Angels and Demons, and the Labour leadership

The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions.

Sometimes it’s paved with sterling values. Like decency, gentleness and loyalty.

Labour Party members are mostly good people (there are, of course, exceptions). Loyalty is one of their admirable qualities. It was put to the test in the last Parliament when, despite all the evidence that he was failing to make a mark on his adversaries, we stuck by our leader Ed Milliband, right to the bitter end.

And bitter it was. After five years of lamentable government, a Tory party led by men principally driven by their sense of entitlement, not only beat Labour for the second time but went from having to rely on a coalition partner to having a working majority and governing alone.

A poor reward for all our loyalty. But a lesson from which we could learn.

We seem not to have. We’ve given ourselves a leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who has even more desirable qualities than Milliband did. He voted against the Iraq War. He’s firmly against the austerity policies that are crucifying the whole of Europe. He even has the guts to oppose the renewal of the Trident nuclear missile programme, which only gives a sense of security by being so expensive the assumption is that it has to be useful.

Sadly, few voters see him as a potential Prime Minister. Just like Milliband, he leaves barely a scratch on Cameron when he takes him on. His performance in the European Referendum campaign is often described as lacklustre, but in reality it was practically invisible. The debate came to be seen as an internal Conservative spat, pitting Cameron against Boris Johnson. Corbyn barely impinged.

Things have got so bad that a vote of no confidence in him was passed by 80% of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Outside Parliament, however, the loudest in the Party continue to back him. “60% of members voted for him,” they proclaim. 

I was one of those members. I voted for him because the alternatives were so uninspiring and because I felt we ought perhaps to give somebody different a chance. Well, we have given him a chance. It seems to me that if our leader hasn’t managed, over nine months, to unite the Parliamentary Labour Party, his most immediate collaborators, and hasn’t persuaded a majority of voters to see him as a future Prime Minister, then he’s unlikely to do it in the next four years. The Milliband experience underlines how important it is to make such a change quickly.

So why do the other members stick with him? They seem again to be driven by excessive loyalty. They also have their own sense of entitlement: “we are the members, we elected him.” Unfortunately, though members may elect a leader, it’s voters who elect a government. Maybe we’d do better to listen to them.

Naturally, dumping Corbyn now is unfair. But Labour doesn’t exist to be fair to its leaders. It exists to make life fairer for the vulnerable, the voiceless, the people who are paying the price of the current government’s policies. They and only they deserve our loyalty. Their cause needs a real fighter on its side. Corbyn is honest, decent, earnest, but if the European referendum campaign’s anything to go by, he’s no fighter. 

That puts me in mind of the words of one of the finest trial lawyers of all time, Clarence Darrow. He repeatedly emerged as the American champion of the left, of the underdog, of the trade unionist. He knew a thing or two about what it took to be a good labour leader.

Back in 1907, “Big Bill” Haywood, of the Western Federation of Miners, was put on trial for a murder he didn’t commit. Darrow won his acquittal, much to the establishment’s shock and anger. In the course of his summing up, he outlined what it took to be a leader of a working class movement:

I don’t claim that this man is an angel. The Western Federation of Miners could not afford to put an angel at their head. Do you want to hire an angel to fight the Mine Owners’ Association and the Pinkerton detectives, and the power of wealth? Oh, no, gentlemen; you better get a first-class fighting man who has physical courage, who has mental courage, who has strong devotion, who loves the poor, who loves the weak, who hates iniquity and hates it more when it is with the powerful and the great; and you cannot win without it, and I believe that down in your hearts there is not one of you would wish him to be an angel. You know an angel would not be fitted for that place, and I make no claim of that; but he is not a demon.

Big Bill Haywood. No angel, but certainly a fighter.
And he even had a way with words, wouldn’t you say?

Ah, yes. That’s what we need at the head of the British Labour Party: a leader who hates iniquity and loves the poor, but who is also a first-class fighting man (or woman). Not a demon who might take us into an illegal war inflaming decades of terrorism. But we don’t want an angel, either, without the killer instinct to knock out the other side.

Sadly, it looks like we’ve saddled ourselves with an angel for now.

The government: no easy ride for the bone idle

It’s seemed to me for a long time that to be successful in government you have to be a skilful politician, to get elected in the first place, and a good statesman to make something of office once you get there.

Nicolas Sarkozy showed great political skill seeing off his rivals for the presidential nomination in 2007, and then thrashing his opponent (though admittedly she was pretty weak). Once in power, though, he proved so sadly mediocre a statesman that even his superior political talents couldn’t secure him a return to the Elysée.

Back on this side of the Channel, our previous Prime Minister, Gordon Brown was a fine statesman. Assisted by an able Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, he returned the country to growth in early 2010 after the 2008-2009 recession. Today, that looks little short of miraculous. But his indecisiveness and short temper made him a lousy politician (most notably when he indulged in some choice comments about a voter without realising that he was wearing a live mike). Result: he quickly turned a lead in the polls into a deficit he couldn’t overturn before the last election.

But the people who really take the prize are the present lot, above all the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and his Chancellor, George Osborne. They seem inept at both politics and statesmanship.

They failed to win a majority against the hapless Brown, partly because they initially started off telling the electorate just how much the programme of austerity they were planning was going to hurt. So, while I took delight in the damage it was doing to their poll standing, I couldn’t help feeling a tinge of rueful admiration for their honesty. On the other hand, they may have chosen this line because they were expecting everyone to blame Labour – you know, ‘look at the terrible things Labour’s legacy is going to make us have to do to you.’ 

In fact, and unsurprisingly, quite a few voters simply wondered why they’d vote for a party that had nothing better on offer.

When they realised that they were losing votes, Cameron and Osborne switched tack and started talking of the sunlit uplands that awaited us all when they cleared the deficit and reduced the national debt. They stressed the happy ending rather than the painful road they were going to take us down to get there. 

In a sense, that was actually more honest than the previous position, because it revealed them to be just as mendacious as any other politicians.

It wasn’t enough to win them outright victory, but it gave them the opportunity to get their backsides onto cabinet seats in the present tawdry coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The latter, by the way, have consigned themselves to oblivion for a generation for having made this government possible.

In power, Cameron and Osborne have revealed just how lamentable they are as statesmen. The country’s back in recession. Debts have barely dropped. And as unemployment climbs to record levels, the worst of the cuts are still to come.

Meanwhile, their competence as politicians continues unchanged. For instance, when the Unite union threatened a strike by fuel tanker drivers, they saw a great stick with which to beat the opposition: Unite is a major contributor to Labour. So Ministers whipped up a panic about shortages and even urged people to stockpile fuel at home. There were queues at petrol stations around the country, and a woman was badly burned after the petrol she had had the presence of mind to store in her kitchen exploded.

Together with a budget that increased taxes on the poorest and reduced them on the top 1% of incomes, this kind of behaviour led to their turning a narrow lead at the end of last year into a record-breaking lead for Labour in recent weeks (some of that’s soft though: the leaders of the Opposition have a lot of consolidation work to do, but they must be grateful for the help the government’s giving them). 

Cameron and Osborne.
Yep, the picture does them complete justice

What’s fascinating though is the way one of those Opposition leaders is beginning to get right under the government’s skin. Not so much Ed Miliband, the leader, though he’s beginning to land some telling blows, as the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls. As the Guardian pointed out at the weekend, he’s been right on a couple of notable points, above all in his assertion that the government’s policies would lead us back into recession without sorting the debt problem. So – balls by name, but when it comes to talking balls, he leaves that to the government, and limits himself to exposing it.

Nothing is so painful for a politician as to face an opponent who told him so. And it’s a test of good politicians that they can rise above that pain. But, as I’ve said, Cameron isn’t a good politician. Faced with Ed Balls’ provocative asides, he’s cracked a few times in recent times, most notably last week when he was heard to call him a ‘muttering idiot’.

Interesting that he takes Balls’ barbs so badly. I can only put it down to the phenomenon Dorothy Parker pointed to when she said ‘I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true’. Whoever said that the truth can never hurt was showing the kind of propensity for talking balls that marks our present government. A lie can be shrugged off, but a true criticism strikes deep and hard.

So poor old Cameron. He’s beginning to lose it. The sure sign of the beginning of the end. 


Couldn’t happen to a more deserving chap, really.

But why is he so bad at all this? After all, he has a background in PR. Why is he so incompetent at communications?

Without wanting to do any pop psychology, I can’t help feeling the answer’s easy. He’s never had to strive for anything. Everything’s dropped into his lap. Eton, then Oxford. At Oxford, he was in the Bullingdon club whose members liked to get drunk in restaurants and then trash them, knowing that ‘Daddy’ would be round to pay for the damage. Why, he even got his chance to enter Parliament because the previous holder of his seat, Shaun Woodward, defected to Labour and had to give it up.

There have been increasing rumours that Cameron simply doesn’t work too hard. A lot of holidays, frequent evidence of attending meetings poorly briefed.

Could it simply be that he’s at last having to work for something and he just doesn’t know how?

A voice to the voiceless

Curious how interesting conversation can be on Twitter despite the draconian limitations of its format.

Today an exchange with a fellow tweeter Diana Smith (@mulberrybush) introduced me to a remarkable video, Game's Over (@GamesOverFilm):




Ironically, Diane is based in Stafford where we used to live. A shame our paths didn’t cross at that time. Still, at least our 140-character exchanges are making up for it now.

What frightened me most about the government that took power in Britain in 2010 was not so much its delusions, its mendaciousness or even its incompetence, but its indifference to the plight of others.

‘Lack of compassion can quickly slip into cruelty, and this is going to be a cruel government,’ I told a friend who’d voted Tory.

‘Oh, come on,’ she replied, ‘you’re not giving them a chance. And how can they be worse than Gordon Brown?’

That comparison with Brown was striking. In trying to understand politics, I find myself increasingly using two sets of polar oppositions based on terms which might at first glance not seem that opposed: politician and statesman on the one hand, empathy and charisma on the other.

The essential task of a politician is to win office, and charisma helps enormously. David Cameron had bags of it, as did Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and they won the highest offices in their respective countries.

Gordon Brown, on the other hand, was a hopeless politician and short on charisma. He came across as boorish, churlish, uncouth. His defeat came in large part because voters chose charm over unsmiling competence.

For competence is what Brown had in spades. And he made up in empathy for what he lacked in charisma. He could understand the pain felt by people whose suffering he didn’t necessarily share.

The effect was striking. Within eighteen months of the most serious economic crisis the world had seen for a century, the Brown government had Britain back to growth with unemployment falling.

That’s statesmanship.

Cameron’s crew have taken us back into recession and sent unemployment climbing towards record heights, and it isn’t just incompetence. As Game's Over shows, the fundamental problem is that they don’t care.

Their charisma makes them articulate, even inspiring. Most of the people they are harming are tongue-tied or even voiceless.

A politics that matters, a politics that leads to justice will set as its key goal to give such people their voice. To speak for them when that’s necessary, but far better, to help them speak for themselves. For that we need statesmen not politicians and, while charisma will do no harm, what matters far more is empathy.

That’s why next week’s election in France is important. Sarkozy has panache  but no empathy and, as he’s shown over five years, precious little competence. His challenger, François Hollande, has made a virtue of his very ordinariness. What he has promised to do is to speak up for the powerless and he shows every sign of meaning it. 

Of course, like all leaders of the Centre-Left, he can disappoint too. He’s started talking about the need to limit immigration, a subject he’d studiously avoided previously. But then, you do have to get elected to do any good and, with 18% of the electorate voting for the far right, he presumably feels he owes them some concession.

Still, he’s ordinary and empathetic, and he’s up against charismatic and remorseless. And at the moment the polls are showing him on 55% to the incumbent’s 45%, with nearly a quarter of even the far right voters coming over to his side.

Maybe, just maybe, the French are showing us that our celebrity-obsessed societies are beginning to see through charisma and understand that a good politician can’t hold a candle to a real statesman.

We in Britain also have a leader of the opposition who’s having trouble connecting with the electorate, a Gordon Brown rather than a Nicolas Sarkozy. Though his Labour party sits on a comfortable lead over Cameron’s Tories, Ed Milliband is simply not setting the electorate alight. On the other hand, every time he speaks out he does so with increasing authority and he shows his ability to empathise with the marginalised, the underprivileged, the suffering.

A government led by such a man won’t be perfect, any more than a government led by Hollande would be, but it will at least aspire to social justice and decency. There’s no such aspiration today, as Game’s Over shows. A society which at least sets out to ensure none are excluded, all have a voice, is a better and healthier place for everyone to live, whether we are among today’s victims or not.

Mr Ordinary may win in France next Sunday. And if he does he will set an example for us on this side of the Channel.

One I hope we shall emulate at the earliest opportunity.

Enjoying memories of a certain kind of Jewishness

My childhood gave me a particular view of British Jews.

They tended to be open towards other cultures, which made many of them fine linguists. They were open to the arts, which made some of them great performers: one of my great uncles took particular pride in the setting he published of traditional Yiddish songs. They admired intellectualism or at least education, so they tended to have at least a passing if ironic acquaintance with Marx, and were happy to discuss Sartre or Camus at length even if they knew little about them. Just like me. 

They were almost by definition of the Left. I associate them with corduroy trousers, again a tradition I keep up, though I don’t go for the tweed jackets or thin-rimmed glasses. They thought the Attlee government was the best thing to have happened to Britain. They were Keynesians to a man, a tradition that it would be well to revive today, when we see the destruction the other lot are wreaking around Europe if not the world. 

And they loathed Franco: I remember a colleague who greeted the news of Franco’s death by declaring, ‘I blame his doctors.’ Faced with our astonishment, he went on, ‘had they been worth their pay, they would have kept him alive for another six months of increasing agony.’

Out of this simmering cauldron of ideas built on liberalism and tolerance came an important current of inspiration for the British Left. These days could hardly be more different. Today mainstream British Jews are little more than the UK branch of international Likud. Dull, conservative, conformist, sometimes latently or even blatantly racist. Firmly aligned with the David Camerons of this world.

So it’s particularly gratifying to have the chance to enjoy an evening of nostalgia for those glory days. Yesterday we went for dinner with an old Jewish friend — old only in the sense of the friendship, of course, since she’s as young at heart as ever. 

It was a good evening of the kind of wide-ranging, lively conversation that I associate with the best evenings I remember. And the food was great too — Jewish, of course, so we ended with a wonderful cheese cake of which, inevitably, I ate far too much. The quality of the cooking was all the more remarkable as hour hostess had damaged her foot badly — good luck, Brenda, with the X-ray: I hope it reveals nothing broken — and though I’m not suggesting that Jewish cooks use their feet they do, like anyone else, have to stand on them at the stove. 

But above all it was great reminder of a time I valued in my youth. And of a tradition which did much to enliven and stimulate the British Left. Could do with that coming back again.

Then, come to think of it, just what tradition does Ed Milliband represent?