Thinking of choosing the hard left? You'll end up with the hard right

According to a leftie who keeps on at me on Twitter, the problem for Labour is that the 2019 election merely represents a continuation of its decline over many years now, with the 2015 result an anomalous blip in that downward trend.

Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn: architects of Labour misfortunes

That stance got me interested in taking a longer-term view of British politics. So I looked at percentages of the popular vote in eleven elections over the forty years between 1979 and 2019. Clearly, the relative strengths of the two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, would be of interest. It struck me, though, that it might also be useful to set them in the context of the overall landscape of parties of the broad right (the Conservatives, but also the hard right parties of today or their earlier embodiments, Brexit Party, UKIP, the British National Party) or of the broad left (Labour, the LibDems and their earlier forms, the Alliance or Liberals, the Greens or Ecology Party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru).

How the left (broadly) performs against the right
compared with Labour alone

What emerges is a curious picture. The ‘left’, in this broad definition (orange line), consistently outperformed the ‘right’ (black line) except in 2015. That surge for the right was principally down to UKIP’s 12.6%; the Conservative result was still an anaemic 36.8%.

With either proportional representation or some arrangement between the constituents of the ‘left’, the ‘right’ would have had a majority of the popular vote for only two years out of the last forty.

Now popular votes don’t necessarily translate into Parliamentary majorities. But if big enough, they can deliver victory, and the ‘left’ tends to be significantly ahead of the ‘right’ most of the time. That suggests that if Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens could have pulled together, the Tories would have been out of power for most of the last 40 years, instead of in power for 27 of them.

Interestingly, Labour alone (red line) only outpolled the combined right for three elections – unsurprisingly, the three when Blair was leader and in government. The leftie on Twitter, and others of his ilk there or on FaceBook, are also constantly assuring me that Blair was the lowest of the low and worthy of nothing but contempt. However, if we’re interested in keeping the Tories out of power, it’s worth remembering that he was the only leader in four decades able to ensure that Labour could do that on its own.

For the rest of the time, it would have had to work in partnership with others to oust the Tories. That’s clear from the second graph comparing Labour’s performance (red line) directly with the Tories’ (blue line). Again, only under Blair did Labour outperform the Tories. Otherwise, we’re consistently behind.

Labour performance alone against the Conservatives

Interestingly, the worst results are not under Corbyn. The worst of all, naturally, is 1983. Then Labour was led by Michael Foot, although Tony Benn, the deputy leader, was the main architect of our overwhelming defeat.

Since then, our lowest percentages of the popular vote came in 2010 and 2015. The Tories, however, were down then too, winning by small margins. Looking instead at the gap between Labour and the Tories, the worst elections of all were 1983 and 2019, Benn’s and Corbyn’s. Indeed, it is Corbyn’s greatest achievement to have gifted the Tories their second-highest vote share in that forty-year period. The only higher result was Maggie Thatcher’s first win in 1979.

The significance is that her victory was the first in a series. Johnson’s was the fourth in a row for the Tories, and the first time since the nineteenth century that any party has increased its Parliamentary representation in a fourth election victory.

Corbynists always said that Jeremy would do something remarkable. He has. Although I’m not sure this is what they meant.

This takes us to the nub of the problem for the hard left. One told me recently that whatever we learned from the 2019 election, we should not on any account ‘abandon the programme’. For Corbynites, no compromise is possible on Corbynist policies. That makes any hope of collaboration with other parties impossible. And that, as the last eleven elections demonstrate, means that the right would continue to outperform us.

Above all, with the kind of programme championed by Corbynites now or Bennites in 1983, we ensure not just a Tory win, but a colossal one. Why does this happen? Because Bennites and Corbynites want Labour to mirror their views, not those of the electorate. And the electorate has no time for their policies.

In the current leadership election, we need to choose a leader who reverses that. We need a leader who listens to the voters and goes to them with a programme that they can endorse, even though that means compromise, even giving up on some cherished policies. That way we can win back Labour voters. And if, in addition, we can compromise enough to attract other parties to our banner, why, we could kick the Tories out for a generation.

The alternative is to choose Bennite or Corbynite orthodoxy.

And we know what that gets us: the likes of Maggie or Boris.

Spirit conversation, or my mother on why Labour has to be a Broad Church

My mother, a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party and member for nearly four decades, liked to tell me her party was a Broad Church.

The Duomo in Milan: one of the broadest churches I know

One of the proudest moments of her long life was the day in 1945 when she learned, in a roomful of her Labour Party staff colleagues, that for the first time Labour had a majority in the House of Commons. Clement Attlee was about to become Prime Minister, heading what was, indeed, a broad-church government. On its left, were men around the fiery Welsh orator, Nai Bevan; on its right, those who lined up with the wily old Trades Unionist, Ernest Bevin; in the middle, the mainstream around Attlee himself.

Not the least of Attlee’s skills was the capacity to hold that disparate band together. Above all, that meant compromise, so that no one felt they were being denied more than they could bear, or that someone else was getting too much. Even Attlee couldn’t handle it for longer than six years and, eventually, the government was brought down from the inside by Bevan’s intransigence. It achieved a huge amount in that short time, however, not least launching Britain’s most cherished institution, now under existential threat, the National Health Service. Ironically, it was that same Bevan who acted as its midwife.

My mother would probably have been shocked to see how contemptuously the notion of a ‘broad church’ is treated these days. The dominant group within the Labour Party these days seems much more intent on homogeneity than diversity. They want everyone to be a supporter of their faction, even though that faction has just taken the Party to a historically massive defeat.

It would be a great pleasure to welcome my mother’s spirit here in Spain, if she chose to visit us from the other world. She would, I’m ensure, enjoy a Christmas in better weather than she’d been used to in England, but I imagine the conversation would quickly turn more serious.

“Unfortunately,” I’d have to tell her, “the Labour Party’s being run these days by people who think we shouldn’t have to compromise any more. They think it’s time for a Labour government more aligned on a single tendency within the movement – the one Nai Bevan represented in your time, and Tony Benn later.”

“But,” I suspect she’d reply, “they need the others too.”

“It’s hard for me to speak for the leadership, but I think they like the idea of something purer, less corrupted by compromise, firmer on its principles.”

“Doesn’t that mean narrower?”

“I suppose it does.”

“Well, there you are then,” she’d exclaim triumphantly, “if it’s narrow it won’t be able to put together a majority.”

I can just see the gleam in her eyes as she points out the fallacy in the position I’ve been trying to present.

“Funnily enough, it couldn’t. We’ve just had an election and Labour won a bit over ten and a quarter million votes. The Tories took just shy of fourteen million. We got 202 seats.”

“202? But that’s worse than 1983!” she’d exclaim, “and… that’s after nearly ten years of the Tories in office!”

I’d hang my head.

“That’s the worst result I’ve ever seen, not counting 1935 when I was only eleven and not really paying attention. Extraordinary. How could they do that badly?”

“Well, it’s lousy, I admit. It means we need getting on for a couple of million voters to switch from the Tories to us.”

“That’s a big ask.”

“I know. Maybe beyond a single election. But we might do it in two.”

“Only if you broaden your appeal. You can’t do it by being pure and narrow.”

“You think we should become a broad church again? That wouldn’t be popular with the characters running the party at the moment.”

“Then,” she would say decisively, “it’s time for them to get out of the way. Broad churches win elections. Narrow ones lose them.”

“You know that. I know that. But they don’t want to hear that.”

“Explain it to them.”

“I try. I’m not getting far,” I’d point out thoughtfully, as I start mulling over a new idea, “couldn’t you have a go? You know, haunt them a bit?”

“Not a bad idea. I could try. I’ve always been good at making my views clear when people are being silly.”

“I know you have,” I’d say, shaking my head, partly out of some painful memories, but partly also out of doubt. “Trouble is, this lot seem terribly hard of hearing when you’re trying to tell them something true they’d rather not know.”

“Well, it’s up to them. If they’d rather stick with what makes them comfortable and lose, they’re even sillier than I thought. But you can only get things done when you’re on the winning side. Attlee knew that. He told me himself. Bevin knew. Why, even Bevan knew, before he brought the whole house crashing down.”

“Sadly, his heirs seem intent on bringing the house down before it’s even built.”

“Seems a hopeless case. You can’t save people who don’t want to save themselves.” She’d shake her head in turn. And then, as if making up her mind, she’d add, “Let’s have a glass of that red I brought you.”

Gerald Kaufman leaves. And is Jeremy Corbyn preparing a backhanded tribute?

Gerald Kaufman, who has just died aged 86, at least fulfilled his wish of remaining an MP until the end of his life. He represented a tough Manchester constituency, today called Gorton, steadily increasing his majorities by dint of being an excellent local MP, until it reached over 24,097 votes at the latest General Election.

Gerald Kaufman 21 June 1930-26 February 2017
Acerbic, awkward, accurate

He had a way of getting up people's noses, certainly irritating those in power, including in power in his own party. That prevented him ever reaching Cabinet rank. He made his mark in other ways, though. In one that appealed to me, he was highly critical of the Israeli government despite being a Jew, precisely as I am.

But the statement of his I most like was his description of the 1983 Labour manifesto as “the longest suicide note in history”. The manifesto, written when Labour was led by Michael Foot and his deputy Tony Benn, was a long and indigestible statement of policies which appealed to few in the electorate.

At the 1983 general election, the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher increased their number of MPs by 38 while Labour lost 52. The Conservatives, who had held a comfortable majority of 44 seats, emerged with a landslide of 144 seats, despite losing 700,000 votes.

It was Labour’s worst result since 1918, though I rather suspect we’re heading towards setting a new record at the next election.

Back then, Tony Benn, deputy leader of the Labour Party and flag carrier for the radical left, was proud of the manifesto. It was, he felt, the first truly socialist manifesto the Party had fought on and, the implication seemed to be, if Labour kept working to such manifestos, in the long run voters would rally to its appeal. The party would be returned to government and radical change would follow.

In the meantime, we had a Thatcher government with a massive majority. There was certainly radical change but not, I hope, of the kind Benn had intended.

Benn saw the policies as appealing. Kaufman saw them as a suicide note. Even when Labour finally returned to power, under Blair, it pursued policies heavily marked by Thatcher’s influence. The toxins she spread affect us still.

So I’m inclined to think that Kaufman assessed things considerably more accurately than Benn did.

In the statement issued about his death, his family pointed out that Kaufman “never believed that policies, however attractive, meant anything without the power to act on them”. That strikes me as a view it’s difficult to deny. So it’s interesting to see how Jeremy Corbyn has reacted to the latest crushing defeat suffered by Labour, when it lost a by-election in the Copeland seat.

He’s asked for more time to prepare – some appealing policies.

This begs two questions. The first is why he hasn’t been able to get his policies in place in the last eighteen months: he has a staff, he has advisers. The second is still more fundamental: why does he believe that a party’s appeal is based on its policies? In 1983, they had plenty of policies. Loads of the blasted things. To the point of tedium. The problem was that voters simply couldn’t see Michael Foot as Prime Minister.

Just as, today, only a tiny minority of the electorate see Corbyn as a potential Prime Minister.

Ah, well. Perhaps Corbyn’s working on a kind of backhanded tribute to Kaufman: another long-winded litany of fine policies no one will read and everyone will mock. Just like Benn.

In fact, he may be crafting another fine suicide note. Not just for Labour, of course. Again, it’ll be for all of us.

The Corbyn controversy, or have we learned anything from last time Labour put its Foot in it?

Let’s wind the clock back to 1981. Specifically, to 25 January. This is the day when four former Labour cabinet members, known as the Gang of Four, announced a long-feared move to split the party.

Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers set up the Council for Social Democracy because they felt that Labour had lurched too far to the left. It had adopted policies of unilateral nuclear disarmament and departure from the European Economic Community (forerunner of the European Union). It had also elected a left-wing leader, Michael Foot.

Insofar as one can like anyone without meeting him personally, I liked Foot. I agreed with most of his views, but I also felt a personal link to him: I was in the second year of doctoral studies on an eighteenth-century writer and thinker, and Foot was a respected authority on one of the greatest eighteenth-century writers and thinkers, Jonathan Swift. He even did his research in the North Library of the British Library, still in those days housed within the British Museum building, as I did.

The Gang of Four, getting ready to split the Labour Party

The Gang of Four was, however, more worried still by the veteran left winger Tony Been, seen as exercising a baleful influence on the Party.

There’s much to admire in Benn. However, I don’t go with the personality cult that’s developed around him. Unlike most Labour left wingers, he’d had experience in government, not always to his honour. As Secretary of State for Energy, he had ordered three new nuclear power stations, one of them – Sizewell B – using the US Westinghouse Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) technology.

Later he would write in the Guardian, “I am strongly opposed to nuclear weapons and civil nuclear power.” Earlier in the same article, he talked of, “Sir Jack Rampton, my permanent secretary, who seemed to be as keen as [Dr Walter] Marshall [of the Atomic Energy Authority and an adviser to Benn] on the adoption of the PWR.” This kind of rationalisation strikes me as self-serving – “I was pressurised into making a lousy decision by bad advice” – as well as feeble – “I may be a clarion voice of the left, but when I have to defend my position against pressure, I cave.” 

Hardly the stuff of which we want Labour politicians to be made. However, back then, the Gang of Four was deeply apprehensive of him.

In March 1981, they launched the Social Democratic Party. In the end, just 28 Labour MPs joined them, and one Tory, and they were badly hammered at the 1983 General Election: only six SDP MPs were returned. Indeed, even their alliance with the then Liberal Party only managed to win 23 seats overall. However, that poor result at parliamentary level belied a far better performance in the popular vote: the SDP-Liberal Alliance took 7,780,949 vote, just 675,985 behind Labour.

Labour fought that election on probably the most left-wing manifesto it had ever adopted. But the result saw it lose 9.3% of its popular support and 52 MPs. The Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher, assisted by the split vote against them, won by a landslide, with a majority of 144 seats, despite a 700,000 drop in their vote.

Tony Benn came up with a glorious reaction to that catastrophic Labour defeat. He described the debacle as “a triumph for socialism.” I still can’t believe he said that. Two or three such triumphs and Labour would guarantee Tory government for a couple of generations.

Benn reckoned that 8,456,934 Labour voters had voted for a socialist manifesto. I suppose positive spin can be a good thing, but that struck me as a trifle over the top, given that the party had registered its worst performance since 1918. Labour MP Gerald Kaufmann seemed closer to the truth when he described the massive, turgid and indigestible manifesto, as “the longest suicide note in history.”

Benn’s mistake was no doubt down to a view, still held by many, that policies actually matter when it comes to winning elections. Aaron Banks, the leading Brexit and UKIP backer, reckoned the recent referendum win was down to the principle that “facts don’t matter”. Remain campaigners only put forward facts, but the Leave side appealed to emotions. The same is true when it comes to perception and policy in general elections. It doesn’t matter what policies you promise to pursue, if your leader isn’t seen as a potential Prime Minister. Far too few voters saw Foot as a PM, and the SDP-Liberal Alliance gave them another choice. The result was a catastrophic defeat of the Labour Party (or “triumph of socialism”, of course, if you like the Benn point of view.)

Aldous Huxley once pointed out that the only lesson to learn from history is that no one learns any lessons from history.

Let’s run the clock forward again, to today. Have we learned any lessons?

Once more, the Bennite wing of the Labour Party is in the ascendancy, in the movement known as Momentum (momentum, by the way, is something that keeps you moving forward, but doesn’t unfortunately distinguish between whether you’re heading for sunlit uplands or straight over a cliff.)

Once more, we have a leader who is kind, decent, honest, principled and from the Left of the Party. He may not be an authority on Swift. But he is, just like Foot, not someone many see as a potential Prime Minister.

It’s been reported that there are once more moves afoot to launch a new grouping, bringing together the right of the Labour Party with more liberal Conservatives. And once more Shirley Williams has emerged to talk about cross-party collaboration. Even the issue she has chosen to highlight is a throwback to the controversy of the early eighties: Europe again, following the Brexit vote.

Despite that experience, we seem to be lining ourselves up to make all the same mistakes. As Einstein almost certainly didn’t say, to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, is the definition of insanity. We may be heading for another period of lunacy.

What were the results last time?

Fourteen more years of highly painful Tory rule. The first seven of them under Thatcher. To whom Theresa May is a worthy and effective successor.

We’ve been warned.

Adapting to post-imperial life: hard for Austria. Just as hard for Britain.

It’s always a joy to make a new friendship. I particularly enjoyed meeting a new Austrian colleague the other day. In conversations covering a wide range of subjects – work, naturally, but much else besides – he struck me by his intelligence, culture and thoughtfulness. Among other matters, on Austria itself.

The country entered the century as the dominant partner in the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. That monarchy, or rather Empire, ceased to exist after the First World War, where it made the mistake of fighting on the wrong side. That’s not wrong in any moral sense, simply wrong in the sense that it was the side that lost.

Now many years ago my wife and I visited Hungary, and we were struck by the liveliness of resentment over the loss of territory that component of the Empire suffered after the war. To give some of the peoples within the old borders of Hungary their own countries, Hungary was deprived of 72% of its territory; because borders are never neat, 31% of ethnic Hungarians found themselves outside Hungary – a total of 3.3 million people, in such countries as Czechoslovakia or Romania. 80 years on, there was still considerable bitterness on the subject.

So it was interesting talking about Austria. In 1914, at the outbreak of war, the Empire covered a population of 52.8 million. After the post-war settlements, the newly separate nation of Austria had just 6.5 million. In other words, it had lost seven out of eight people over which it had previous ruled.

The new dispensation required some radical mindset adjustments. The view an Austrian might have had of the nation’s place in the world no longer corresponded to reality. To take just one obvious change, the old Empire had been a major naval power, but modern Austria is landlocked. Above all, though, Austria no longer had an imperial role.

An Austrian fleet? Not a sight we’d see any more...
Austro-Hungarian WW1 warships at Pola, today in Croatia

Indeed, it was one of the smaller countries of Europe.

If Hungary had such difficulty adapting to these changes that it was still struggling with them eight decades on, one can imagine that the re-examination Austrians had to undergo would have left them deeply perturbed and confused. There were serious internal conflicts within Austria between the wars, leading to the emergence of extremist movements, and preparing the ground for the eventual Nazi annexation.

All this reminded me of a statement the late left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn once made: “the last colony of the British Empire will be England.”

We too in Britain had to come to terms with a post-imperial life. It hasn’t always been easy. Nor is the process complete: the Iraq War showed a continuing desire to pursue a far bigger role on the world stage than Britain’s real power justifies. At least Austria has reconciled to its position as a prosperous but small European state. That has made it a fully integrated member of the European Union.

With a referendum on EU membership due on 23 June, that’s not an adjustment that Britain has fully made yet.

Labour: it's got to be Cooper or Burnham

The main mouthpiece of British high Toryism, the Daily Telegraph, is involving itself in a Labour Party election.

The Telegraph gets stuck into the Labour leadership election

This is made possible by the rules adopted for the election of a new leader to replace Ed Miliband. The old system gave massive weight to the voice of the Trade Unions, which is what gave us Ed Miliband in the first place. This time round every member of the party has exactly one vote (“one member one vote”, as the system is accurately if not imaginatively called).

To accommodate the many trade unionists who are Labour supporters but not Party members, a special category has been created which allows such people to register and, on payment of £3, take part in the election.

The Telegraph has decided to urge Tories to register themselves as Labour supporters and vote for the most left-leaning of the candidates, Jeremy Corbyn. This is because it has rightly decided that Corbyn would stand no chance of winning a general election. Indeed, the paper believes that as leader, he would bury the Party for good.

No one younger than their late forties will have been particularly aware of politics the last time the Labour Party elected a leader from the Left. This was Michael Foot, in the early eighties. Foot was one of the gentlest, most tolerant and most intelligent of leaders the Party has ever had. An expert on Jonathan Swift, he could be regularly seen in the British Library researching the author of Gulliver’s Travels, when he might have been in the House of Commons.

That gentle soul was crucified by the right-wing press. On one occasion he turned up for the annual ceremony commemorating British war dead in a duffle coat. He was mercilessly hounded in the media, as though what mattered in a potential British Prime Minister was his willingness to dress conventionally.

In 1983, Foot led the Party to crushing defeat by the Tories under Margaret Thatcher. The Party took fewer votes than at any other election since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, although there has been much heart searching about the disastrous election result earlier this year, the 1983 results were nearly 900,000 votes worse.

The depth of the disaster was due in large part to a massive, radically left-wing manifesto which has come to be known as the longest suicide note in history. It is a measure of the capacity for self-delusion of certain people on the far left – not I think Michael Foot, who was far more of a realist – that another veteran of that wing, Tony Benn, described the result as a major success for socialism.

Michael Foot and Tony Benn
Didn't work out so well as we might have liked

His argument was that never before had eight and a half million people voted for so strongly socialist a manifesto. To Benn it was apparently irrelevant that nearly 21 million had voted against, 13 million of them for the Tories. And as a result one of the most radical right wing governments we have seen was elected with a massive parliamentary majority.

The Daily Telegraph may be obnoxious and unprincipled, but it’s not stupid. It has realise that Jeremy Corbyn as leader would be as disastrous for Labour today as Michael Foot was 35 years ago. It’s a lesson Labour members need to bear in mind. Corbyn may be the choice of many activists, as Foot was. He does not appeal to the floating voters we need to attract back to us, any more than Foot did. To elect Corbyn is self-indulgent and it plays into the hands of the Telegraph and its ilk.

So who should we choose?

I recently listened to Liz Kendall, one of the other candidates, and heard her describe herself, unprompted, as a “fiscal conservative”. We have plenty of those in office at the moment, within the Conservative Party. It’s also beginning to feel as though across Europe, a movement is starting in reaction to the austerity politics such figures represent. In Greece, of course, in Spain too, in Scotland, even in Germany, where protestors have been taking to the streets against the behaviour of their own government towards the Greeks.

It also seems likely that austerity politics may begin to hurt wider sections of the British population who escaped relatively unscathed during the last five years. As they lose faith in the economic policies of the present government, it would seem unfortunate if all we could say to them was “the fiscal conservatism of this government has failed; now give our version of fiscal conservatism a try.”

That leaves only two candidates, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper. Both are former ministers, and therefore arguably damaged goods, tainted by their association with the Blair-Brown governments. They are also highly experienced, intelligent politicians. Do they have the courage to take the country in the direction it needs to go? I don’t know. But I do know there is no fifth candidate.

Cooper or Burnham may not be the most inspiring of choices. But neither would take us in the direction of the wilderness of 1983, or into the embrace of the very policies that are failing in the government we oppose.

Avoiding either of those alternatives strikes me as vital if we are to give Labour another chance. And the Telegraph the comeuppance it deserves.

An honourable man who restores faith in politics

I know there are many people who regularly get up at 6:00 in the morning, and I have a great deal of admiration for them. For me, however, it’s one of those purgatorial experiences that I usually associate only with the pain of an early-morning swim. People keep assuring me that such swims do me a lot of good, and I believe them, though given the way it feels, that does take quite an act of faith.

Today, however, I was up at that time of day without fear a cold wetting. Two friends had invited me to attend a Rotary Club breakfast.

Now I love doing things I’ve always sworn I’d never do. Wear a tie. Work in business. Live in Luton. There’s a kind of perverse enjoyment in breaking my vows to myself. I never actually swore never to have anything to do with the Rotary Club but I’m convinced that if anyone had suggested, even a few years ago, that I’d attend one of their events, I’d have laughed in their faces. But when invited by friends I admire as well as like? Of course I went.

In any case, the guest speaker was worth getting up for. He’s the kind of man who can single-handedly restore one’s faith in politics and make one realise that it can be an honourable profession.

He’s not my MP, as I live in Luton South, but he represents the constituency next door, Luton North. His name’s Kelvin Hopkins and he impressed me. Now, I may be in the same party as he is (the Labour Party – of course – what other?) but that doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with everything he says. His mentor in politics was the late Tony Benn, and Benn often infuriated me.

Kelvin Hopkins MP, outside the Palace of Westminster
It was well worth meeting him. And highly refreshing.

For instance, I’m not as keen as Hopkins on renationalisation of the railways. I remember the old British Rail, and my memories are far from uniformly fond. I see no reason to rush back to those far from good old days. On the other hand, I certainly agree that the State should have the right to compete for rail franchises and, when it runs one superbly following the failure of not one but two private companies, as happened on the East Coast line, it should be left to go on running it.

What I liked about Hopkins, however, was his attitude. He talked about his own school days when, as someone from a relatively prosperous background, he would turn up in class comfortably dressed and properly fed, and perform well, for which he would be rewarded. Classmates turned up hungry and dressed in rags, underperformed, and were punished for it.

“Being punished for being unfortunate,” according to Hopkins, is simply unacceptable. And it is that kind of conviction, he told us, that drives him in politics.

Nor was it only his general principles that impressed me. Hopkins also behaves at a personal level in a way that deserves respect. Even the arch-Conservative Daily Telegraph called him a “saint”, when it emerged during the recent parliamentary expenses scandal that hadn’t fiddled anything.

In his own view, however, Hopkins had done nothing saintly. He had merely behaved as “an ordinary human being”. The message struck me powerfully: how low have we sunk when ordinary behaviour seems saintly to us?

What I’m sure about is that listening to him left me feeling that politics could, and should, be both clean and admirable.

That was worth getting up at 6:00 for. It left me feeling much better. Without even involving a plunge into cold water.

Indian Independence, and how it helped free Britain

Richard Lederer, in his Anguished English, quotes a student who believed that the sun never set on the British Empire because the Empire was in the East, and the sun sets in the West.

An American, the Revered W. B. Brown, suggested that the sun never set on the British Empire because God didn’t trust the Brits in the dark.

Both statements have some merit. 

We’re all watching blood-curdling events unfolding in the Middle East at the moment, as Islamic State militants terrorise their region to build themselves a new country that crosses the recognised borders of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. But where did those borders come from? Why, from the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. In the middle of World War One and without even waiting to beat the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the British, represented by Sir Mark Sykes, signed a secret agreement on how to divide up Turkish possessions in the Levant with the no more trustworthy French, represented by François Georges-Picot.

Sharing out the spoils of the Ottoman Empire

In other words, a lot of blood is being spilled today because of a devious deal brokered by the British and their fellow conspirators. It seems that letting them operate away from scrutiny was never a good idea. It was indeed wiser to keep the Empire in the sunlight.

As for its Eastern nature, it’s true that the main centre of the British Empire, the jewel in its crown,  was India. While I was preparing my recent Countdown to War series, it was curious to read a 1914 Manchester Guardian reference to Britain as an “Asiatic power”. It seems a strange notion today, but back then the possession of India and its other Far Eastern holdings, certainly made Britain an Asiatic power and a major one at that.

The fact that the Empire was best not left unsupervised meant that being a British colony was hardly a matter for self-congratulation in India. Just how serious a misfortune it was is perhaps best illustrated by the events surrounding the ending of that status. 

Rather than leaving India to the Indians, and allowing them to sort out their internal difficulties, including sectarian ones, Britain partitioned the country first. So the Muslim majority areas were hived off, eventually forming Pakistan, even to the extent of giving that country two separate wings with 1600 km of Indian territory between them.

To ensure that an independent India could not block the partition, Pakistan was granted its independence a day earlier. India was faced with a done deal, which it was forced to accept despite fighting four wars with its neighbour to undo it.

Partition also sparked the world’s largest migrations, involving some ten million people. Hindus and Sikhs moved from Pakistan to India and Muslims travelled the other way. Conflicts between the groups left anywhere between 200,000 and a million dead. Eventually the two wings of Pakistan fell out, and a short but destructive war led to East Pakistan winning independence as Bangladesh.

Refugees on the move as a result of Indian partition

And yet, was there any point in partition? There are more Muslims in India today than there are in Pakistan. They are one of the many disadvantaged minorities of the world’s largest democracy. Had the Muslims of Pakistan and Bangladesh remained inside India, sheer numbers might have ensured better treatment for such a large minority. It would also have spared the world the creation of two failed or failing states.

Kipling and his ilk thought of the British presence in India as shouldering the white man’s burden. It strikes me that the burden was British and it was carried by the Indians. Except maybe that by imposing it on the Indians, we in Britain bound ourselves to keeping our country authoritarian and imperialistic, to our own loss. I remember the late Tony Benn, the radical Labour MP, describing England as the last colony of the British Empire. So the independence of India was the beginning of a process to free us from our self-imposed yoke too.

The White Man's Burden: the question is, who was carrying it?

That’s why today, 15 August, I celebrate the 67th anniversary of Indian independence with my glass raised to my many Indian friends and colleagues. I wish them enjoyment today and prosperity in the future.

And breathe a sigh of relief that, however Eurosceptic it may be, my homeland has at last accepted that it is a second-tier European state, and not an Asiatic power with global reach.

Jawaharlal Nehru's first address as Prime Minister of an independent India

Even though, with a few islands scattered round the globe, technically the sun still doesn’t set on the British Empire...

Hobsbawm and freeing England from colonialism

Every now and then I read of the death of a public figure that touches me more than others. 

I was particularly sorry to learn that Eric Hobsbawm had died. He was an outstanding historian and a fine political thinker; in the course of a distinguished career he collected many honours, one of them that of becoming President of Birkbeck College where he taught and where, unbeknown to him, I also spent most of my student career.

It was at Birkbeck that I attended a public meeting which took the unusual form of an interview: Hobsbawm questioning (none too aggressively) Tony Benn.

Now Benn is someone I find it easy to disagree with. He has a way of adopting simplistic radical positions which maintain his reputation as the champion of the left of the Labour Party, without the slightest danger of ever being called on to put any of them into practice. Besides, I always remember his time as Energy Secretary when he caved in to commercial pressure from the US to introduce a new generation of highly questionable nuclear power stations.

Even so, in that interview Benn came out with one statement of great elegance and simplicity which, in my view, summarises a vital truth: ‘the last colony of the British Empire,’ he said, ‘will be England’.

It’s a thought that has come back to me many times down the years. For instance, when Maggie Thatcher won her first landslide victory on the back of the Falklands campaign. When she insisted on banning the voices, though not the words, of Sinn Fein leaders from British radio or television. When she reacted with undisguised contempt to the initiatives of other heads of government in the European Union. It all seemed to suggest that Britain was somehow a different kind of country, more powerful and influential than our continental partners.

And Benn had spoken of ‘England’, which was right too. In the other parts of the United Kingdom there seemed to be a greater readiness to accept that our imperial role was over and that we had to carve ourselves a new one, as a middling power, with a better chance of moulding world events as part of a bigger grouping such as the EU.

Then we had the election of Tony Blair and the first fully post-World War II generation took the helm. His government incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic legislation. It granted devolved powers to the other nations of the UK. It brought in a freedom of information act. Would he free the last colony from the thrall of British imperialism?

Next came Afghanistan and Iraq, and all that stuff about the special relationship with the US. Not that I think our relationship with the US isn’t special: it is. Unfortunately, the US relationship with us isn’t.

We were still trying to punch above our weight, still trying to be a world power.

Another country suffering from the illusion that it can indulge imperial pretensions is our closest neighbour, France. So it was interesting to be at a wedding on Saturday, in a tiny village in the Moselle department of Lorraine (and I stress that Lorraine, like Alsace, is in France not Germany). The town hall contained a little bouquet of French flags, a common sight in France and rather an attractive way of treating the national colours.

The traditional bouquet of French flags

In another niche there was another bouquet: 

A more surprising but heartening collection of European flags

European colours had been given equal prominence to those of France.

If the mayor of a village in deepest France can see that the country’s future lies with the other countries of the continent, then it seems to me that the distorting effects of an imperial tradition are gradually beginning to fade on that side of the Channel.

In England, however, as David Cameron rattles his sabre over Syria, we still have some way to go. On the other hand, that public meeting chaired by Eric Hobsbawm only took place just over three decades ago. England likes to make haste slowly. Who knows, in a few more decades it too may free itself of the imperial yoke.

In the meanwhile, I feel I owe a tribute to the man who helped open my eyes to the problem in the first place. His death has reminded me that I need to do what I can to contribute to the solution. Which is perhaps the best tribute I can pay him. 

National decline? Could be a lot better than the alternative

It’s a curious fact that’s not well known outside Sweden that one of its Kings spent time as a prisoner of the Turks.

Is this just something you might find useful in a pub quiz? Bear with me: it’s more relevant to our lives than you might imagine.

I was born into a nation in decline, in so far as power on the world scene defines what a nation is really about. As a child I admired stamps with the Queen’s head on them, marked ‘Gold Coast’, but overprinted ‘Ghana’. That’s how recent the loss of Britain’s dominance in Africa was. Our atlases at school, a little out of date as all good school atlases always are, still showed great tracts of the world in pink to identify them as British possessions.

As a student I heard the radical politician Tony Benn qualify England as the last colony of the British Empire. Unusually for Benn, he was spot on in that judgement: we lived in England as though we were the core of an Empire though the imperial dream was all but over. Dreams can often be nightmares, and in those days we had one more to go through, a colonial war as vicious and cruel as those we fought, in my lifetime, in Malaya, Kenya, Aden or Cyprus: the low-intensity but heartbreakingly drawn out conflict in Northern Ireland.

England stopped being the last imperial possession only in 1997 with the formation of its first post-colonial government, made up predominantly of people with no direct connection with the Second World War, the final great combat into which Britain led its Empire. It was no coincidence that it was this government that brought peace to Northern Ireland, a legacy for which Tony Blair would have been admired for generations and of which he could have been justly proud, had he not rather spoiled it by launching into a new military adventure in the Middle East.

As it waned over the decades, there was a constant refrain that Britain ‘punched above its weight’, an admission that its weight was no longer what it had been. The wealthiest nation in the world in the mid-nineteenth century was by the late twentieth an also-ran economically – well behind not just the United States but also Japan and Germany, the defeated powers of the Second World War, and even at different times behind France and Italy (the latter talked with great pride of ‘Il Sorpasso’, the overtaking – it was short lived but dramatic while it lasted).

The subject of decline is once again in the news. In part this reflects the success of the film The King’s Speech. The film is brilliantly written, directed and performed; it gives a powerful insight into life-distorting disability and the value of friendship in overcoming it. To enjoy it you have, however, to forget about certain uncomfortable historic facts over which the film draws a veil, such as George VI’s appalling attitude towards the Jews of Germany.

A great part of the film’s success in this country is down to nostalgia. To many people the film evokes a time of glory when things were better than they are today. They forget that for the few pukka sahibs on their elephants, or district commissioners determining the fate of thousands of African villagers from their folding tables under the baobab trees, or the white-suited gents in Raffles bar being treated with the deference due to Englishmen from mere natives, there were millions at home struggling with unemployment, thousands on the Jarrow hunger marches, millions more forced to give up their lives in two world wars to settle other and much wealthier men’s quarrels.

The price of national grandeur.

Which takes back to the Swedish King.

Charles XII reigned over Sweden when it was one of the Great Powers of Europe. To defend and extend his possessions, Charles waged wars in Poland, Germany and Russia. Against the Russian Tsar he fought his way all the way down to Poltava in modern day Ukraine, a hell of a sight closer to the Black Sea than to the Baltic, in a classic campaign of overseas imperial ambition.

It was massively overblown ambition. He was crushingly defeated and had to flee into exile in the Ottoman Empire, in modern-day Moldova. He was treated with respect and the Ottoman court subsidised his lavish lifestyle until his constant political intriguing and the conflict between his readiness to incur debts with local traders and his reluctance to pay them, led to serious trouble and soon he found himself in Constantinople under house arrest.

Get a map out. Locate Stockholm. Locate Istanbul. And wonder.

He got around, that Charles

Eventually he made it back to Sweden, crossing the continent on horseback in fifteen days, which was going some. He limited his further campaigns to giving the Norwegians a bad time, unsuccessfully on both attempts, the second of which cost him his life.

Now came the moment of key Swedish genius. The politicians met and took a decision that this whole imperial adventure had been a terrible waste of time, lives and treasure. The game simply wasn’t worth the candle. Sweden consciously chose to give it up for ever.

So they went through a process of decolonising themselves, just as we’re having to in Britain. And need to in France. Maybe even in Spain and Germany. And – dare I say it – will relatively soon be forced to in the United States too.

No doubt the Swedes had their moments of nostalgia as we did, with books, poems and paintings harking back to a mythical golden age where we have films. And why not? A little nostalgia isn’t a bad thing, as long as you don’t indulge in it too much or confuse it with anything that really matters.

Nostalgia for glory: the battle of Poltava imagined 17 years later

Above all Sweden concentrated on the slow process that would eventually make it what it is today, a society in which those who most need it are properly looked after, where religions coexist, where schools are equipped for teaching and hospitals for delivering care.

Funnily enough, we in Britain have moved that way too since the imperial pretensions eased, but we’ve got a long way to go yet. In the most brutal economic terms, Sweden has GDP per head of nearly $48,000, Britain some $36,000.

The lesson? Remember the glory of Charles XII. Make and enjoy films about him. But if you’re sensible, when you get out of the cinema, emulate his successors and not him. They understood that the important thing is to get a life.

Things are so much more fun when you do.