Labour: getting back to its roots. But which roots?

“The only lesson to learn from history,” to paraphrase the German philosopher Hegel, “is that no one learns any lessons from history.”

In the course of the great debate over the leadership that is currently rocking the UK Labour Party, the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn frequently tell me that we need to get the party back to its roots. It’s because we’ve abandoned them for the last forty years – a precise figure quoted to me on Twitter, though what specifically happened in 1976 I’m not quite sure – that we’re in the mess today.

It never strikes me as a particularly good approach to call for a move “back to” some set of values. John Major, British Prime Minister between 1992 and 1997, Thatcher’s successor, launched a “back to basics” programme that was criticised even within his own party. Generally, it’s best to be moving forward and getting ready to deal with the next set of challenges, for which we’re likely to need different attitudes than worked when we faced the last.

Still, even in a forward-looking process, it’s useful to to see if we can at least learn enough from the past not to make the same mistakes again. Perhaps being aware of our roots might be a more useful approach than getting back to them. However, if we’re to do that well, we need at least to make sure we’re remembering them correctly. A mythical past isn’t going to help us at all in planning our future. It would be a pity to go back to the wrong roots, wouldn’t it?

What, then, were the roots of the Labour Party?

The great historic leader of the early days, and Labour’s first MP, was James Keir Hardie. He died long before Labour had its first chance to form a government, but he had among his advisers a young man, full of fine rhetoric and powerful views, who would lead Labour in government for the first time: Ramsay MacDonald was an early intellectual of the party and one of its most effective voices. He had principles too, and stuck to them: he was a pacifist and nothing could persuade him to back Britain’s involvement in the First World War. So, though he was one of the earliest Labour MPs, elected in 1906, he paid the price for his beliefs, losing his parliamentary seat in the elections at the end of the war.

Ramsay MacDonald: watered the roots of the Labour Party
But it didn’t end well, did it?

MacDonald came back, though, leading the first two Labour governments. Sadly, his second administration took office in 1929 and had to deal with the Great Depression. MacDonald, man of principle, thinker, left-winger, champion of the socialist cause, decided that was needed was a sound-money policy and reduced public spending. So he slashed unemployment benefit, to the fury and dismay of his Labour colleagues. In order to cling on to power, he formed a coalition with the Conservatives and remained Prime Minister, at the head of a government dominated by the party he’d always opposed, until 1935.

Are those the roots we’re supposed to get back to?

To be fair, when people talk about the Labour Party’s roots, they’re much more likely to be thinking of the great, reforming post-World War 2 government led by Clement Attlee. In particular, they’re probably thinking about one member of that government: Aneurin ‘Nai’ Bevan, founder of the NHS. They probably don’t remember that when someone mentioned to Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary in the same government, that Nai was his own worst enemy, Bevin growled back “not while I’m alive, he ain’t.”

Nai Bevan, father of the NHS. Much easier to get enthusiastic about.
As long as you’re not too worried abut nuclear disarmament.

Actually, that’s one of those stories that comes up again and again in different contexts, with different speakers. Another version has Bevin saying it about a different fellow Minister, Herbert Morrison. Then again, it was apparently said of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by his fellow Democrat “Cotton” Ed Smith. What all these versions have in common, though, is that they all reflect deeply destructive internal divisions in parties of the centre-left.

Sadly, we’re in exactly the same position today, but surely again this isn’t where we want to be, is it?

Much more significant than any comment of Bevin’s on Bevan, though, is a remark of Bevan’s himself. Jeremy Corbyn has made himself a bit of a name by his resistance to the renewal of the Trident nuclear missile programme. Interestingly, for a man and a member of a movement that swears by the sanctity of party decisions, he took that stance against Labour policy. He nonetheless enjoyed widespread support among his fan base, who tend to be pretty keen on Bevan too. So perhaps they need to ponder the words Nai spoke at the Labour Conference of 1957, during the debate on unilateral nuclear disarmament:

I knew this morning that I was going to make a speech that would offend and even hurt many of my friends. I know that you are deeply convinced that the action you suggest is the most effective way of influencing international affairs. I am deeply convinced that you are wrong. It is therefore not a question of who is in favour of the hydrogen bomb, but a question of what is the most effective way of getting the damn thing destroyed. It is the most difficult of all problems facing mankind. But if you carry this resolution and follow out all its implications and do not run away from it you will send a Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber… You call that statesmanship? I call it an emotional spasm.

Curious, isn’t it? That a past idol of the left referred to the policies espoused to the policies of today’s idol of the left as an “emotional spasm.”

So – are those the roots we’re supposed to be getting back to?

Might the word be mightier than the nuclear missile?

It’s a commonplace of British foreign policy that the country needs to “punch above its weight.”

With constant repetition, the idea has seeped into received wisdom, becoming one of those obvious truths we all accept without question. But questioning it badly needs.

To start with, the expression comes from boxing. In most sports, injuring an opponent can lead to a sanction by the referee; indeed, if the injury is deemed to be deliberate, the sanction may be serious, even career-limiting. The aim of boxing, on the other hand, is to cause deliberate injury to the adversary, as quickly as possible, and decisively. It’s hard to see how that can even be classified as a sport. And doesn’t a national goal become suspect precisely for being drawn from a metaphor drawn from it?

In any case, a boxer who kept boxing above his weight would be bound, ultimately, to come up against an opponent who would be undeterred by any cleverness or technical proficiency the fighter showed and would simply use his superior weight to crush him.

As it happens, that isn’t a bad parallel for British defence policy. When British politicians talk about the British punch, they’re mostly talking about the country’s nuclear weapons. They’re impressive when it comes to potential to do incalculable damage to the world. But compared to the arsenals of the United States or Russia, they’re trivial. If we fell out seriously with Russia, we’d soon discover that punching above our weight was a terminal occupation. As our (relatively) puny force was met by their overwhelming might, we’d just have to time to ponder the error of our ways before oblivion.

This last week I was in Madrid and at one point wandered past the British Council headquarters. A fine, even palatial building. It’s the centre from which the Council runs a series of mostly educational initiatives: teaching English, making books available, laying on shows or lectures, all with a British theme.

We don’t do anything like as much of that as we ought. To pick a sporting metaphor from outside the boxing ring, we’re not playing to our full strength. Britain can make cultural contributions to the world that are impressive. Making an impression, that is, in a much more pleasing way than a Trident missile could.

A Trident missile, and the British Council building in Madrid
Which really projects power most effectively?

Curiously, according to their accounts, the income of the British Council globally was £972m in 2014/15. Within this total, just £154.9m came from the British public, down by 5% on the year before, in line with stated government policy to keep reducing its investment in the cultural body.

At that rate, it would take Britain around 645 years to spend the amount the government plans to spend on Trident over just ten years. But if the government estimate of £100bn for Trident is an underestimate, and the true figure is closer to £167bn as has been claimed, it would take rather over a millennium to spend as much on the British Council as on those weapons of mass destruction.

Whose use would spell our own destruction.

Whereas the work of the British Council might extend and deepen international affection for its home country.

Strikes me that even simple financial expediency should favour the intelligence over the Council over the punch, however weighty, of the Trident system…

Two nations from the axis of evil: contrasting treatment and outcome

It’s interesting to reflect that George Dubya Bush, who has to be in the running for dumbest US president ever – a position only likely to be challenged if Donald Trump is elected – lumped Iran and Iraq together, with North Korea, in what he saw as the “axis of evil.”

Two of those three nations have been the target of intense action by the US.

It was Dubya himself who turned his guns – literally – against Iraq, with the invasion of 2003. Thirteen years on, the nation is a shattered patchwork of regions in conflict with one another. At the centre is a weak government dominated by none other than Iran. To the north, the Kurds form an autonomous region which is independent in all but name. Both the Baghdad government and the Kurds are in a state of continuous war with what has to be the world’s most brutal terrorist group, ISIS, an organisation that grew strongly in the power vacuum Bush’s war created.

There is no reliable estimate of the deaths caused by the war. Those available range from over 100,000 to over a million.

Iran, on the other hand, never enjoyed the privilege of invasion by a US-led coalition. It continued in its evil ways, but as it toyed with developing nuclear weapons, it came in for some tough and highly effective economic sanctions. At the same time, the US and other nations engaged in intense bouts of diplomatic activity with succeeding Iranian governments.

As I write these words, the International Atomic Energy Authority seems poised to publish a report officially recognising that Iran has abandoned its military nuclear programme. As a result, a prisoner exchange is to take place between the US and Iran – a small, symbolic gesture, but symbols matter, especially as there’s bitter opposition to the deal from the backwoodsmen in the States (aka as the Republican Party). A symbolic release will be a significant success for Obama, though his opponents, and in particular Donald Trump, won’t give him credit.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and
Mohammad Zarif, Iranian Foreign Minister

Most significant of all, the deal would allow Iran back into the world economy.

Iran and Iraq may have been lumped together at one stage. But their histories in recent years have diverged starkly. Above all, that’s been due to the different policies adopted towards them by the West.

The problems in South Africa and Iran were approached through a mix of sanctions and diplomacy. In Iraq, Lybia and Afghanistan, on the other hand, the West took military action.

Compare. Contrast. Learn a lesson.

And, friends in America, for heaven’s sake – for all our sakes – keep Trump out of the White House.

Caught on the prongs of a Trident

What on earth’s the attraction of Britain hanging on to Trident nuclear missiles?

Voices around the Labour Party are being raised in opposition to the leader Jeremy Corbyn’s desire to get rid of the British nuclear deterrent. I’m sure there are many around the country who agree with his critics. But are either the Labour leaders speaking out against Corbyn, or the voters who share their views, thinking through their position?

The full cost of the next generation of Trident is likely to be £97 billion over its 30-year life, or just over £3.2 billion a year. That’s nearly 10% of the total defence budget as it currently stands.

Trident. Macho, certainly. Expensive, for sure. Useful? Unlikely

Would anyone ever advocate the weapon’s use? If so, who would they use it against? Our biggest enemy these days seems to be ISIS in Iraq and Syria; surely no one would advocate launching nuclear weapons against either of those countries? At least, no one with a claim to sanity?

As Jeremy Corbyn pointed out to his critics, having the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world did absolutely no good to the United Sates when it came under attack on 9/11. Different weapons are needed against that kind of threat (and they need to be different, too, from the ones that were ultimately used: an invasion by land forces has hardly given us a stable, peaceful region…)

Even if we were tempted to use nuclear weapons against a more worthy target than Syria or Iraq, would we actually do so? Would we want to launch a nuclear attack against Russia? It doesn’t take a lot of nuclear weapons to do a great deal of damage, so we could doubtless inflict real pain on Russia, but surely no one believes we would survive the response? Even if we survived the radioactive fallout?

Nuclear weapons strike me as an extraordinarily bad way to spend a large amount of money. An investment from which there is only one set of beneficiaries: the manufacturers of the weapons in the United States. They, indeed, are the only beneficiaries of most of military adventures we’ve been on in recent years: whoever won or lost in Afghanistan or Iraq, the arms producers came out on top.

It seems that the support for these weapons is much more to do with people’s desire to feel defended than with any real defence.

Meanwhile, we’re constantly told how much we should fear terrorism. Government, keen to frighten us out of certain important rights, no doubt overstate the extent of the threat. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t deny that it is real and imminent. It strikes me that £3 billion a year could buy quite a lot of additional defence against terrorists.

Why, if we wanted to, we could spend part of it in the form of increased aid to some of the worst affected regions, such as Syria, for instance. That might help turn people away from terrorism in the first place. It might even help stem some of the flow of refugees out of that country.

Wouldn’t that be a more intelligent way of spending the money?

Meanwhile, Labour is being distracted by this debate from what should be its main concern. We need a powerful, united campaign against the disastrous, and cruel, austerity policies of this government.

Could we get back to that, please? And drop the irrational demand to renew a highly expensive investment in a weapon we can’t use and only enriches the wrong people? Especially as it only offers at best a comfort blanket we should all have grown out of anyway?

It’s all a matter of focus, focus, focus.

The British Labour Party: finding a form of leadership with a great pedigree

Leadership, if it means anything, is about finding a way to persuade people to come with you to somewhere they may not, initially, have thought they wanted to go.

That’s something that many in the Labour Party need to ponder. They point out, correctly, that a great many people in Britain are inclined towards the right wing, whether it’s towards the unpleasantly right wing Conservatives, or the even nastier right wing UKIP. They are equally correct that Labour needs to win some of those people back if it is to have a chance to form a government again.

Where they’re wrong is in assuming that this means we have to adopt the same policies: ape the Tories on austerity, or UKIP on xenophobia. That’s followership. Leadership is persuading them to try a different approach.

Abraham Lincoln was one of the world’s greatest political leaders. There were two particularly admirable characteristics to his politics: the ability to bring people with him, and the capacity to listen, learn and adapt, without abandoning principles.

On the first of these, he applied with consummate skill the notion that the trick, in leading people, is to stay in front, but also to stay in touch. In the immortal words of The West Wing, a leader without followers is just a man out for a stroll. 

So, though Lincoln always abominated slavery, and never gave way on the fundamental point that it should not be allowed to expand beyond the area in which it already existed, he was more than prepared to compromise with the slaveholding south to the extent of not pursuing immediate abolition throughout the US and by toying with notions of compensated emancipation: buying slaves to free them.

On occasions, he even fought election campaigns without mentioning slavery at all, if he felt it would hinder his or his party’s progress to speak out.

That strikes me as entirely legitimate, because what he never did, was endorse the positions of the other side. Never did he support slavery. In that respect, his position is in stark contrast with that of certain Labourites who advocate adopting a Conservative position on, say, cuts in benefits in the hope of attracting Tory voters. That’s wrong in principle, and it’s ineffective in practice: why would anyone vote for a party imitating the Tories? If they want those policies, they’ll vote for the real thing. The trick isn’t to go along with it, it’s to wean them from those views.

The Lincoln position isn’t easy. It leads to accusations of betrayal or of trimming, and Lincoln certainly faced his share of them. But in the end, it was he and not the radical abolitionists who ensured that the 13th amendment to the US constitution, banning slavery completely, was adopted. He temporised, he sometimes forbore to speak, but eventually he achieved what the abolitionists had always wanted but hadn’t been able to implement by more direct means.

He did that by sometimes judiciously shelving the slavery question, while he focused on the overriding issue of his time: saving the union of the United States. Success in that struggle led to success on slavery too.

When it comes to Lincoln learning, it’s fascinating to see how his position changed on Black equality. While he always hated slavery, it’s clear that initially he didn’t believe that Black and White could coexist, and backed the notion of “colonisation”: sending freed Blacks to their own nation, in Africa or possibly in Central America.

However, as events unfolded, he found himself evolving with them. During the Civil War, he was won round to the notion that Black free men could serve in the Army; eventually he accepted that they should be paid the same as their White counterparts; not long before his assassination he had gone so far as to accept that the “most intelligent” Blacks (whatever that means) and any who’d borne arms for the Union, should be allowed the vote.

He was still a long way from a whole-hearted endorsement of equal rights and universal suffrage (not even all White men had the vote, and of course no women did). But had he lived, how far might he have gone?

John McDonnell (left) and Jeremy Corbyn
Following in the steps of Lincoln?

Given my view of what true leadership is, I’ve been fascinated by the way Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, and John McDonnell as shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, have been behaving. They have left issues such as getting out of NATO, of doing away with the British nuclear deterrent, of leaving the EU, to negotiation with other Labour leaders, with whom they often disagree.

Like Lincoln, they’re focusing on the key issue. John McDonnell said it in his first Conference speech in his new shadow post: “austerity isn’t an economic necessity, it’s a political choice.”

Yes. That’s the first issue we need to take on. There’s a stultifying and deeply damaging consensus across most of Europe, that the correct response to the financial crash of 2008 is to cut government spending and inflict terrible suffering on the most vulnerable. As McDonnell also said, that is to make the victims pay for the crash instead of the perpetrators.

That view is beginning to be questioned in European nation after European nation. It’s a huge step forward that one of the main parties in one of the major European economies is taking up that cause. That’s the one to focus on for now, leaving others on the back burner – certainly, the more contentious ones that would split the party and make it less likely to achieve its main goal.

Once we’ve dealt with austerity, we could perhaps move on to the other urgent question, which has to be climate change.

Then we can look at NATO and nuclear weapons. And who knows? If the people are moving with us on the top priorities, they may well move with us on the others.

But that takes leadership. So far Labour’s looking a bit like Lincoln. And that’s promising.

Beware the Russian bear, especially when he's wounded

For the first time for over twenty years, I was woken from a dream which I had several times as a teenager or a young man. A dream of planes, large and somehow cumbersome, moving apparently slowly across the sky as they seem to do in films, though we all know they travel at speeds almost unimaginable on earth. The fly towards me and I know they’re about to drop nuclear weapons.

In the dream, cowering around the corner of a wall from the blast, I don’t hear the noise but see the blinding light, again as shown in countless films.

Russian bombers: the stuff of dreams

Now I attach no significance to dreams. All this one represents is preoccupations that have resurfaced in my life, in all our lives, and which had receded for quarter of a century. Because Russia has moved firmly back into the “watch this space” category: it’s going broke, it’s shown no hesitation about getting aggressive with other nations, and it’s nuclear-armed.

Yesterday the rouble lost half its value against the dollar. The Russian government took emergency measure after emergency measure against the failure of its currency, but couldn’t stop it, even when interest rates went up to 17% (you’d think somebody would want to invest for that return, but no one believes the fall has stopped – so they don’t invest and the fall continues).

Part of the problem is that the oil price is on the way down (curious that energy prices in Western countries haven’t yet started falling as dramatically – curious, but not at all surprising). And Russia remains as dependent on raw material as any third world country, specifically that raw material, oil.

The Russian government has done a great job of making a small number of people extremely wealthy, but has done little or nothing for most of the people.

Nothing like Britain, you see.

Strangely, Russian voters don’t seem able to grasp that they’ve put in power people who are going to fleece them, so they keep voting for them.

Again, not at all like Britain.

The second factor is making the situation a great deal worse: Western sanctions. Now, I can see a good argument for saying that Crimea ought to be part of Russia: it always was, and was handed over to Ukraine by Kruschev, in a clumsy act of arbitrary rule. On the other hand, I can see no good argument for saying that the problem should have been resolved by force of arms.

Nor can I see any good argument for infiltrating troops and arming lawless militias in other parts of Eastern Ukraine, but Russia keeps doing it. As a result, they’re under an increasing burden of sanctions, which are making a desperate financial position still worse.

But will this undermine Russian resolve to keep on stirring things up for Ukraine, and for the West?

t’s far more likely to have exactly the opposite effect. Voters already committed to Putin to the point of fanaticism, will in all probability back him still more strongly. And they’ll want to lash out against their perceived enemies more brutally, if only to make themselves feel less bad about themselves.

They’ll justify their position with words like “pride” and “honour”. We’ll probably hear expressions such as “it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”

A man to inspire confidence. And reassurance about peace

That’s always struck me as a particularly short-sighted view. Die on your feet, and you don’t stay on your feet. Live on your knees and there’s a chance you might be able to get up again in a while. No one has ever stood up from being dead, except allegedly one man in Jerusalem a while back, and I’m not wholly convinced by the evidence I’ve been shown.

The sensible position would be for Russians to say “it’s bloody cold around here in the winter, and food prices are shocking already. Let’s come to an accommodation with the West and even with Ukraine, and live to fight another day.”

They won’t. There’ll be stiff backs and stiffer upper lips all over the place. Stiff necks too. And there’ll be a powerful surge of support for getting their retaliation in first.

Why would they stop with Ukraine, seen as a surrogate for the West, when they have the missiles to get at the West itself?

Because, and don’t you forget it, Russian’s nuclear-armed. Well nuclear-armed.

Sweet dreams, everyone.

What goes around comes around. Sometimes like a boomerang

The film 300 earned its makers some $456 million, a tidy return on an investment of $65 million. But then the heroic tale of 300 Spartans battling to the death at Thermopylae against a Persian army of thousands has so many features to commend it, even if historical accuracy or simple plausibility aren’t among them.

Bloody and dramatic but not as bad as today

The background to the film is the long hostility between the great powers that faced each other across the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. What’s fascinating is the way the players have changed down the ages but the essential conflict has persisted. 

The Persians at the time of Thermopylae were the Achaemenids, the dynasty that gave us Xerxes and Darius, and their adversaries again and again were the Greeks. In time, though, Alexander the Great led the Greeks in bringing down that great Empire. Out of its ruins rose another, founded oddly enough by a bunch of nomadic tribesmen from the north-east of the country, the Parthians. Meanwhile, the Greeks had fallen too, passing under the dominance of the Romans.

So for the next four centuries, Romans and Parthians faced off across that great border. For Roman leaders, the debate was always whether it was perhaps best to leave well alone and avoid picking a fight with the Parthians, or to take a chance in the knowledge that victory would lead to triumph, though defeat might lead to loss of power if not of life.

The same fighting and the same Roman soul-searching continued once the Parthians had in turn been replaced to the Sassanian dynasty, another 400-year Persian Empire. Its triumph came in the killing of one Roman emperor and the capture of another, said — with probably as much historical accuracy as exemplified by 300 — to have been used as a footstool by the Sassanian ruler to mount his horse.

In time, the Roman Empire morphed into the Byzantine, but between it and the Sassanians, unstable peace continued to alternate uncomfortably with bitter war until the seventh century. Then a terrifying new power emerged from the South to batter them both with the power of a hurricane. The prophet Mohammed died in 632; within two years the first Caliph Abu Bakr had welded the Arabian tribes into a single fighting force; within two years after that his successor Umar had beaten both those Empires, capturing key territory from Byzantium and entirely overwhelming Persia.

So it’s with a certain sense of irony — ‘amusement’ would be too strong a word — that I watch the present deepening dispute with Iran. We’re right back there again, among the Achaemenids and the Greeks, the Romans and the Parthians, the Sassanians and the Byzantines. Once again, the area of conflict is Mesopotamia, Syria, the Levant. And the Levant, of course, includes Israel.


Even the sabre rattling is the same. Peace? War? Is victory worth the risk of defeat?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And yet, and yet, there’s a fairly major difference. Leonidas, king of the Spartans at Thermopylae, is said to have replied to the warning that the Persians would turn the sky dark with their arrows, that the Spartans would therefore fight in the shade.

If only Israelis and Iranians were only armed with arrows. Sadly, it’s a bit harder to make brave jokes about the shadow cast by nuclear weapons.

It feels as though something old and familiar has come round again, another twist in the spiral of the old conflict with Persia. Still, if it’s not to be last twist, perhaps this time we ought to try to find a way of calming things down a bit.