland, after readers (and his editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger) complained – a quite astonishing failure of editorial nerve. I’m with Suzanne and Julie on this one: however misunderstood and oppressed you are, you don’t Tweet rape threats to the birds.

But the SWP sexual assault scandal has wider ramifications. The story is simple. Some years ago, a woman member of the party complained of sexual harassment by a party bigwig – and last year she accused him of rape. The party referred the case to its disputes committee, the members of which were friends of the accused; and the committee conducted a slapdash inquiry and found the accusation not proven. It then reported its verdict to a closed session of the party’s conference in early January – which voted to accept it, but only by the narrowest of margins.

Then the shit hit the fan. A transcript of the conference debate on the disputes committee report was sent to the Socialist Unity website by a party member disgusted by the leadership’s lack of openness on the case. This in turn was the cue for several resignations and a spate of polemics from suddenly dissident SWPers – prominent among them the writers Richard Seymour and China Miéville – loudly denouncing the party leadership they had supported unswervingly for years. The hypocrisy is breath-taking, but never mind. The SWP is now in what looks like a terminal crisis.

So what, you might think. But although the SWP doesn’t matter much, it does matter. Until this latest scandal, it was the sole survivor of the Leninist far left in Britain that could claim to be more than a website or a network of old comrades in their fifties with salaried positions in the labour movement, academia, the media and various pressure groups (though of course it was that too). Since the early 1990s the SWP has been the biggest faction on the far left in Britain (which isn't saying much: its membership is almost certainly less than 2,000).

It was a beneficiary of the implosion of its competitors. The Communist Party of Great Britain split during the 1980s. The Eurocommunist majority abandoned Leninism to create Democratic Left (which dwindled to nothing, changed its name twice and handed over what remained of the Moscow gold to a constitutional reform pressure group). The CPGB’s Stalinist minority regrouped in the tiny Communist Party of Britain, most of whose members are now pensioners. A little later, the SWP’s main rival on the Trotskyist left, the Militant Tendency, went into catastrophic decline after it was expelled from the Labour Party (except briefly in Scotland, where it was the core of the Scottish Socialist Party until its charismatic leader Tommy Sheridan fell from grace, though that’s another story).

During the 1990s, the SWP recruited a swathe of leftists left homeless by New Labour, and after Labour won in 1997 made an opening to its rivals, setting up a party to fight elections, the Socialist Alliance, with Militant (by then the Socialist Party of England and Wales), which contested the 2001 general election. The SA won nothing, and meanwhile the brains behind the SWP got old and died: Tony Cliff (2000), Duncan Hallas (2002), Paul Foot (2004).

The SWP terminated the great Trot love-in amid recriminations, but after 9/11, the SWP threw itself into anti-war activism – and found itself new allies in the form of the Muslim Association of Britain and the maverick pro-Saddam Hussein Labour MP George Galloway. The result, after Galloway’s expulsion from Labour in 2003, was the creation of another new electoral party, Respect, which did very well for Gorgeous George, who won Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005, but not so well for the SWP, which got few recruits from the initiative and a lot of ridicule for cosying up to barmy reactionary Islamists.

The SWP left Respect and jettisoned the two leading figures most responsible for the Islamist turn, John Rees and Lindsay German, who now run a website-cum-party called Counterfire. It was obvious when they left that the party was in trouble, but it still dominated the far-left scene: every union branch had a resident SWPer. Now the party is a laughing-stock: no one will even talk to them after all this. I’m not mourning, but it’s worth noting. British Leninism is finished.

EU SHOULD TELL CAMERON TO GET LOST

What the EU needs right now is more integration – a Eurozone-wide tax-and-spend regime to mitigate the impact of the single currency and democratic institutions to run it. David Cameron's proposal for Britain to become a free-rider with access to the common market but able to undercut everyone else on workers' rights and to evade regulation on everything from banking to the environment deserves nothing but contempt. Our European partners should – and probably will – tell him where to stick it. And we don't need a referendum on Europe, or indeed on anything else. Ed Miliband has called this one perfectly.

OBITUARY: WILLIAM REES-MOGG

I've no desire to speak ill of the dead, but William Rees-Mogg, who has just died, was the Man Who Got Everything Wrong. He was a great modernising editor of the Times. More than anyone else, he turned it into a modern broadsheet paper between the late 1960s and early 1980s: it stopped being fuddy-duddy and dull and put on circulation.
But after he left the chair, is there anything he got right? His columns in the Independent and later in the Times were fuddy-duddy and dull and became a laughing-stock because of his enthusiasm for ill-informed predictions – Private Eye taunted him as "Mystic Mogg" – but they never went away. He was wrong about everything imaginable, from the state of the world economy and other geopolitical issues right down to the minutiae of arts policy, and was wrong so barmily and systematically that his column became a must-read for anyone with a taste for comedy. We need another chief establishment chump, and we need one now.