CHARLES CLARKE ON LABOUR'S PREDICAMENT
Paul Anderson writes:
The former home secretary's interview with Andrew Neil on the BBC News Channel on Saturday night was widely trailed but only selectively quoted in the papers – and watched by almost no one. But it's worth watching in full here: Clarke says plenty of very sensible things about where Labour should go politically (greenery, constitutional reform, rationalising taxation) and also makes it clear, rightly I think, that Gordon Brown is very much on probation right now. He says that Labour could suffer meltdown at the next general election unless it gets its act together ... and at the moment I'm inclined to agree.
June 11, 2009
Paul Anderson writes:
The former home secretary's interview with Andrew Neil on the BBC News Channel on Saturday night was widely trailed but only selectively quoted in the papers – and watched by almost no one. But it's worth watching in full here: Clarke says plenty of very sensible things about where Labour should go politically (greenery, constitutional reform, rationalising taxation) and also makes it clear, rightly I think, that Gordon Brown is very much on probation right now. He says that Labour could suffer meltdown at the next general election unless it gets its act together ... and at the moment I'm inclined to agree.
BROWN MUST STAY TO GET RID OF EXPENSES FIDDLERS
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 12 June 2009
Where do you start? It’s difficult to think of a more depressing time for Labour supporters since – well, I was going to say the weeks after Labour lost the 1992 general election, but this is much worse. Labour’s failure in 1992 was like your team losing in the cup final. This is like watching the penultimate game of the league season when you’re three points adrift in the relegation zone and three-nil down and your players start brawling with one another on the pitch …
OK, that’s enough blokish football metaphors. But you get the point. In 1992 we were disappointed to lose when we hoped to win. This time, we are simply staring disaster in the face.
No matter how you look at it, the council and European election results are dire for Labour. In the English counties, the party lost nearly two-thirds of the seats it held and all four of the councils it controlled. Its projected share of the national vote was just 23 per cent, 15 points behind the Tories.
The Euro-elections were even worse. Labour’s overall share of the vote was 15 per cent, eight points down on its dismal performance in 2004. Labour was beaten in Wales by the Tories and in Scotland by the SNP. In the North West and Yorkshire regions, it lost sitting MEPs to the far-right British National Party, and in the South West and South East it trailed in fifth behind the Tories, UKIP, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. Labour was fourth in the East and third in the West Midlands, with UKIP second in both. It came first only in the North East.
European and local elections are not reliable guides to the level of support for parties at the next general election. In general elections, turnout is usually much higher, and parties not already represented at Westminster hardly ever win substantial shares of the vote, let alone seats. In the past, governing parties have been battered in European and local elections and won large Commons majorities a year or two later, as Labour did in 2001 and 2005. But it would be unprecedented for a governing party to win after a performance as poor as Labour’s on 4 June.
Of course, Labour’s drubbing took place in exceptional circumstances. The resignations from the government of two cabinet members and two other ministers before polling day did it serious harm – Hazel Blears’s departure was particularly damaging, not least because it was so obviously intended to be.
What really made the difference, however, was the MPs’ expenses scandal. The message on the doorstep was the same everywhere: I normally vote Labour but I’m so disgusted with what those MPs have done that I’m not this time. The scandal undoubtedly hit Labour much harder than the other major parties. Labour is in government and has more MPs than the rest combined – and, more importantly, many hitherto solid Labour voters are furious at its MPs spending from the public purse the equivalent of a year’s skilled manual worker’s wages on property speculation and lavish lifestyles, all the while claiming to stand for fairness and the interests of “hard-working families”.
But the expenses scandal won’t just fade in voters’ memory as time goes by. The only possible way back for Labour is to get to grips with it this summer by chucking out every MP who has abused the system.
For now, everything else except economic management is a luxury – even coming up with brilliant new policy ideas. And this means that getting rid of Gordon Brown immediately (as advocated by several departing ministers, “rebel” backbench Labour MPs and the Guardian) would be the height of folly.
A leadership election over the summer would not just divert attention from cleaning up the Parliamentary Labour Party: it would make it nigh-on impossible. MPs called to account over expenses would protest vehemently that they were being victimised for supporting one or other leadership contender. The necessary purge would grind to a halt. Whoever won the leadership election, Labour would go into the general election, whether in autumn or next spring, with the expenses scandal still festering – and the result would be a wipeout.
In this light, it’s just as well that Brown was forced by the resignations of Blears and James Purnell to reshuffle the cabinet earlier than planned, so that all the credible would-be replacements for him had sworn undying loyalty in public before the European votes were counted. By the time the sheer scale of Labour’s European defeat had sunk in, pressure for the PM’s resignation had already dissipated .
Which isn’t to say that Gordon shouldn’t go – just that it shouldn’t be yet. There’s a good three months’ work still to be done. And after that? Let’s see ...
June 05, 2009
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 12 June 2009
Where do you start? It’s difficult to think of a more depressing time for Labour supporters since – well, I was going to say the weeks after Labour lost the 1992 general election, but this is much worse. Labour’s failure in 1992 was like your team losing in the cup final. This is like watching the penultimate game of the league season when you’re three points adrift in the relegation zone and three-nil down and your players start brawling with one another on the pitch …
OK, that’s enough blokish football metaphors. But you get the point. In 1992 we were disappointed to lose when we hoped to win. This time, we are simply staring disaster in the face.
No matter how you look at it, the council and European election results are dire for Labour. In the English counties, the party lost nearly two-thirds of the seats it held and all four of the councils it controlled. Its projected share of the national vote was just 23 per cent, 15 points behind the Tories.
The Euro-elections were even worse. Labour’s overall share of the vote was 15 per cent, eight points down on its dismal performance in 2004. Labour was beaten in Wales by the Tories and in Scotland by the SNP. In the North West and Yorkshire regions, it lost sitting MEPs to the far-right British National Party, and in the South West and South East it trailed in fifth behind the Tories, UKIP, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. Labour was fourth in the East and third in the West Midlands, with UKIP second in both. It came first only in the North East.
European and local elections are not reliable guides to the level of support for parties at the next general election. In general elections, turnout is usually much higher, and parties not already represented at Westminster hardly ever win substantial shares of the vote, let alone seats. In the past, governing parties have been battered in European and local elections and won large Commons majorities a year or two later, as Labour did in 2001 and 2005. But it would be unprecedented for a governing party to win after a performance as poor as Labour’s on 4 June.
Of course, Labour’s drubbing took place in exceptional circumstances. The resignations from the government of two cabinet members and two other ministers before polling day did it serious harm – Hazel Blears’s departure was particularly damaging, not least because it was so obviously intended to be.
What really made the difference, however, was the MPs’ expenses scandal. The message on the doorstep was the same everywhere: I normally vote Labour but I’m so disgusted with what those MPs have done that I’m not this time. The scandal undoubtedly hit Labour much harder than the other major parties. Labour is in government and has more MPs than the rest combined – and, more importantly, many hitherto solid Labour voters are furious at its MPs spending from the public purse the equivalent of a year’s skilled manual worker’s wages on property speculation and lavish lifestyles, all the while claiming to stand for fairness and the interests of “hard-working families”.
But the expenses scandal won’t just fade in voters’ memory as time goes by. The only possible way back for Labour is to get to grips with it this summer by chucking out every MP who has abused the system.
For now, everything else except economic management is a luxury – even coming up with brilliant new policy ideas. And this means that getting rid of Gordon Brown immediately (as advocated by several departing ministers, “rebel” backbench Labour MPs and the Guardian) would be the height of folly.
A leadership election over the summer would not just divert attention from cleaning up the Parliamentary Labour Party: it would make it nigh-on impossible. MPs called to account over expenses would protest vehemently that they were being victimised for supporting one or other leadership contender. The necessary purge would grind to a halt. Whoever won the leadership election, Labour would go into the general election, whether in autumn or next spring, with the expenses scandal still festering – and the result would be a wipeout.
In this light, it’s just as well that Brown was forced by the resignations of Blears and James Purnell to reshuffle the cabinet earlier than planned, so that all the credible would-be replacements for him had sworn undying loyalty in public before the European votes were counted. By the time the sheer scale of Labour’s European defeat had sunk in, pressure for the PM’s resignation had already dissipated .
Which isn’t to say that Gordon shouldn’t go – just that it shouldn’t be yet. There’s a good three months’ work still to be done. And after that? Let’s see ...
THEY'LL NONE OF THEM BE MISSED
Paul Anderson writes:
A small point, but an important one, about the government resignations that have rocked Gordon Brown into meltdown.
So far (as of 11.30am Friday 5 June), apart from Patricia Hewitt and John Hutton, all of them appear to have been severely compromised by the Daily Telegraph's expenses revelations.
And now they have resigned, with most of them making it known that they left because Gordon had been horrid/hates women/is useless, it becomes much more difficult for Labour's NEC panel to haul them in for questioning. "It's not fair!" they will declare. "He's just trying to take revenge!"
Convenient, huh?
June 04, 2009
Paul Anderson writes:
A small point, but an important one, about the government resignations that have rocked Gordon Brown into meltdown.
So far (as of 11.30am Friday 5 June), apart from Patricia Hewitt and John Hutton, all of them appear to have been severely compromised by the Daily Telegraph's expenses revelations.
And now they have resigned, with most of them making it known that they left because Gordon had been horrid/hates women/is useless, it becomes much more difficult for Labour's NEC panel to haul them in for questioning. "It's not fair!" they will declare. "He's just trying to take revenge!"
Convenient, huh?
HEADLESS CHICKENS SHOOTING THEMSELVES IN THE FOOT - 456
Paul Anderson writes:
The current “febrile atmosphere in Westminster”, as everyone is calling it, is not something I have had the pleasure to witness directly: I’ve been nowhere near parliament for months. But anyone who reads the papers and watches the television news can tell that the Parliamentary Labour Party is in the grip of the most serious of its periodic fits of hysteria for more than 25 years.
The expenses scandal has hit Labour harder than the other parties – partly because it is in government, partly because there is a feeling among traditional Labour supporters that what many MPs have done in claiming expenses to fund property speculation and lavish lifestyles is radically at odds with what Labour should stand for. Gordon Brown has not covered himself in glory in dealing with the problem – though it’s difficult to see what exactly he could have done much better in the circumstances – and as the party faces what looks set to be a drubbing in today’s European and county council elections, two cabinet ministers and two other ministers have resigned from the government in advance of a widely flagged reshuffle. Meanwhile, backbench Labour MPs are trying to put together a petition demanding that Brown stands down now.
I have no more idea than anyone else how this will pan out over the next few days. My hunch is that Brown will neither resign over Labour’s disastrous election performance nor provoke a revolt that forces him out with his reshuffle. He doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t have to go, and there is no alternative Labour leader that opinion polls suggest would rescue Labour from ignominious defeat at a general election.
I hope my hunch is right – not because I think Brown is the right person to lead Labour into the next general election but because it would be utterly stupid for him to stand down now. Labour’s priority for this summer must be to weed out all the MPs who have abused the expenses system and replace them as parliamentary candidates, and a leadership election would prevent that from happening. Can you imagine Labour’s NEC sub-committee calling in alleged expenses fiddlers who are on the campaign teams of would-be leaders? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
What’s more, a new Labour leader elected this summer would be under massive pressure as prime minister from the media and the public to call a general election in autumn – which would be entirely against Labour’s electoral interests. On one hand, the brand would still be toxic because the leadership change had prevented the necessary cleansing of Labour’s parliamentary ranks. On the other, the chances of the economy having picked up sufficiently to provide voters with a reason to return to Labour would be extremely slim.
Gordon should go, but now is not the time. He should oversee a purge this summer, starting with a really brutal cabinet reshuffle to ensure that no one at the top table has dirty hands. Then he should announce his retirement gracefully in his party conference speech in the autumn, offering to stay on as PM until the Labour leadership election is complete to ensure a smooth handover to his successor by Xmas. Whoever took over could then announce a spring general election – and who knows, Labour might not even lose that badly …
Will it happen? I doubt it. But I live in hope.
Right, now off to vote (Labour of course).
May 21, 2009
Paul Anderson writes:
The current “febrile atmosphere in Westminster”, as everyone is calling it, is not something I have had the pleasure to witness directly: I’ve been nowhere near parliament for months. But anyone who reads the papers and watches the television news can tell that the Parliamentary Labour Party is in the grip of the most serious of its periodic fits of hysteria for more than 25 years.
The expenses scandal has hit Labour harder than the other parties – partly because it is in government, partly because there is a feeling among traditional Labour supporters that what many MPs have done in claiming expenses to fund property speculation and lavish lifestyles is radically at odds with what Labour should stand for. Gordon Brown has not covered himself in glory in dealing with the problem – though it’s difficult to see what exactly he could have done much better in the circumstances – and as the party faces what looks set to be a drubbing in today’s European and county council elections, two cabinet ministers and two other ministers have resigned from the government in advance of a widely flagged reshuffle. Meanwhile, backbench Labour MPs are trying to put together a petition demanding that Brown stands down now.
I have no more idea than anyone else how this will pan out over the next few days. My hunch is that Brown will neither resign over Labour’s disastrous election performance nor provoke a revolt that forces him out with his reshuffle. He doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t have to go, and there is no alternative Labour leader that opinion polls suggest would rescue Labour from ignominious defeat at a general election.
I hope my hunch is right – not because I think Brown is the right person to lead Labour into the next general election but because it would be utterly stupid for him to stand down now. Labour’s priority for this summer must be to weed out all the MPs who have abused the expenses system and replace them as parliamentary candidates, and a leadership election would prevent that from happening. Can you imagine Labour’s NEC sub-committee calling in alleged expenses fiddlers who are on the campaign teams of would-be leaders? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
What’s more, a new Labour leader elected this summer would be under massive pressure as prime minister from the media and the public to call a general election in autumn – which would be entirely against Labour’s electoral interests. On one hand, the brand would still be toxic because the leadership change had prevented the necessary cleansing of Labour’s parliamentary ranks. On the other, the chances of the economy having picked up sufficiently to provide voters with a reason to return to Labour would be extremely slim.
Gordon should go, but now is not the time. He should oversee a purge this summer, starting with a really brutal cabinet reshuffle to ensure that no one at the top table has dirty hands. Then he should announce his retirement gracefully in his party conference speech in the autumn, offering to stay on as PM until the Labour leadership election is complete to ensure a smooth handover to his successor by Xmas. Whoever took over could then announce a spring general election – and who knows, Labour might not even lose that badly …
Will it happen? I doubt it. But I live in hope.
Right, now off to vote (Labour of course).
SPEED IS OF THE ESSENCE FOR LABOUR
Paul Anderson writes:
The Labour National Executive Committee on Monday threw out the proposal to reopen selections for all sitting MPs who have been reselected to stand again at the next general election – which would have been by far the quickest and most sensible way for the party to lance the boil of the parliamentary expenses scandal, as it would be for the other parties.
Instead, there’s going to be an NEC panel to investigate Labour MPs expenses, which will then make recommendations to the NEC, which will then decide on various MPs' fates. (This is not the same thing as the independent investigation of the whole scandal,agreed between the party leaders earlier.)
The details and timescale for this NEC panel are currently vague, but it is imperative that it completes its work very quickly. MPs might complain of summary justice, but it is essential that any necessary disciplinary action takes place in time for constituency Labour parties to choose new candidates over the summer.
This would at least means that Labour could go into its conference - or even an autumn election - with sleaze no longer hanging over it quite so obviously. I don’t think there will be an autumn election, though the current situation is so extraordinary now I wouldn’t rule it out, say if Labour is almost wiped out in the Euroelections or a very big fish is caught in the expenses-fiddling net. But even if Labour manages to carry on until spring next year, it needs to neutralise the expenses story (in so far as it can) as soon as possible if it is not going to suffer utter humiliation at the polls.
May 16, 2009
Paul Anderson writes:
The Labour National Executive Committee on Monday threw out the proposal to reopen selections for all sitting MPs who have been reselected to stand again at the next general election – which would have been by far the quickest and most sensible way for the party to lance the boil of the parliamentary expenses scandal, as it would be for the other parties.
Instead, there’s going to be an NEC panel to investigate Labour MPs expenses, which will then make recommendations to the NEC, which will then decide on various MPs' fates. (This is not the same thing as the independent investigation of the whole scandal,agreed between the party leaders earlier.)
The details and timescale for this NEC panel are currently vague, but it is imperative that it completes its work very quickly. MPs might complain of summary justice, but it is essential that any necessary disciplinary action takes place in time for constituency Labour parties to choose new candidates over the summer.
This would at least means that Labour could go into its conference - or even an autumn election - with sleaze no longer hanging over it quite so obviously. I don’t think there will be an autumn election, though the current situation is so extraordinary now I wouldn’t rule it out, say if Labour is almost wiped out in the Euroelections or a very big fish is caught in the expenses-fiddling net. But even if Labour manages to carry on until spring next year, it needs to neutralise the expenses story (in so far as it can) as soon as possible if it is not going to suffer utter humiliation at the polls.
RE-OPEN NOMINATIONS NOW
Paul Anderson writes:
The more that has emerged from the Telegraph about MPs' expenses, the clearer it has become that the only way any of the main political parties can hope to recover credibility is to hold new candidate selections in every single seat they hold where the sitting MP has been confirmed as the candidate for the next general election.
If Labour's National Executive Committee goes for anything less when it meets next week it will destroy any chance the party has of avoiding a catastrophic defeat at the next general election.
The parliamentary expense-fiddlers and property speculators need to be cleared out, and the best people to do that in the Labour Party are the members. They know their MPs and they can read.
This isn't ultra-left posturing, it's plain common sense.
May 15, 2009
Paul Anderson writes:
The more that has emerged from the Telegraph about MPs' expenses, the clearer it has become that the only way any of the main political parties can hope to recover credibility is to hold new candidate selections in every single seat they hold where the sitting MP has been confirmed as the candidate for the next general election.
If Labour's National Executive Committee goes for anything less when it meets next week it will destroy any chance the party has of avoiding a catastrophic defeat at the next general election.
The parliamentary expense-fiddlers and property speculators need to be cleared out, and the best people to do that in the Labour Party are the members. They know their MPs and they can read.
This isn't ultra-left posturing, it's plain common sense.
MPS OF ALL PARTIES HAVE BEEN TAKING THE PISS
Paul Anderson, Tribune column 15 May 2009
It’s that time of year again. I’ve got to sort out my accounts and file a tax return. I spent hours last weekend sifting through invoices, receipts, bank statements and wage slips, working out what to declare to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs about my freelance income and related expenditure for tax year 2008-09.
I used to hire an accountant to do it, but I realised that he was charging me £500 to fill in a form, so for years I’ve done it myself. It’s a lot easier now than it used to be, partly because I’m not doing as much freelance work as I used to and partly because HMRC has made it easier with self-assessment. Whereas ten years ago the process took three days, this week I did in one.
Believe it or not, I’m meticulously honest about what I declare to the Revenue. That’s not down to asceticism or stupidity: I had a nasty scare 20 years ago after I failed to file a tax return and was threatened with court action for not paying the £12,000 the Revenue told me I owed. It took a lot of grovelling to get out of that, but I learned my lesson. Ever since, I’ve sent the taxman a return soon after the end of the financial year that scrupulously details my economic activity.
Except … well, I do what everyone does. The income is always right, but the tax-deductible expenses are less precise.
I know I can’t claim travel to and from salaried work against tax but can claim travel for freelance jobs. Quite often, I have to go to London to do research as a freelance – but I also travel to London to get to my place of employment or just to go out. Of course, I keep all the ticket receipts, but by the time I do my accounts I can’t remember which was for what journey. Had I gone to the LSE library, or was I off to the Guardian for a shift? Or was that the day I spent canoodling in the park with the nubile Letitia? What the hell, the Revenue isn’t going to know, just put down 25 trips to London that are claimable against tax: it’s about right and I’ve got the paperwork to cover it. And so it goes with the share of the heating bill related to working at home and a whole lot more besides.
In other words, I do a certain amount of estimating, then put the ball into the Revenue’s court. And so far the Revenue has believed me. OK, we’re talking piffling sums – I earned £50,000-odd last year and only £5,000 was from freelancing. It might be that I’m such small fry I’m not worth bothering to catch. I like to think, however, that there is a bond of trust between me and the taxman. He hasn’t a clue what I earn or what I spend, but he accepts what I tell him because I’m not taking the piss.
You can see where this is going. If only our parliamentary representatives had taken a small fraction of the minimal care that most taxpayers take when filling in their tax returns, we wouldn’t now be facing a frighteningly complete collapse of public confidence in the entire political class.
They didn’t, however, and we are. The leaked expenses claims published by the Telegraph show that MPs of all parties have been taking the piss big-time for years.
True, the Telegraph paid for the info. True, the sums are not huge in terms of GDP or Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension – and, given the cost of accommodation in central London, £24,000 a year is not a ridiculously generous sum to allow non-London MPs for nights they have to stay in the capital. True, MPs are not particularly well-paid by comparison with bankers or lawyers. And of course the system for paying MPs’ expenses is absurd – although we only know how absurd thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.
But there really are no acceptable excuses for what so many MPs have done. Four nights a week in a modest hotel, rent on a two-bedroom flat in Pimlico, mortgage interest on a small town house in Kennington – any of that is fine. So too are a cleaner and a bit of gardening and home maintenance. Beyond these basics, however, it’s impossible to see any justification for claiming. Many if not most MPs have used expenses allowances to fund blatant speculation in the housing market, home improvements they could have afforded from their salaries and luxuries that are in no sense related to their work.
On the evidence so far, at least 50 MPs should resign in shame. But I’ll put a tenner on no one doing so (as long as I can claim it on exes).
May 10, 2009
Paul Anderson, Tribune column 15 May 2009
It’s that time of year again. I’ve got to sort out my accounts and file a tax return. I spent hours last weekend sifting through invoices, receipts, bank statements and wage slips, working out what to declare to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs about my freelance income and related expenditure for tax year 2008-09.
I used to hire an accountant to do it, but I realised that he was charging me £500 to fill in a form, so for years I’ve done it myself. It’s a lot easier now than it used to be, partly because I’m not doing as much freelance work as I used to and partly because HMRC has made it easier with self-assessment. Whereas ten years ago the process took three days, this week I did in one.
Believe it or not, I’m meticulously honest about what I declare to the Revenue. That’s not down to asceticism or stupidity: I had a nasty scare 20 years ago after I failed to file a tax return and was threatened with court action for not paying the £12,000 the Revenue told me I owed. It took a lot of grovelling to get out of that, but I learned my lesson. Ever since, I’ve sent the taxman a return soon after the end of the financial year that scrupulously details my economic activity.
Except … well, I do what everyone does. The income is always right, but the tax-deductible expenses are less precise.
I know I can’t claim travel to and from salaried work against tax but can claim travel for freelance jobs. Quite often, I have to go to London to do research as a freelance – but I also travel to London to get to my place of employment or just to go out. Of course, I keep all the ticket receipts, but by the time I do my accounts I can’t remember which was for what journey. Had I gone to the LSE library, or was I off to the Guardian for a shift? Or was that the day I spent canoodling in the park with the nubile Letitia? What the hell, the Revenue isn’t going to know, just put down 25 trips to London that are claimable against tax: it’s about right and I’ve got the paperwork to cover it. And so it goes with the share of the heating bill related to working at home and a whole lot more besides.
In other words, I do a certain amount of estimating, then put the ball into the Revenue’s court. And so far the Revenue has believed me. OK, we’re talking piffling sums – I earned £50,000-odd last year and only £5,000 was from freelancing. It might be that I’m such small fry I’m not worth bothering to catch. I like to think, however, that there is a bond of trust between me and the taxman. He hasn’t a clue what I earn or what I spend, but he accepts what I tell him because I’m not taking the piss.
You can see where this is going. If only our parliamentary representatives had taken a small fraction of the minimal care that most taxpayers take when filling in their tax returns, we wouldn’t now be facing a frighteningly complete collapse of public confidence in the entire political class.
They didn’t, however, and we are. The leaked expenses claims published by the Telegraph show that MPs of all parties have been taking the piss big-time for years.
True, the Telegraph paid for the info. True, the sums are not huge in terms of GDP or Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension – and, given the cost of accommodation in central London, £24,000 a year is not a ridiculously generous sum to allow non-London MPs for nights they have to stay in the capital. True, MPs are not particularly well-paid by comparison with bankers or lawyers. And of course the system for paying MPs’ expenses is absurd – although we only know how absurd thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.
But there really are no acceptable excuses for what so many MPs have done. Four nights a week in a modest hotel, rent on a two-bedroom flat in Pimlico, mortgage interest on a small town house in Kennington – any of that is fine. So too are a cleaner and a bit of gardening and home maintenance. Beyond these basics, however, it’s impossible to see any justification for claiming. Many if not most MPs have used expenses allowances to fund blatant speculation in the housing market, home improvements they could have afforded from their salaries and luxuries that are in no sense related to their work.
On the evidence so far, at least 50 MPs should resign in shame. But I’ll put a tenner on no one doing so (as long as I can claim it on exes).
HALLELUJAH, I'M A NEOCON - 2
Paul Anderson writes:
I discover that my entry on David Miller's disgraceful left-McCarthyite website Neocon Europe, listing supposed "neocons", has been changed after I objected to it.
I am now listed as being "not a neoconservative, though he is involved in a number of organisations linked to neoconservatives such as Democratiya and the Euston Manifesto".
But there is a further page in which I am said to be "involved in pro-war left organisations" – Democratiya and Euston again, though neither is "pro-war" in fact – and am quoted (more-or-less accurately) on various subjects. Then comes an editorial comment:
"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
Paul Anderson writes:
I discover that my entry on David Miller's disgraceful left-McCarthyite website Neocon Europe, listing supposed "neocons", has been changed after I objected to it.
I am now listed as being "not a neoconservative, though he is involved in a number of organisations linked to neoconservatives such as Democratiya and the Euston Manifesto".
But there is a further page in which I am said to be "involved in pro-war left organisations" – Democratiya and Euston again, though neither is "pro-war" in fact – and am quoted (more-or-less accurately) on various subjects. Then comes an editorial comment:
Anderson's defence of the neoconservative trope of 'Islamic fascism' ignores the reality that this has not been limited to a caricature of authoritarian movements like Al Qaeda, but in the hands of Douglas Murray and others, it has been used to smear Muslim communities as a whole. Nor has its use been limited to an analysis of ideology and practises. Rather, it has been employed in neoconservative propaganda campaigns that sought to portray Iraq as a military threat analogous to Nazi Germany.I don't mind vigorous criticism, but this is bollocks. So – I'm not a neocon but a fellow-traveller who deserves a listing because my arguments objectively play into the hands of the neocons? Get lost, you cretino-leftist, and stop your blacklisting.
"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
BEST COLUMNIST IN THE COUNTRY
Paul Anderson writes:
My good friend Padraig Reidy from Index on Censorship and I were talking in the pub about columnists last week, and we concurred after 30 seconds that the best in any UK newspaper is DJ Taylor in the Independent on Sunday.
His latest is a gem.He is doing Orwell's "As I Please" better than anyone since Orwell. And I'm not saying that just because I know him very slightly, like him and share many of his enthusiasms (but not Norwich City). This is how to do it!
May 09, 2009
Paul Anderson writes:
My good friend Padraig Reidy from Index on Censorship and I were talking in the pub about columnists last week, and we concurred after 30 seconds that the best in any UK newspaper is DJ Taylor in the Independent on Sunday.
His latest is a gem.He is doing Orwell's "As I Please" better than anyone since Orwell. And I'm not saying that just because I know him very slightly, like him and share many of his enthusiasms (but not Norwich City). This is how to do it!
HOLD ON A MINUTE
Paul Anderson writes:
OK, I know how bad the MPs' expenses claims look. But £24,000 a year as an allowance for accommodation in central London on the money most of them are on seems to me to be about right.
London is bloody expensive. You're not going to get a decent cheap hotel room midweek near Westminster for much less than £120 a night unless you spend hours on the budget hotels' websites -- and it takes only 200 nights in town to make the total allowance.
I'm not defending the disgraceful expenses scams, but why not just give all MPs outside the M25 a £24,000 non-London-weighting supplement and let them spend it as they will?
May 04, 2009
Paul Anderson writes:
OK, I know how bad the MPs' expenses claims look. But £24,000 a year as an allowance for accommodation in central London on the money most of them are on seems to me to be about right.
London is bloody expensive. You're not going to get a decent cheap hotel room midweek near Westminster for much less than £120 a night unless you spend hours on the budget hotels' websites -- and it takes only 200 nights in town to make the total allowance.
I'm not defending the disgraceful expenses scams, but why not just give all MPs outside the M25 a £24,000 non-London-weighting supplement and let them spend it as they will?
DEAD CANARIES
Paul Anderson writes:
I have just been informed of a tragic incident last year in which 65 canaries died of asphyxiation while being transported cruelly from their native habitat in Norfolk. There can be few sights more moving than this:
April 30, 2009
Paul Anderson writes:
I have just been informed of a tragic incident last year in which 65 canaries died of asphyxiation while being transported cruelly from their native habitat in Norfolk. There can be few sights more moving than this:
HALLELUJAH, I'M A NEO-CON!
Paul Anderson writes:
I find that I am on a blacklist here of supposed "neo-conservatives". The perpetrator, David Miller, professor of sociology at the University of Strathclyde, is an utter disgrace.
April 16, 2009
Paul Anderson writes:
I find that I am on a blacklist here of supposed "neo-conservatives". The perpetrator, David Miller, professor of sociology at the University of Strathclyde, is an utter disgrace.
TIME FOR LABOUR TO KISS SPIN GOODBYE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 17 April 2009
And there I was thinking the worst was over… As Neil Kinnock would have put it in his pomp, it is difficult to exaggerate how completely, totally and utterly Derek Draper and Damian McBride have let down the Labour Party.
OK, there are questions about how the creepy Tory blogger Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, got hold of the emails the idiots exchanged. OK, the grand plans for a website publishing rumours about the sexual peccadilloes, drug use and mental health of leading Tories and their spouses never came to fruition. OK, it’s hardly Watergate.
All the same, the scandal takes the breath away. To put it bluntly, what the fuck did they think they were doing?
I am absolutely in favour of a full-on anti-Tory attack blog – as it happens, provoked by the oleaginous Dan Hannan’s dissing of the National Health Service on Fox TV the week before last, I was in the process of planning one myself when the scandal broke, though I now think it can wait a bit.
But the way you get at the Tories is not by spreading puerile defamatory personal tittle-tattle. David Cameron’s fitness for office has nothing to do with whether or not or why he visited the clap clinic at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford as a student many years ago: what counts is what a Cameron government would do for the funding of clap clinics. As for the supposed mental instability of a senior Tory politician’s wife – you what? There’s nothing to suggest there’s anything to the story. But even if it were true and you had evidence, you wouldn’t touch it in public, and in private, if asked, you’d express sympathy, warmth, tenderness, understanding, even solidarity. Only a complete shit would even think of doing anything else. And unless you have solid evidence for coke-and-hookers stories, just leave them alone because of the libel laws – and I say that as a confirmed coke-and-hookers man myself.
Seriously – I’m not into coke and hookers really, darling! It was a joke, honest! Why have you put the phone down? – this is the end of New Labour’s spin regime. And it’s time to state the obvious. Derek Draper, Damian McBride et al: what a bunch of tossers you are.
For all your cocksure swagger, you couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. Your antics – not just in the past couple of months – have done incalculable harm to people’s faith in the democratic system in Britain and to the cause of social democracy. I thought you were rubbish many years ago, but now it’s clear to everyone. Charlatans. Liars. Incompetents. Now get lost, and don’t ever come back.
***
The Draper-McBride affair has prompted a lot of speculation about why the political blogosphere in Britain is dominated by the right – but no one has mentioned the main reason, which is money.
This might seem a little counterintuitive, because blogging – unlike self-publishing in print – doesn’t cost a penny. You write your piece, upload it to your personal website and that’s it. There’s no need to buy expensive desktop publishing software, there’s no printers’ bill and there are no postage or promotional costs. What could possibly be less elitist?
But that’s not quite the whole story. To generate traffic to your blog, you need to get a reputation both for the quality of your posts and their frequency – and that takes time most people don’t have.
I’ve had a blog for more than six years, and when I started I was full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of the medium, posting nearly every day and eagerly following dozens of stories.
Slowly but surely, however, I started to flag. Spending a couple of hours a day researching and writing for a blog read by a few hundred people simply wasn’t compatible with working full-time and all the other commitments of everyday life – and that was with a flexible work routine, a generally indulgent employer and no kids. Increasingly, I found I was posting my monthly Tribune columns, the odd review, lots of You Tube videos – and nothing else.
Would it have been different if I’d been a man of independent means? I’ve no idea, but I do know that being rich and not having to work is rather an advantage in the new media age. The most obvious case in point is Arianna Huffington in the United States, who has used her fortune to bankroll the Huffington Post website – but Britain’s Tory bloggers have got the upper hand at least in part because they don’t need to do anything else. Yes, it’s easier to be oppositional on the web than it is to support a ruling party. Yes, the blogosphere is inherently individualistic. But cash counts too. Give me loads of it and I’ll show you.
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 17 April 2009
And there I was thinking the worst was over… As Neil Kinnock would have put it in his pomp, it is difficult to exaggerate how completely, totally and utterly Derek Draper and Damian McBride have let down the Labour Party.
OK, there are questions about how the creepy Tory blogger Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, got hold of the emails the idiots exchanged. OK, the grand plans for a website publishing rumours about the sexual peccadilloes, drug use and mental health of leading Tories and their spouses never came to fruition. OK, it’s hardly Watergate.
All the same, the scandal takes the breath away. To put it bluntly, what the fuck did they think they were doing?
I am absolutely in favour of a full-on anti-Tory attack blog – as it happens, provoked by the oleaginous Dan Hannan’s dissing of the National Health Service on Fox TV the week before last, I was in the process of planning one myself when the scandal broke, though I now think it can wait a bit.
But the way you get at the Tories is not by spreading puerile defamatory personal tittle-tattle. David Cameron’s fitness for office has nothing to do with whether or not or why he visited the clap clinic at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford as a student many years ago: what counts is what a Cameron government would do for the funding of clap clinics. As for the supposed mental instability of a senior Tory politician’s wife – you what? There’s nothing to suggest there’s anything to the story. But even if it were true and you had evidence, you wouldn’t touch it in public, and in private, if asked, you’d express sympathy, warmth, tenderness, understanding, even solidarity. Only a complete shit would even think of doing anything else. And unless you have solid evidence for coke-and-hookers stories, just leave them alone because of the libel laws – and I say that as a confirmed coke-and-hookers man myself.
Seriously – I’m not into coke and hookers really, darling! It was a joke, honest! Why have you put the phone down? – this is the end of New Labour’s spin regime. And it’s time to state the obvious. Derek Draper, Damian McBride et al: what a bunch of tossers you are.
For all your cocksure swagger, you couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. Your antics – not just in the past couple of months – have done incalculable harm to people’s faith in the democratic system in Britain and to the cause of social democracy. I thought you were rubbish many years ago, but now it’s clear to everyone. Charlatans. Liars. Incompetents. Now get lost, and don’t ever come back.
***
The Draper-McBride affair has prompted a lot of speculation about why the political blogosphere in Britain is dominated by the right – but no one has mentioned the main reason, which is money.
This might seem a little counterintuitive, because blogging – unlike self-publishing in print – doesn’t cost a penny. You write your piece, upload it to your personal website and that’s it. There’s no need to buy expensive desktop publishing software, there’s no printers’ bill and there are no postage or promotional costs. What could possibly be less elitist?
But that’s not quite the whole story. To generate traffic to your blog, you need to get a reputation both for the quality of your posts and their frequency – and that takes time most people don’t have.
I’ve had a blog for more than six years, and when I started I was full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of the medium, posting nearly every day and eagerly following dozens of stories.
Slowly but surely, however, I started to flag. Spending a couple of hours a day researching and writing for a blog read by a few hundred people simply wasn’t compatible with working full-time and all the other commitments of everyday life – and that was with a flexible work routine, a generally indulgent employer and no kids. Increasingly, I found I was posting my monthly Tribune columns, the odd review, lots of You Tube videos – and nothing else.
Would it have been different if I’d been a man of independent means? I’ve no idea, but I do know that being rich and not having to work is rather an advantage in the new media age. The most obvious case in point is Arianna Huffington in the United States, who has used her fortune to bankroll the Huffington Post website – but Britain’s Tory bloggers have got the upper hand at least in part because they don’t need to do anything else. Yes, it’s easier to be oppositional on the web than it is to support a ruling party. Yes, the blogosphere is inherently individualistic. But cash counts too. Give me loads of it and I’ll show you.
MULLIN TELLS IT AS IT IS
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 20 March 2009
Most political memoirs and diaries are deeply disappointing. I know, because I’ve ploughed through hundreds of them in the past 25 years in the course of everyday political journalism and historical research.
The best – the diaries of Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn on the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, for example – are not only essential historical sources but also enthralling. The worst are utterly worthless. I have on the bookshelf by my desk half-a-dozen bland, plodding accounts of the Thatcher years by retired ministers that have remained unopened since the week before publication when I desperately searched through their pages for something – anything – that might make a diary story.
No one has produced anything quite as bad on the Blair era – though The Blunkett Tapes ran them close. But even the most intelligent and revealing New Labour memoirs and diaries up to now have been seriously flawed. Robin Cook’s The Point of Departure was telling on many things (and included a chapter on how Labour should renew itself that bears rereading today) but Cook was restrained by his intention to make his departure only temporary, an ambition sadly thwarted by his early death. And the extracts from Alastair Campbell’s diaries published as The Blair Years, although extraordinarily revealing on quite a lot, were edited to omit anything that might be embarrassing to Gordon Brown, making them rather like Hamlet without the ghost.
All of which makes the publication of Chris Mullin’s A View from the Foothills a real landmark. The diaries of the former Tribune editor and soon-to-retire MP for Sunderland South are the first no-holds-barred account of life inside the Blair administration – and hunch tells me that they will become as important for future historians as the Crossman, Castle and Benn diaries.
This is not because Mullin held high office: as the book’s title makes clear, he did not. He was a junior minister in the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions from 1999 to 2001, then a slightly less junior one first in the Department for International Development and then in the Foreign Office, from which he was dropped in 2005, returning to the back benches.
But if Mullin was not a senior player, he has other things to offer. He is a great observer of people and a connoisseur of the absurdities of ministerial life: the speeches written for ministers by civil servants in impenetrable jargon, the endless futile meetings, the inability of senior ministers to delegate. He captures perfectly the tedium of the constituency MP’s existence. He is spectacularly rude – with reason – about John Prescott and Gordon Brown (but not about Tony Blair, whom he dubs “The Man”) and a perceptive analyst of what’s happening in cabinet even though he’s not there. And all of it is done in the clearest of prose with dry self-deprecating humour. I read it in a weekend and couldn’t put it down …
***
On a different matter entirely, I’ve been amazed by the hoo-hah in the past fortnight over the revelation in the Guardian that the historian Eric Hobsbawm had been refused access to his MI5 file.
My first thought was that it was rather mean of MI5 – the old boy is 91, and anything in his file could only relate to his activity as a member, from the mid-1930s, of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which breathed its last as long ago as 1991 – but hardly a big deal.
Others had different ideas, however. The Daily Mail went into full hate mode, denouncing Hobsbawm as an unreconstructed apologist for Stalin’s terror – and the Guardian responded with pieces arguing that the Mail was out-of-order because (a) Hobsbawm is a great historian and (b) it’s outrageous that MI5 kept files on members of the Communist Party.
There are several things that strike me as weird about this. First, I can’t see why Hobsbawm’s enduring sympathy for the Soviet Union – which is not quite the same thing as unreconstructed Stalinism, though he was certainly a Stalinist when Stalin was around – is news: he’s never made any secret of it. Secondly, I don’t understand why the fact that he is a brilliant historian should preclude criticism of his politics (or indeed of the influence his political allegiance has had on his historical work). And thirdly, I can’t grasp why it’s so outrageous that MI5 kept files on prominent members of the CP. For most of its life, after all, the party was a dedicated servant of a foreign power that had hostile intentions towards Britain (and between 1939 and 1941 was effectively allied with another foreign power that was waging war against Britain).
None of which is to defend the decision not to release the file. The cold war has been over 20 years now, and there is no excuse whatsoever for not opening the books on it – however embarrassing the results might be.
April 06, 2009
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 20 March 2009
Most political memoirs and diaries are deeply disappointing. I know, because I’ve ploughed through hundreds of them in the past 25 years in the course of everyday political journalism and historical research.
The best – the diaries of Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn on the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, for example – are not only essential historical sources but also enthralling. The worst are utterly worthless. I have on the bookshelf by my desk half-a-dozen bland, plodding accounts of the Thatcher years by retired ministers that have remained unopened since the week before publication when I desperately searched through their pages for something – anything – that might make a diary story.
No one has produced anything quite as bad on the Blair era – though The Blunkett Tapes ran them close. But even the most intelligent and revealing New Labour memoirs and diaries up to now have been seriously flawed. Robin Cook’s The Point of Departure was telling on many things (and included a chapter on how Labour should renew itself that bears rereading today) but Cook was restrained by his intention to make his departure only temporary, an ambition sadly thwarted by his early death. And the extracts from Alastair Campbell’s diaries published as The Blair Years, although extraordinarily revealing on quite a lot, were edited to omit anything that might be embarrassing to Gordon Brown, making them rather like Hamlet without the ghost.
All of which makes the publication of Chris Mullin’s A View from the Foothills a real landmark. The diaries of the former Tribune editor and soon-to-retire MP for Sunderland South are the first no-holds-barred account of life inside the Blair administration – and hunch tells me that they will become as important for future historians as the Crossman, Castle and Benn diaries.
This is not because Mullin held high office: as the book’s title makes clear, he did not. He was a junior minister in the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions from 1999 to 2001, then a slightly less junior one first in the Department for International Development and then in the Foreign Office, from which he was dropped in 2005, returning to the back benches.
But if Mullin was not a senior player, he has other things to offer. He is a great observer of people and a connoisseur of the absurdities of ministerial life: the speeches written for ministers by civil servants in impenetrable jargon, the endless futile meetings, the inability of senior ministers to delegate. He captures perfectly the tedium of the constituency MP’s existence. He is spectacularly rude – with reason – about John Prescott and Gordon Brown (but not about Tony Blair, whom he dubs “The Man”) and a perceptive analyst of what’s happening in cabinet even though he’s not there. And all of it is done in the clearest of prose with dry self-deprecating humour. I read it in a weekend and couldn’t put it down …
***
On a different matter entirely, I’ve been amazed by the hoo-hah in the past fortnight over the revelation in the Guardian that the historian Eric Hobsbawm had been refused access to his MI5 file.
My first thought was that it was rather mean of MI5 – the old boy is 91, and anything in his file could only relate to his activity as a member, from the mid-1930s, of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which breathed its last as long ago as 1991 – but hardly a big deal.
Others had different ideas, however. The Daily Mail went into full hate mode, denouncing Hobsbawm as an unreconstructed apologist for Stalin’s terror – and the Guardian responded with pieces arguing that the Mail was out-of-order because (a) Hobsbawm is a great historian and (b) it’s outrageous that MI5 kept files on members of the Communist Party.
There are several things that strike me as weird about this. First, I can’t see why Hobsbawm’s enduring sympathy for the Soviet Union – which is not quite the same thing as unreconstructed Stalinism, though he was certainly a Stalinist when Stalin was around – is news: he’s never made any secret of it. Secondly, I don’t understand why the fact that he is a brilliant historian should preclude criticism of his politics (or indeed of the influence his political allegiance has had on his historical work). And thirdly, I can’t grasp why it’s so outrageous that MI5 kept files on prominent members of the CP. For most of its life, after all, the party was a dedicated servant of a foreign power that had hostile intentions towards Britain (and between 1939 and 1941 was effectively allied with another foreign power that was waging war against Britain).
None of which is to defend the decision not to release the file. The cold war has been over 20 years now, and there is no excuse whatsoever for not opening the books on it – however embarrassing the results might be.
RIGHT, I'VE GIVEN UP GIVING UP
Paul Anderson writes:
OK, I'm busy, but this has really got me:
Dan Hannan, far-right Tory MEP and top of the party's list in the south-east, interviewed by Fox News. What a stuck-up wanker. Lower than vermin. And what a cretin to do it now.
January 09, 2009
Paul Anderson writes:
OK, I'm busy, but this has really got me:
Dan Hannan, far-right Tory MEP and top of the party's list in the south-east, interviewed by Fox News. What a stuck-up wanker. Lower than vermin. And what a cretin to do it now.
THAT'S IT FOR NOW
Paul Anderson writes:
I've had enough of blogging because I've done it far too long. Nothing more until I change my mind. Goodnight, and thank you for reading what you've read.
January 06, 2009
Paul Anderson writes:
I've had enough of blogging because I've done it far too long. Nothing more until I change my mind. Goodnight, and thank you for reading what you've read.
NO FUN
Paul Anderson writes:
Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton has been found dead. It's time to play Fun House really loud.
December 05, 2008
Paul Anderson writes:
Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton has been found dead. It's time to play Fun House really loud.
OBITUARIES - 18: PATRICK FITZGERALD
October 31, 2008
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 28 November 2008
Last week, one of my best friends died. I first met Patrick Fitzgerald at a meeting of the Oxford Anarchist Group in the first week of term when I went up to university in October 1978. It was in Danny Simpson’s Exeter college room in a house on Turl Street.
We were both 18, but Pat was a seasoned veteran. He’d been an anarchist for all of two years and a university student for one, having started at Keble at a tender age because he was such a brilliant mathematician. And he was rather suspicious of the influx of raw new recruits to the anarchist group from freshers’ week. He sat on Danny’s bed looking sullen, smoking, rigged out in unfashionable denim – flared trousers when flares were out – and a Chelsea scarf. Pat’s style was always his own.
We didn’t make friends at first. We were rivals over several girls – and Pat always won. But, through a shared enthusiasm for pills, booze and rock’n’roll, we bonded. And we became – literally – partners in crime.
He burgled dons who were recruiting for MI5, and wrote up his findings in Back Street Bugle, Oxford’s alternative paper. He burgled the army recruitment office. And he burgled college bars for money – an enterprise that went badly wrong when he and two others were caught red-handed.
When the Oxford University Student Union had a general meeting at which the left hoped it would secure a majority to occupy a building that became the social science department library – the idea was that we’d turn it into a proper central students’ union that put on gigs – it was Pat who waited with the crowbar for the call that never came from the meeting. (He was waiting with Sarah Baxter, now of the Sunday Times, who had a bicycle.) It was Pat too who cut the outside broadcast link from Billy Graham’s Christian revivalist meeting in Oxford town hall that we disrupted as a protest against – well, Billy Graham.
We were both 18, but Pat was a seasoned veteran. He’d been an anarchist for all of two years and a university student for one, having started at Keble at a tender age because he was such a brilliant mathematician. And he was rather suspicious of the influx of raw new recruits to the anarchist group from freshers’ week. He sat on Danny’s bed looking sullen, smoking, rigged out in unfashionable denim – flared trousers when flares were out – and a Chelsea scarf. Pat’s style was always his own.
We didn’t make friends at first. We were rivals over several girls – and Pat always won. But, through a shared enthusiasm for pills, booze and rock’n’roll, we bonded. And we became – literally – partners in crime.
I have no idea how he acquired the knack, but as a youth Pat was an accomplished cat-burglar. He was always one for digging up dirt – and one of his main means of doing it when he started out in the late 1970s was the break-in.
He burgled dons who were recruiting for MI5, and wrote up his findings in Back Street Bugle, Oxford’s alternative paper. He burgled the army recruitment office. And he burgled college bars for money – an enterprise that went badly wrong when he and two others were caught red-handed.
When the Oxford University Student Union had a general meeting at which the left hoped it would secure a majority to occupy a building that became the social science department library – the idea was that we’d turn it into a proper central students’ union that put on gigs – it was Pat who waited with the crowbar for the call that never came from the meeting. (He was waiting with Sarah Baxter, now of the Sunday Times, who had a bicycle.) It was Pat too who cut the outside broadcast link from Billy Graham’s Christian revivalist meeting in Oxford town hall that we disrupted as a protest against – well, Billy Graham.
I only once benefited materially from any of this, and only in a small way. The heist – and it was a great one – was of booze from an Oxford college boat clubhouse, the getaway transport a punt on to which crates of summer drinks were loaded before it was inexpertly floated a couple of miles down the river, where a waiting crew spirited the haul to their bedsits in east Oxford. Ten years later there were still unopened bottles of Pimm’s in many former Oxford anarchists’ parents’ drinks cabinets.
Meanwhile, Pat got serious. After he left Oxford, he started a doctorate at the University of Kent but soon decided that his vocation was as an investigative journalist. He did work for various radical magazines – including Tribune from the mid-1980s – and Fleet Street newspapers, but put his main efforts into books. British Intelligence and Covert Action, co-authored with the émigré South African journalist Jonathan Bloch, appeared in 1983. A ground-breaking exposé of secret operations since the second world war, it met a furious response from the political and military establishment, but its accuracy on all its key stories remains unquestioned. In 1987 came Stranger on the Line, co-authored with Mark Leopold, an exhaustive account of the British state’s enthusiasm for phone-tapping, and a side project, The Comic Book of MI5, with illustrations by the Irish cartoonist Cormac.
Pat was an enthusiastic hedonist, and at times in the late 1980s and 1990s he overdid it, but he kept up an impressive journalistic output, covering intelligence and security issues for Tribune and the New Statesman among others and earning money writing business travel guides. He was less obviously prolific in recent years – partly because of lack of outlets, partly because of poor health – but still managed a great deal, most recently doing a substantial body of work on a soon-to-be-published book on the war on terror with Jonathan Bloch and Paul Todd.
He’d not been well for some time – he contracted cellulitis earlier in the year, and the treatment had dragged on and on without apparently working – but his sudden death was a shock to all his friends, not least his partner of 20 years, Leila Carlyle, with whom he lived in east London. Frighteningly intelligent and well informed, immensely funny and above all extraordinarily kind, he will be missed. There’s a wake for him tonight (November 28) in the Calthorpe Arms in Gray’s Inn Road, London EC1, just up the road from Tribune’s old offices.
TRIBUNE'S NINE LIVES
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 31 October 2008
I hope that somewhere else in this magazine there is a cheery announcement that Tribune has secured financial backing and that this will not be the last issue. But I’m not sure there is, so I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank you, dear readers, for having me. It’s now more than 22 years since I first wrote for Tribune and 10 since I started this column, and your persistent poisonous sniping and personal abuse have sustained me through many a dark hour.
Seriously, if this isn’t the last issue – and I don’t think it is – it has been a damn close-run thing, as the Duke of Wellington didn’t actually say of the Battle of Waterloo. Perhaps it’s not quite as close as it was in 1988, when we ran a front page adorned with the words “DON’T LET THIS BE THE LAST ISSUE OF TRIBUNE” after the then board of directors decided to pull the plug in a week – this time, the magazine has had all of a month to organise a rescue. But it’s closer than at any time in the intervening two decades.
Of course, Tribune has a glorious history of financial crisis. It was launched as a newspaper in 1937 by two rich Labour MPs, Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, as a vehicle for the Unity Campaign, a quixotic attempt to unite the Labour left with the Communist Party and the Independent Labour Party, with Cripps and Strauss putting up £18,000 of their own cash (roughly £800,000 in today’s money). They assumed they would achieve a break-even circulation of 50,000 in a matter of weeks and then recoup their investment – but in fact the paper used up all the dosh in nine months and barely hit 25,000.
Cripps continued reluctantly to subsidise its losses through 1938 and 1939 – a period when Tribune became an adjunct to the publisher Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club – but then lost interest and dropped out of completely in spring 1940 on his appointment as ambassador to Moscow, leaving control of the paper to Aneurin Bevan and Strauss. Strauss picked up the tab and continued to do so for several years – but he too blew hot and cold and dropped out on becoming a junior minister in the 1945 Labour government.
By the late 1940s, Tribune was on its uppers again and resorted to selling editorial space to Labour Party headquarters – and in 1950 it was forced to go fortnightly, resuming weekly publication only in 1952. Throughout the 1950s, it survived only thanks to non-stop fundraising, most of it from readers but some from anonymous rich benefactors. One of these was the maverick Tory press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who handed over £3,000 when his rival Lord Kemsley sued Tribune for libel.
The 1960s and 1970s were decades of relative stability for the paper despite a slow decline in circulation – largely because many of the trade unions were left-led and were persuaded to take bulk orders and solidarity advertising – and in the early 1980s Tribune’s finances were buoyed by advertisements from local councils under left-wing Labour control, particularly Ken Livingstone’s GLC. But in the mid-1980s the financial situation deteriorated rapidly. The unions, with membership in decline, tightened their belts and merged. The GLC was abolished by the Thatcher government and the rules on local council spending were tightened. By the end of 1987 it looked as if the writing was on the wall, and in early 1988, with circulation around 5,000, the board decided Tribune would have to close.
It didn’t, for two reasons. The paper’s readers rallied round magnificently, raising £40,000 in a little more than a fortnight, and the unions agreed to pay for a promotion campaign. That worked, but not quite well enough, and there was another minor crisis in early 1991 that led to the paper going down from 12 tabloid pages to eight for six months. In the meantime, however, we raised sufficient funds to buy desktop publishing equipment, which slashed production costs – and the rest of the 1990s were plain sailing.
There was another wobble in 2002-03, which was resolved by a consortium of unions taking ownership of Tribune and promising long-term investment – but by this spring they had got cold feet, and last month they decided that this would be the last issue unless a buyer could be found. Every time I’ve spoken to the editor since, he has expressed cautious optimism about the prospects. I’ve just been keeping my fingers crossed: I hope we haven’t used up our nine lives.
And the moral of the story? Well, there isn’t one, except that it has always been difficult to sustain left-wing newspapers. Whether it is more difficult now than it used to be is a moot point – but that’s for another column. If there is one …
October 08, 2008
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 31 October 2008
I hope that somewhere else in this magazine there is a cheery announcement that Tribune has secured financial backing and that this will not be the last issue. But I’m not sure there is, so I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank you, dear readers, for having me. It’s now more than 22 years since I first wrote for Tribune and 10 since I started this column, and your persistent poisonous sniping and personal abuse have sustained me through many a dark hour.
Seriously, if this isn’t the last issue – and I don’t think it is – it has been a damn close-run thing, as the Duke of Wellington didn’t actually say of the Battle of Waterloo. Perhaps it’s not quite as close as it was in 1988, when we ran a front page adorned with the words “DON’T LET THIS BE THE LAST ISSUE OF TRIBUNE” after the then board of directors decided to pull the plug in a week – this time, the magazine has had all of a month to organise a rescue. But it’s closer than at any time in the intervening two decades.
Of course, Tribune has a glorious history of financial crisis. It was launched as a newspaper in 1937 by two rich Labour MPs, Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, as a vehicle for the Unity Campaign, a quixotic attempt to unite the Labour left with the Communist Party and the Independent Labour Party, with Cripps and Strauss putting up £18,000 of their own cash (roughly £800,000 in today’s money). They assumed they would achieve a break-even circulation of 50,000 in a matter of weeks and then recoup their investment – but in fact the paper used up all the dosh in nine months and barely hit 25,000.
Cripps continued reluctantly to subsidise its losses through 1938 and 1939 – a period when Tribune became an adjunct to the publisher Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club – but then lost interest and dropped out of completely in spring 1940 on his appointment as ambassador to Moscow, leaving control of the paper to Aneurin Bevan and Strauss. Strauss picked up the tab and continued to do so for several years – but he too blew hot and cold and dropped out on becoming a junior minister in the 1945 Labour government.
By the late 1940s, Tribune was on its uppers again and resorted to selling editorial space to Labour Party headquarters – and in 1950 it was forced to go fortnightly, resuming weekly publication only in 1952. Throughout the 1950s, it survived only thanks to non-stop fundraising, most of it from readers but some from anonymous rich benefactors. One of these was the maverick Tory press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who handed over £3,000 when his rival Lord Kemsley sued Tribune for libel.
The 1960s and 1970s were decades of relative stability for the paper despite a slow decline in circulation – largely because many of the trade unions were left-led and were persuaded to take bulk orders and solidarity advertising – and in the early 1980s Tribune’s finances were buoyed by advertisements from local councils under left-wing Labour control, particularly Ken Livingstone’s GLC. But in the mid-1980s the financial situation deteriorated rapidly. The unions, with membership in decline, tightened their belts and merged. The GLC was abolished by the Thatcher government and the rules on local council spending were tightened. By the end of 1987 it looked as if the writing was on the wall, and in early 1988, with circulation around 5,000, the board decided Tribune would have to close.
It didn’t, for two reasons. The paper’s readers rallied round magnificently, raising £40,000 in a little more than a fortnight, and the unions agreed to pay for a promotion campaign. That worked, but not quite well enough, and there was another minor crisis in early 1991 that led to the paper going down from 12 tabloid pages to eight for six months. In the meantime, however, we raised sufficient funds to buy desktop publishing equipment, which slashed production costs – and the rest of the 1990s were plain sailing.
There was another wobble in 2002-03, which was resolved by a consortium of unions taking ownership of Tribune and promising long-term investment – but by this spring they had got cold feet, and last month they decided that this would be the last issue unless a buyer could be found. Every time I’ve spoken to the editor since, he has expressed cautious optimism about the prospects. I’ve just been keeping my fingers crossed: I hope we haven’t used up our nine lives.
And the moral of the story? Well, there isn’t one, except that it has always been difficult to sustain left-wing newspapers. Whether it is more difficult now than it used to be is a moot point – but that’s for another column. If there is one …
TRIBUNE ON THE ROCKS - 2
Paul Anderson writes:
The leftwing weekly Tribune will close after its 31 October edition unless a buyer can be found.
At a meeting of its board last night, its trade union shareholders agreed to what its editor Chris McLaughlin called an "amicable parting of the ways" with the magazine. Tribune is now actively seeking a new owner.
McLaughlin said that he was optimistic about interest already being shown but that a deal would have to be done very soon to ensure continuity of publication.
A consortium of five trade unions took over ownership of Tribune four years ago, promising substantial investment in the magazine. But the unions declined to give financial support to a business plan put forward earlier this year by McLaughlin and his team.
Tribune, founded in 1937 by Sir Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan, has lived a precarious existence for most of its life. It currently sells 4,000 copies a week.
Paul Anderson writes:
The leftwing weekly Tribune will close after its 31 October edition unless a buyer can be found.
At a meeting of its board last night, its trade union shareholders agreed to what its editor Chris McLaughlin called an "amicable parting of the ways" with the magazine. Tribune is now actively seeking a new owner.
McLaughlin said that he was optimistic about interest already being shown but that a deal would have to be done very soon to ensure continuity of publication.
A consortium of five trade unions took over ownership of Tribune four years ago, promising substantial investment in the magazine. But the unions declined to give financial support to a business plan put forward earlier this year by McLaughlin and his team.
Tribune, founded in 1937 by Sir Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan, has lived a precarious existence for most of its life. It currently sells 4,000 copies a week.
