Mould events. Or watch them pass you by.

With hindsight, William Yale, the main US intelligence agent in the Middle East during World War 1, would criticise the reaction of his President, Woodrow Wilson, to major events. The winner isn’t:

…he who waits to act at some dramatic crisis, but he who consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events. President Wilson and his advisors never seemed to realise this simple truism.

I couldn’t help smiling as I read those words, in Scott Anderson’s excellent book Lawrence in Arabia, since they struck such a bell. Last week, the British Prime Minister Theresa May had to pull a vote in the House of Commons on the Brexit deal she’d spent two years negotiating with the European Union, because it was obvious she was going to lose and lose massively. She wasn’t so much in retreat as in precipitous flight.

Theresa May in the House of Commons
Admitting defeat, in her very attempt to dodge it,
by pulling the Brexit deal vote

Such a government rout would normally present an Opposition with a golden opportunity, to make a bid for office itself. Many of us were, therefore, surprised that Jeremy Corbyn, who as leader of the Labour Party also leads the official opposition, declined to take the obvious next step and propose a vote of no confidence in the government. He said he wanted to wait for the ‘appropriate moment’ to do so.

That seems to mean waiting until the Democratic Unionist Party, with ten MPs, turned its back on Theresa May and committed to vote with the no confidence motion. In other words, he wanted to wait until he could be sure of winning.

Let’s step back over forty years, to 5 April 1976, when Jim Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson as Labour leader and Prime Minister.

With the promised support of the then-Liberal Party (today the Liberal Democrats), Callaghan enjoyed a majority in the House of Commons. He was fairly secure against a no-confidence motion. Besides, a new Prime Minister – you might think he deserved a bit of a honeymoon.

Thatcher gave him just two months.

On 9 June 1976, she brought a no confidence motion against his government.

With his majority, Callaghan could, of course, see it off. She lost by 290 votes against 309. Close, but still a defeat. Many might have dismissed her, feeling that she’d overreached and failed, proving poor judgement.

But that wasn’t the lesson she learned from the experience. Instead, a little over nine months later, on 23 March 1977 she tried again, and was beaten again. Indeed, this time, the margin was even bigger: 298 to 322.

What was she playing at? Let’s be clear: I found Thatcher a bigoted, ruthless, often cruel Prime Minister. But she was an effective politician. Those two failed attacks issued a clear statement of intent: she was going to harry Callaghan and keep on harrying him until she beat him. She was saying, not just to MPs but to the electorate as a whole, that she was serious about taking the top office herself. That displayed qualities much admired by voters: toughness, guts and tenacity.

Finally, in 1978 the Liberals withdrew their support for Callaghan’s government. That’s the equivalent of what Corbyn’s waiting for from the DUP: the withdrawal of support by a small but crucial partner. So Thatcher came back to the attack again. She brought her third no-confidence motion on 28 March 1979. And this time she pulled off the trick, beating him in what became a famous photo finish: 311 votes to 310. Just one vote. And it was enough to bring down his government.

A general election was held in May, which the Conservatives comprehensively won, and Thatcher was in office for eleven years. The Tories, indeed, through her and her successor John Major, were in power for eighteen.

The only no confidence motion she won was in 1979. And even then, there was no guarantee of victory. After all, she scraped through by just one vote. By the Corbyn definition, that made it only barely an ‘appropriate moment’. But she pressed ahead anyway, as she had twice before in the previous three years, though the moments then were so inappropriate that she lost.

The defeats didn’t stop her. Because she moulded events rather than waiting for them to turn favourable to her. Like her or dislike her – and I don’t like her at all – she was undeniably one of those who, in William Yale’s words, ‘consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events’. The reward was eighteen years of rule by her party.

Corbyn’s waiting for events to come to his rescue.

Where Thatcher got stuck in, as a player in the game, and flourished, he’s sitting on the sidelines. Inviting history to sideline him.

Trump and Wolff: a fine tradition of obtuse authoritarianism

Excellent. I’ve taken delivery of my copy of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. 

My Kindle edition of Fire and Fury
Now I'll decide whether or not I read it, not some tinpot autocrat

I previously had little intention of buying it, and couldn’t have until next week anyway, but Donald Trump’s attempts to block publication made purchasing the book more attractive and brought the launch date forward.

Thus we rush more quickly to our fate by lashing out against it…

This experience evokes a strong sense of nostalgia in me. In 1987, during the heady days of the height of Maggie Thatcher’s power, she was more inclined than ever to indulge in spasms of complete battiness. One concerned a rather bad book, Spycatcher by a certain Peter Wright, formerly of the spook service MI5.

Maggie decided that the book represented a security threat to our fine kingdom. She seems not to have cottoned on to the obvious fact that anything the book contained would have been known by our then principal foes in Moscow, probably well before Wright had got around to writing it down.

She set out to ban publication of the book. Since her writ never ran quite as far as she would have liked – which would have been worldwide (at least) – she was only able to block UK publication.

The result was glorious: the book could be bought anywhere in the world, including in Moscow, but not in Britain. You might almost have wondered whether Thatcher was trying to prevent her own electorate reading about the ineptitude of some of our spies, rather than trying to protect secrets from the Soviet Union.

I wasn’t particularly tempted to read the book, but I was damned if the iron lady was going to stop me. I persuaded a friend in the US to buy a copy and mail it to me, which he kindly did. As it happens, I didn’t read the blessed book for years and when I did, I found it turgid and unconvincing. I struggled to finish it. But at least, I’d made it my choice, and not Maggie’s, whether I read it or not.

The point of this story is that Maggie’s fixation with banning the book turned an obscure third-rate work into a worldwide publishing sensation. Just as Trump’s rantings against Fire and Fury have taken the book from 48,449th on Amazon’s list to the number 1 spot.

By the way he has tried to block a book that claims he’s unfit for office, Trump has demonstrated just the kind of incompetence that makes the case against him. In fact, his reaction to the book condemns him far more powerfully than the book itself possibly could: it no longer matters if the book is entirely false, his reaction to it is authentic and visible to anyone. At least, to anyone with the eyes to see. 

There’s nothing new about any of this.

Nearly three centuries ago, Voltaire spent three years exiled in England. Such was his talent, he not only learned English, he mastered it well enough to write a book in the language, a book that sparkles with humour and provocative insights. His Letters on the English would have made the King of France as apoplectic as Trump is over Wolff – only in the French case, most of his officials would have agreed.

The English are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established that wise Government where the Prince is all-powerful to do good, and, at the same time, is restrained from committing evil.

Resisting Kings? Restraining their freedom to act? Oh, no, Louis XV would have taken a distinctly dim view.

There was worse still.

An Englishman, as one to whom liberty is natural, may go to heaven his own way.

What? There might be a way to heaven that didn’t go through the one true Church? The clergy would have been as incensed as the King.

No wonder Voltaire didn’t publish.

Well, at first he didn’t. But it must have gnawed at him to have a book that good mouldering in a bottom drawer. He gave in to temptation. He published, though only in English.

Still. Voltaire’s natural audience was his countrymen. Could he bear to deny them something that would enhance his reputation so forcefully?

It seems, naughty boy, he’d prepared a translation and adaption which he called the Lettres Philosophiques. And he let a printer see them. And then another. And then, for good measure, a third. Under strict instructions not to publish.

But they could see how well the book would sell. And when they discovered that others held the manuscript they began to fear that one of the other two would publish it first, creaming the most profitable part of a lucrative market.

Eventually, the book appeared. Without the permission legally required, a permission the authorities would certainly not have granted anyway. And Voltaire was in trouble – worse trouble than Michael Wolff because eighteenth-century France had few restraints on the power of the authorities to make their displeasure painfully known. Trump might envy them their unbridled authority but he doesn’t have it.

Voltaire’s friends got him away from Paris and into the deepest provinces. Eventually they persuaded the powers-that-were to leave him alone, on condition he stayed there, kept quiet and behaved himself.

But something had to be punished, if only for the form of the thing. So the authorities seized a copy and condemned it to be shredded and burned on the steps of the Palace of Justice. A sentence that was carried out in all its brutality.

Except that – actually, it wasn’t. The public executioner could spot a market opportunity as well as anyone else. In his hands was a first edition of the Lettres Philosophiques, a book that was selling (clandestinely) like hot cakes. He was going to burn it? Not a chance.

He substituted some inoffensive and far less marketable text for shredding and burning. Keeping the Voltaire work as a nice little nest egg for later.

Three centuries ago it was clear that obtuse autocrats trying to prohibit a provocative book would only make it more attractive and enhance its sales.

Louis XV was an obtuse autocrat. Clearly, we have another such in the White House today. As Michael Wolff points out, “not only is he helping me sell books, but he’s helping me prove the point of the book”.

I doubt Wolff’s book will be as good as Voltaire’s. But it belongs to the same fine tradition. It’s in that spirit that I’ve bought it.

And I, rather than Trump, will decide whether I read it or not.

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.

Do you believe the NHS is safe with the Tories? How Thatcher's behaviour exposed that lie

“The NHS is safe with us,” Thatcher told the nation – well, the Tory Party Conference, but we were all listening – in 1982.

It can take some time – in this case, over three decades – but eventually the truth will out, and the lie is exposed. At least, if you have a newspaper as effective as the Guardian to do the exposing.

It was three years ago that we discovered from papers published under the thirty-year rule, that back then Thatcher’s government had considered a proposal to end free Higher Education and to introduce vouchers to pay for school education, freeze benefits and, most toxic of all, to overthrow the founding principle of the NHS that healthcare should be free at the point of care, replacing the service by one based on insurance. As the paper containing the proposal pointed out, “This would of course mean the end of the National Health Service.”

As quoted in the Guardian: the killer phrase in the 1982 proposals

In her memoirs, Thatcher said, “I was horrified when I saw this paper. I pointed out that it would almost certainly be leaked and give a totally false impression … It was all a total nonsense.”

The government dropped the proposals after what her then Energy Secretary, Nigel Lawson, described as “the nearest thing to a cabinet riot in the history of the Thatcher administration.”

What has now emerged, from newly-published Treasury papers of her then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, is that Thatcher didn’t give up on the proposals herself but kept working on them with him. As he noted, “the prime minister has arranged a series of meetings with the main spending ministers to discuss the follow-up to the discussion in cabinet” on the proposals. Among other things, the discussions were to look into replacing some public services by “more efficient alternatives from the private sector.”

If Thatcher was horrified, it was clearly about the fact that the ideas “would almost certainly be leaked” rather than about the ideas themselves.

Now roll on thirty or more years.

There has been constantly extending privatisation of health services in England with little evidence that they provide better quality. In fact, they don’t even seem to be able to generate levels of profit that would persuade the private companies to keep delivering them – several major contracts have already had to be cancelled.

Meanwhile the NHS is facing an unprecedented level of financial crisis. The 2015/16 year was the second in a row which saw the service in England in deficit – and with three times the level as the year before. The much respected health think tank, the King’s Fund, comments:

The scale of the aggregate deficit makes it clear that overspending is largely not attributable to mismanagement in individual organisations – instead it signifies a health system buckling under the strain of huge financial and operational pressures. The recent strategy of driving efficiencies by cutting the tariff has placed disproportionate strain on providers and is no longer sustainable.

That reference to a “recent strategy” reveals that the problem has been caused by deliberate policy. The government is putting the NHS “under the strain of huge financial and operational pressures”. Unbearable strain, you might say. .

Is this an unfortunate consequence of a misguided policy? Or is it merely the continuation by other means of an approach already launched scouted over three decades ago by Thatcher? An approach that would necessarily lead to “the end of the National Health Service”?

It hardly matters how we answer those questions. What’s clear is that the notion that the “NHS is safe” with the Tories is just sand in the eyes of those too tired or too greedy to resist their propaganda.

Why, you might as reasonably believe that Tories will keep the poor safe.

Betrayal, obscurity, radicalism, disaster: the various models of British government facing Britain today

It’s a hallmark of the political left that its failures often take the form of betrayals.

That’s not surprising. After all, the left is there to speak for the little man against the master class. But, however much we may resent his power, we all tend to admire the master – perhaps Freud would prefer the word father – so we often end up seeking his approbation at least as earnestly as we oppose his authority.

That was Tony Blair through and through. He wanted to oppose the British Conservative Party, but wanted to win their grudging admiration as he beat them. He needed to show, for instance, that he was capable of being at least as patriotic, at least as warlike in his patriotism, as they were. So he’s left a legacy which, despite its many and striking achievements – on child poverty, on healthcare, on human rights – will forever be overshadowed by his catastrophic war in Iraq. A war he waged with overwhelming support from the Conservatives, and against widespread opposition in his own party and across the nation.

That betrayal was only the second worst in Labour history, however. The greatest was carried out by the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. A fine radical figure and even a pacifist, he began to show that fatal desire to be approved by the establishment when he agreed to wear pompous (and expensive) court dress in order to be presented to the King. A trivial matter, but an important symbol: he showed his willingness to bow down, for all his radicalism, to the master and his (allegedly) quaint customs.

Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister
But the smiles would later turn to tears

The truly substantial betrayal came in 1931. 

Facing a crisis as we did in 2009, he decided, as the present Conservative government has, to tackle it through austerity. That meant cutting spending, including unemployment benefit at a time when unemployment was rocketing; that wasn’t a policy Labour could back, so he formed a so-called National government in coalition with the Tories. Only he and two others of his Ministers joined the new government, however, and it was dominated by the Tories. The 1931 general election saw the Labour Party reduced to just fifty seats in parliament.

With the right, in Britain at least, things tend to be different. You get three kinds of Tory government: the ones which do nothing much at all, just widespread meanness without vision; the ones that leave a deplorable mark in history; and the third kind which are even meaner than the first, but with spectacular success.

Maggie Thatcher is the iconic figure for that last kind of Tory. If you were gay, if you were a miner, if you were poor, if you were a trades unionist, you could expect nothing but the cruellest treatment from her. Why, even if you were Nelson Mandela, you only received contempt. But she did it all with style, with ruthless determination, and she achieved a great many of her objectives. 

Far too many.

The first kind of Conservative is represented by figures who have drifted into well-deserved obscurity. Stanley Baldwin, for instance, who joined the so-called National Government under MacDonald, and emerged as the openly Conservative Prime Minister in 1935. No one remembers much about him, but his time in office was marked by such events as the Jarrow hunger march. It protested against a state in which cities in the North of England had unemployment rates of 70%. Britain was the hub of a great Empire, but had citizens dying of starvation.

Baldwin was followed by the man who is the prime example of the disastrous Tory, Neville Chamberlain. He signed the agreement with Hitler which he claimed would guarantee “peace in our time.” World War 2 broke out a year later. When he presented the agreement to parliament and Arthur Greenwood, deputising for the absent Labour leader Clement Attlee, rose to reply in a House of Commons silent with shame at the government’s cravenness, Leo Amery cried out from the Conservative benches, “speak for England, Arthur.” Such was the depth of the humiliation that even Tory supporters of a Tory government had to call on Labour to reassert some pride.

Why is any of this interesting today?

We have a radical leading the Labour Party. But many among his parliamentary colleagues are mired in the belief that we still need to win the approval of their masters. So who will win? Will he stand firm against the failures of the Tory representatives of that master class and continue to reject what they stand for? Or will he be brought down and replaced by another Ramsay MacDonald?

On the other side, the question is more about what type of Tory government we’re looking at. It certainly won’t be the Thatcher kind. After five years in a coalition administration, and nearly a year on their own, there’s no sign of any great radical act to mark its tenure. Today these Tories look like Baldwins: nasty, but without either courage or conviction. They have, on the other hand, put themselves in a position where they have to hold a referendum on British membership of the European Union, probably later this year. That could well lead to the disastrous outcome of Britain leaving.

In the Middle East, they’re to be pursuing the same Blair approach of reliance on military muscle – and we know where that got us in Iraq.

Baldwins, so far, then. But it looks as though they may be setting out on a different course. Could they be about to turn into Chamberlains after all?

Cameron's great reforming decade

It’s heartwarming to start 2016 with the stirring words of David Cameron ringing in my ears.

According to his New Year message, Britain is living through “one of the great reforming decades” of our history.

We’ve had great reforming eras before. Attlee’s post-War Labour government launched the National Health Service and put in place a welfare state. In the sixties, we saw Labour back under Harold Wilson and making changes that would revolutionise the way we live: doing away with the death penalty for murder, ending the legal prohibition of homosexuality, massively extending access to education. And then, in 1997, we had a Labour government which, despite the Iraq War tarnish Tony Blair gave it, notched up some remarkable achievements: the human rights act provided Britain with the closest thing to a fundamental law in its history, while the introduction of a minimum wage was matched by outstanding levels of investment in the NHS. The government took millions out of childhood poverty and brought peace to Northern Ireland.

If your preference is for the Tory version of reform, there were the Thatcher years too. We had section 28 to demonise homosexuality again, the deregulation of business that allowed unregulated banks to punish us all for their irresponsibility in the 2008 crash, and the crushing of the unions to give us today’s zero-hour contracts and non-living wages.

So what are the great reforms that Cameron has ushered in? Well, there was gay marriage, and we shouldn’t underestimate that change. On the other hand, the first breakthrough came with the introduction of civil partnerships, under a reforming Labour government, in 2004. In the next year or two, we may have a major decision to take over membership of the European Union, but that will lead either to no change at all, or to a regression to pre-1975 isolationism.

Apart from that, what have we had? Five years, now extending to six, of austerity economics. The effect has been of slowly extending hardship across the least well off in society. Less support for the working poor. Severe cuts to assistance to the ill. An onslaught against the unemployed. And, of course, the slow strangulation of the NHS as hospital after hospital goes into the red.

A monument to Cameron's achievement: homelessness growing again

These policies are intended to serve what Cameron presumably views as his big idea: the elimination of the “structural deficit” in government spending (structural deficit is a slightly easier form of deficit to cut than the actual deficit) and the reduction of public debt. However, what he described as the “legacy of debt” Gordon Brown had left to our children in 2010, had grown by well over half as much again by 2015. That’s because progress has been minimal over the deficit – it’s been pain without gain.

Indeed, in October 2015 the deficit reached its highest level since 2009, at the time of the crash.

Not much sign of a major, dramatic turn for the better there then. Nothing to compare with legalising homosexuality or even privatising the railways. Instead all we see is a general greying of society, a growing meanness as those already least comfortable in their lives are made to suffer more, while those imposing the misery retreat into their increasingly valuable houses and shut the door on what’s happening outside.

Perhaps we shouldn’t pay too much attention to Cameron’s notion of a reforming decade. Instead we should focus on the beginning of his messages and the words, “for me, there are no new year’s resolutions, just the resolve to continue delivering what we promised in our manifesto.” That sounds much more like him, doesn’t it? For “no resolutions” read “no ideas, no commitments.” For “continue delivering what we promised” read “we’ll go on with the policies that have failed for the last half decade, and once again miss our objectives.”

A decade of reform? Sounds more like another five years of increasing squalor and low achievement. Rather like the years under Stanley Baldwin's Tory government. If you've never heard of him, or can't think of any of his achievements – well, that would be precisely my point.

Still. Happy New Year. Let’s make it one in which many more people wake up to the fact that they don’t have to put up with this kind of government for ever.

Thank you, Oliver Letwin, for making Tory views clear

What a fine row has blown up following publication of Cabinet papers from 1985.

The controversy has focused, in particular, on a memo signed by Oliver Letwin and a colleague. It advised the then Prime Minister, Maggie Thatcher, not to respond to that year’s riots by increasing investment in black communities, because the money would be frittered away on the “disco and drug trade.”

Those bright young men apparently viewed the proposal for a £10m communities programme aimed at dealing with inner-city problems, as little more than a means to “subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops”.

Tottenham riots in 1985

To discover that the Tories were racist in 1985 is hardly an earth-shattering revelation. It would be much more interesting to be told that they were still racist today, but we’ll no doubt have to wait a couple of decades or so to have that suspicion confirmed.

What makes this memo interesting is that Oliver Letwin is still firmly in politics, an MP and Minister, and a leading adviser to the present Prime Minister David Cameron, as he was to the Prime Minister back then.

It isn’t even the comments on black communities that I find most interesting. What he has to say about whites is, in many ways, far more illuminating still. He was clear that blacks oughtn’t to benefit from the riots, in particular because “lower-class unemployed white people had lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale.”

What’s so striking about these words is that Letwin clearly meant them as a compliment. It’s a good thing, in his world view, for people to accept life in “appalling slums.” They know their place, no doubt, and don’t disturb their betters by complaining to angrily which, in contrast to those nasty black rioters, makes them fine people. Not actually fine enough for a Tory government to want to help them at all, but fine enough to win applause, in a slightly condescending way, from the betters who keep them in their slums and are pleased not to be bothered by them too much.

It’s become something of a commonplace of English politics in recent years to assert that not enough is done for the white working class. There’s a lot of truth in that statement, if it’s taken at surface value – taken to mean exactly what it says. Unfortunately, it’s often code for “we really ought to accommodate the xenophobic and often racist views that certain elements within the white working class express.” Organisations like the far-right UKIP like to draw on that kind of bitterness. Sadly, however, many on the right of the Labour Party would like to counter UKIP by pandering to its anti-immigrant policies.

The approach that would allow Labour to remain true to its roots is quite different. And Letwin’s remarks show us the way. He talks about “lower-class unemployed white people” living in “appalling slums.” What does that suggest for Labour? It points us towards both a positive and a negative message.

The positive message is that we should push forward our commitment to build an economy that doesn’t leave you unemployed, or even unable to live adequately in a job, as happens today. And a commitment to building more, decent, affordable housing so that no one is forced to settle for a dire slum existence.

The negative message? That Letwin has let the cat out of the bag. Labour needs to hammer the point that the Tory Party’s perfectly happy to leave people unemployed, living in squalid slum environments. So if you want Labour to help you out of those conditions – stop voting Tory or UKIP and elect a Labour government to help us all.

Good of Letwin to have made that clear.

George Osborne: being buried by his own poll tax?

Tory proposals to cut tax credits, benefits to help the poorly paid survive, are “a mistake on a par with the poll tax,” according to Gordon Brown.

Brown, Labour Prime Minister until he was defeated in the 2010 General Election, tends to limit his public interventions. So it’s a measure of how important he feels the attack on tax credits is, that he’s spoken up now. And it’s telling that he compares this Tory policy to the poll tax: it was the measure that Thatcher brought in towards the end of her tenure of office, and which ultimately broke her. Unpopular in the country, it wrought consternation among her own members of parliament who saw it could cost them their seats, so they brought her down.

Gordon Brown:
elder statesman denouncing Osborne's onslaught on the poor

There are times when, as Brown suggests, it seems the tax credit cuts may do the same for George Osborne. He’s Chancellor of the Exchequer now, but has aspirations to succeed David Cameron as Prime Minister. An adverse vote by the House of Lords, which usually refrains from reversing decisions of the Commons on financial matters, forced Osborne back to the drawing board on his cuts. But now even Conservatives are questioning whether they’re acceptable, even if introduced more gradually and reduced in scope.

The Parliamentary Select Committee on Work and Pensions, despite its Tory majority, has called on Osborne to consider postponing the cuts for at least a year to consider other options, if he can’t mitigate the effects of the cuts adequately.

And a Tory MP, Stephen McPartland, boycotted a visit by a Treasury Minister and fellow Tory to his constituency this week, because the Minister refused to discuss the cuts. McPartland had calculated that a family on £20,000 a year, well below the median income for the country but well above the lowest, is likely to lose £2000 a year under the proposals. The government maintains that it’s committed to supporting strivers rather than skivers, but this would be a striving family that would suffer a major blow from Osborne’s policies.

When opposition begins to build within the Conservative Party itself, it seems that as well as a rod for backs of the poor, the Chancellor may well be building one for his own. The next election is still years away, and the Tories may weather this storm and suffer no lasting damage from it. But at least they are, for now, being put to the rack for policies which are inflicting real suffering and which they clearly hadn’t thought through.

That’s another parallel with the poll tax. It was a flat rate tax to support local government. Because it was the same for all, it disproportionately hurt the poor, as the tax credit cuts will. And Thatcher didn’t fully think it through: she had reached the point of believing so firmly in her political instincts that she insisted on pressing ahead with the measure, against the advice of most of her entourage. Until she paid the price.

We’ll see whether Osborne is able to show a little more flexibility. Or will pay the same price.

That will depend on whether he presses on with the tax credit changes. Ironically, most of us, including no doubt Gordon Brown, would be delighted to see the payments falling away to zero. Since they are earnings-related, they would wither away as people earned more. Brown would not doubt be keen to see wages rise in that way. Meanwhile, the Tories claim they want to see us becoming a high-wage, low-benefit economy. Indeed, that’s become a slightly monotonous refrain of theirs these days.

Well, raise the wages and the benefits will, automatically and inevitably, fall.

What’s interesting is that Osborne wants to cut the benefits by direct government action. In other words, he doesn’t himself believe in the “high wage” part of his mantra – if wages were rising as he claims to wish, he wouldn’t need to reduce the benefits himself. They would fall of their own accord.

All of which rather suggests he doesn’t believe his own words. In turn, that suggests that no one else should either. And, what’s more, if his proposals turn into his version of the poll tax, and come back to bury him – well, it could hardly happen to a more deserving fellow.

Being principled is great. In the right cause

It’s not enough to have a conscience.

We all tend to respect honesty and principle in politicians. Well, we don’t get that much opportunity to do so, since in the age of spin and soundbites, it’s hard to find a politician that displays much of either. Which perhaps makes us all the more admiring of those who do.

But honesty and principle, like courage, have much in common with a gun: what matters isn’t so much the thing in itself, as where it’s pointing. It would be hard to deny that Margaret Thatcher showed great courage, resolution, pure grit, but she used it to destroy communities up and down the country. Back in 1970, I taught in a mining village in South Yorkshire; today the population has fallen by over a third, and rates of unemployment or invalidity are frighteningly high. The price of the crushed miners’ strike…

Maggie: grit and courage misapplied

I can think of no better example of misapplied honesty and principle, analogous to Thatcher’s misapplication of courage and resolution, than the case of Robert E. Lee. He occupies a place of honour today, for many, as one of the great generals of history, although he fought, indeed became the leading military figure, on the Confederate side in the American Civil War. That’s the defeated side, and generally now felt to be the wrong side (except by a few diehards in the southern US).

That meant he fought on the side of states defined by slavery – it was their one common point – although he called it “a moral and political evil” and personally freed his slaves. He fought against the Union, although he considered the so-called right of states to secede as “idle talk.”

So why did he fight on the slave-holding Secessionists’ side?

His father, “Light Horse Harry” Lee died a disgraced bankrupt, but in his youth he’d been a dashing cavalry commander in the army George Washington led to fight for independence from Britain. The father had claimed “Virginia is my country; her will I obey, however lamentable the fate to which it may subject me.” Virginia came first.

Likewise, Robert Lee, the son, claimed “if the government is disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and save in defence will draw my sword on none.”

So Lee turned down the opportunity to take overall command of the forces of the Union to which he was ostensibly committed, even though it was offered to him not just by a Northerner, the President, Abraham Lincoln, but by the Commanding General of the Army, Winfield Scott – who was a Virginian like Lee. Indeed, another Virginian, George H. Thomas, had a distinguished career as a general on the Union side, and a distant cousin of Lee, Samuel Phillips Lee became an Admiral in the Union navy.

Many admire Lee’s commitment to the principle that he could not fight against his own country, which he saw as being Virginia rather than the United States.

I however have real trouble with that notion. He was undoubtedly a man of conscience, and it’s apparently honourable to live by one’s conscience. But surely the admiration ends when doing so leads to your fighting for two bad causes, secession and slavery, especially if you believe in neither?

Robert E. Lee: principled and honest,
but for the wrong cause – which he didn't even believe in

It’s like Thatcher’s courage. It would have been wonderful, employed in furthering a good cause. it was lamentable when used for a bad one.

It isn’t abstract principle that counts. It’s the concrete application made of it.

Interesting times for the world. Or a Chinese curse at least

What we tend to forget about economics, is that it takes a long time for changes to work their way through. A long time, that is, relative to political careers.

Ronald Reagan, enthusiastically supported and followed by Maggie Thatcher, began to dismantle economic regulation in the 1980s. The process culminated in the repeal of the US regulations (the Glass-Steagall Act) that prevented any individual bank providing both retail functions, such as current accounts or personal loans, as well as much riskier investment services, in 1999. The repeal was initiated by Republicans, but backed by President Clinton, so no party is blameless in this sorry episode.

That means that over nearly twenty years, the structure of regulation that had been set up in the wake of the great crash of 1929, and which had prevented any bank failures in the States for half a century, was deliberately dismantled. Because the process took so long, a lot of people could claim credit for the prosperity apparently generated as a result: Reagan, Bush, Clinton and little Bush in the US, Thatcher, Major and Blair in the UK.

These leaders seemed sound managers of their own nations’ and the world’s economy. But that’s because the eventual consequences of the deregulation were only incubating below the surface. Apparent success was being furthered by a wild drive for increasingly risky financial gambling, building up a mountain of unreal value which had, eventually, to collapse.

In 2008 it did. As a result, in Britain blame for the failure tends to be assigned to Gordon Brown, Prime Minister at the time; in the US, although the crisis began to break at the tail end of the Dubya Bush presidency, Obama was in office as it spiralled out of control, and he had to take the steps needed to restore stability. For which he can then be blamed or praised, depending on taste.

It feels to me as though we’re about to see a similar phenomenon. For over twenty years now, the West has been watching the Chinese economic miracle with amazement. At times when our economies have struggled to grow by 2 or 3%, China has seen growth of nearer 10%, year after year after year. Some economists warned that the rate was too high, and could not be sustained in the long run. Indeed, a time of reckoning would come, when this house of cards too would fall.

If you keep saying that for several years, and the growth just keeps happening, eventually you sound like the boy who cried wolf. A belief becomes established that the good times will continue indefinitely, and that those claiming otherwise are merely doom sayers.

Sadly, the reality is simply that it just takes economic phenomena that long to become manifest. In recent times, we’ve seen increasing signs of weakness in the Chinese economy. There has been a steady decline in growth so that, though still high by Western standards, it has now fallen to around the 7% level (though some suspect that the true figure is lower: facts aren’t always easy to come by in China). The trend is firmly downwards.

Economic Growth in China: the International Monetary Fund view

In the last few months, there have been interest rate adjustments, share suspensions and now, for two days in succession, devaluations of the currency (the first of them trumpeted as a “one-off” measure).

It’s beginning to feel as though the wheels may be coming off the bus, as some economists were warning years ago. Once again, we have been lulled into false security by the fact that such processes take so long. Once they start to unravel, they can slide fast and be acutely painful for a long time – look at Greece.

The comparison with Greece is an interesting one. Because the Greek economy is a sideshow, in the global scale of things. China, on the other hand, is the world’s second economy. If it gets into trouble, Greece is going to look like a gentle dip in the smooth running of the international financial system. It’s encouraging that voices are already being raised in the US to protect its economy against the possible effects of a Chinese downturn. They need to be heeded.

As far as I can tell, it’s an urban myth that “may you live in interesting times” is a Chinese curse. It does, however, look as though we may be about to enter some interesting times. And the cause may well be a curse from China.

Strange tale of an extremist, a Prince and the not-so saintly Maggie

It was ironic to see the pictures of Prince Charles, tea cup in one hand, using the other for an apparently cordial handshake with Gerry Adams, Sinn Féin leader in Northern Ireland and for many on this side of the water, one of the great bogeymen of all time.

The Prince and the Extremist
Extraordinary cordiality

He repeatedly leaned forward towards the Prince, apparently exchanging not merely remarks, but confidences. This is particularly surprising because they both have bitter history against the other, as Adams made clear yesterday: he blames the British paras for the terrible killing of fourteen people on Bloody Sunday, in Derry, in 1972, and the Prince is the honorary Colonel-in-Chief of the regiment. However, Adams did also recognise that Charles had “been bereaved by the actions of Republicans”, in a reference to the IRA killing of Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India and a relative to whom Charles was particularly close (his “honorary grandfather”).

None of this was half so ironic, for me, than the contrast to Margaret Thatcher’s attitude when she was Prime Minister. She famously talked about the need “to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend”. That led to one of the more risible aspects of her long and painful reign: she banned the voices of extremist organisations being heard on British TV.

This meant that for six years, we could see Gerry Adams on our TVs, we could see his lips forming the words he was pronouncing, but we couldn’t hear his voice pronouncing them: instead, an actor would dub them in over the picture. Exactly the same words, mind you. The “oxygen of publicity” denial didn’t affect his message, only his voice.

This is one of the less well-remembered aspects of the Thatcher years. I always remind her fans of it, when they present her as some kind of secular saint, as they regularly do. It was an entirely pointless act, and damaged only Britain: you can imagine how difficult it made it to argue against freedom of speech limitations in other countries.

The ban kept running after Thatcher fell, perhaps out of deference to her memory. But finally, in 1994, her successor John Major dropped it. The only people who regretted its passing were the actors who were called on to dub the voices: it had been a nice little earner for them.

Today, that same Gerry Adams met and chatted for a few minutes to the next in line to the British throne. With every appearance of cordiality. No actor was on hand to repeat his words for him. And the earth didn’t fall into the sky.

In fact, what the incident did was to strengthen the growing bonds between erstwhile adversaries in Northern Ireland, as the Queen herself did three years ago, when she met Adams’ colleague and the current Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuiness, and shook his hand.

Rather underlying the fact that if you want to bring peace anywhere, it’s a lot more effective to come to terms with your resentments, however deeply held they may be, however justified, and listen to your adversary. A lot more effective than spreading further hatred by labelling him a terrorist and extremist. And then trying to shut him up.

And if it turns out you actually can't, it’s laughable as well as ineffective

Beware the right, especially when it talks about markets

Any of you who had the joy of hearing Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), on the BBC Election Debate last week, may have been struck by his frequent references to “the market.”

Maggie Thatcher: you can't buck the market. Yeah, right

Implicit in this kind of statement is the Thatcherite notion that “you can’t buck the market.” This is a recurring theme in the mouths of most right wing politicians, not just Farage, but those such as Cameron or US Republicans too. It’s untrue today as it was in Thatcher’s time, as indeed it was in the time of that great guru of market economics, the darling of today’s right, Adam Smith. What people tend to forget is that the only kind of market you can rely on at all is a free one. The problem is that a great many markets are firmly rigged – in other words, someone has bucked them.

Adam Smith knew that. He talked, for instance, of the market in labour, in which workers and “masters” strive against each other to set the price, i.e. a wage. Each side tends to pull together to form “combinations” – a word which doesn’t mean simply association, but something more sinister, with a dash of the conspiracy about it – but one of the sides has far more power than the other:

The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it.

For a time, from early in the twentieth century through to the eighties, the “combinations” of workmen did rather better than Smith suggests in The Wealth of Nations. Then Thatcher brought in serious anti-Trade Union legislation, just as Reagan did in the US, and the boot returned firmly to the other foot.

Adam Smith, darling of the right, guru of the market
Rather gives the lie to Cameron and Farage

There are times when I can’t quite work out whether Farage is as unintelligent as he likes to sound, or whether he’s just being disingenuous. I suspect the latter: he’s a knave, rather than a fool. He knows perfectly well that appeals to markets are empty if the markets aren’t free.

After all, he’s a stockbroker. One of those groups of masters, only too ready to combine to protect their own interests: we saw how they, and the rest of the financial services crowd, plunged the world into global recession in 2008 and then made sure they were rewarded for it with wonderful bail-outs, from our pockets.

So he presumably also knows why his jeremiads against migration have no place in an ideology of free markets. Again, at a time when European nations tended rather to block the free movement of labour and capital, Adam Smith lamented that:

… the policy of Europe, by obstructing the free circulation of labour and stock [capital], both from employment to employment, and from place to place, occasions in some cases, a very inconvenient inequality in the whole of the advantages and disadvantages of their different employments.

Workers moving freely, capital moving freely, are essential components of a free market. But then perhaps Conservative and UKIP politicians prefer a market they’ve rigged in their favour to a free one. Which reminds me of another fine sentiment in Adam Smith:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public…

Indeed. George Bernard Shaw expressed the same sentiment even more succinctly 130 years later, in The Doctor’s Dilemma, when he wrote “all professions are conspiracies against the laity.” Where the “profession” in question is right wing politics, we still today face a particularly toxic conspiracy.

Perhaps Farage and Cameron don’t know Smith and Shaw’s sentiments on the subject. But we do. And we should be on our guard.

Nicola Sturgeon: another voice raised for a (moderately) radical approach to our problems

Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, speaking in London today, called for an end to austerity policies and described their continuation as “morally unjustifiable and economically unsustainable.”

Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP:
A radicalism so mild it's barely radical. But it's still refreshing to hear

Consensus is attractive when the alternative is conflict, but much less so when it just means conformity. Especially when what we’re conforming to is principally a matter of fashion.

It has been fashionable in the leading economies since the 1970s or 1980s, to proclaim belief in the working of free markets with minimal regulation. That view tended to come in tandem with faith in trickle-down economics: a free market will allow highly entrepreneurial individuals to make a great deal of money; when they spend it, the resultant wealth will trickle down to the rest of society.

Many of the measures that had been put in place to control, in particular, the financial sector were dropped during the time of Thatcher and Reagan. Unleashed, the banks took increasing risks in order to amass unprecedented fortunes, until they took a risk too many and came unstuck in 2008. At which point, people who had spent decades decrying state intervention, turned to the state – more precisely to all taxpayers, including the poorest – to rescue them from the disaster they’d brought down on themselves.

Unfortunately, holding out their hands to the state didn’t mean that these leaders of economic thinking were prepared to dump the ideology which, particularly in its trickle down aspect, had made them inconceivably rich over a generation.

The success of trickle-down was measured by their wealth; its failure by the impoverishment of everyone else. As Will Hutton argues in his insightful piece in today’s Guardian, “wages have fallen, in real terms, by the greatest degree in more than half a century, inequality of income and wealth have risen to desperately high levels that may soon metastasise into a serious economic and social cancer.”

Sadly, in Europe we’ve been driven since the 2008 crash by such carcinogenic thinking. The consensus claims that austerity is the only way out of this crisis: reduce government deficits and debt by slashing public spending, and we shall cure our problems. As Hutton points out, all this is achieving is to create a society in which “millions of workers struggle in a harsh demimonde of temporary jobs and zero-hour contracts.”

And yet these ideas, the new fashion, merely replaced economic thinking which could really explain our problems. The theories of John Maynard Keynes showed that it isn’t by reducing expenditure that a government gets out of economic difficulty, but by making investments. That provides employment which increases the tax take from workers, and it stimulates the economy to grow by increasing demand – which also increases the tax take. So paradoxically, the government may well get its deficit down more quickly by spending more, not less.

But we’ve been living the Reagan-Thatcher consensus. Keynes is out. Austerity and trickle-down are in. And, sadly, conformity to that credo has extended way beyond the traditional conservative parties. Many in the Labour Party, not least Tony Blair and his one-time voice piece Peter Mandelson, who famously – infamously – once declared himself “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.”

Well, I’d be relaxed about it too, if getting filthy rich didn’t always happen on the backs of a lot of poor people getting a great deal poorer.

To stand for a different set of ideas, for Keynesian ideas, is regarded by the proponents of austerity as a dangerous reversion to old-style, wildly left-wing socialism. Which is odd, since whatever Keynes was, he wasn’t a socialist. He wanted capitalism better managed, as does Hutton.

Calling for better management of our capitalist economy is dangerously radical? 

Seriously?

Keynes: hardly a left-wing firebrand
But we need his approach back, and that has to come from the Left

Fortunately the conformity to this dire consensus hasn’t been total. Every now and then a voice speaks out against these failed and failing views. And, recently, sometimes those voices have been heard.

I spoke yesterday about Alexis Tsipras in Greece. Succeed or fail, at least he’s trying a different approach in a country driven to despair by the previous policy of austerity.

Now Nicola Sturgeon has also spoken out. She, like many of us, feels there’s nothing tremendously inspiring about a Labour Party promising to do the same as the Tories, but a bit less, and a bit less fast.

And yet what she’s proposing isn’t that radical: an increase in spending of £180bn over five years of a parliament. That represents less than two years of running the English NHS, spread over five. Not exactly revolutionary: like Hutton, like Keynes, she just wants capitalism to behave more fairly.

But compared to everyone else calling for more cuts, isn’t it refreshing?

How sad that it has to come from a party whose main aim is the independence of Scotland. That the great party of the left in England, the Labour Party, didn’t beat her to it.

Ed Milliband, Ed Balls: come on, if Sturgeon can do it, surely you too can speak out for a real alternative to the failed policies of the Tories?

Maggie, the poll tax, and the danger of firmness

A benefit of the thirty-year rule for disclosure of British government papers is that it can provide a salutary reminder of just how unsavoury certain people were, at a time – three decades on – when there’s a tendency to canonise them.

For a while now, and never more than since her funeral, there has been a growing tendency to sing the praises of Maggie Thatcher. A strong woman, we’re told, a conviction politician, firm in her beliefs, determined to see them through.

That all sounds like praise indeed. So we sometimes have to remind ourselves of the irregular verb: I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pig-headed. What looks like firmness when you feel it’s in a good cause, is simply dogmatism bordering on fanaticism in a bad one.

Firm? Resolut? Or just inflexible?

The Guardian has done us a service by publishing details of the advice Thatcher received from Oliver Letwin, now a Minister but then a 29-year old special adviser, concerning the proposed move to funding local government based on a “residence charge”, later renamed the “community charge” and ultimately known to practically everyone as the “poll tax”.

This was pretty much an unmitigated disaster. Projections in 1985 showed that 44% of the population would be made worse off. The then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson – the minister responsible for Financial matters – declared the tax would mean that “a pensioner couple in inner London could find themselves paying 22% of their net income in poll tax, whereas a better off couple in the suburbs pay only 1%.” He described the scheme as “completely unworkable and politically catastrophic.”

Letwin maintained that it was the way to go, backed by Lord Victor Rothschild, now revealed to be the man who first had the idea. Letwin even supported the approach it has long been suspected Thatcher adopted, of using the Scots as guinea pigs and only introducing the poll tax in England and Wales after running it for a year north the border.

Despite the opposition of many of her most senior ministers, Thatcher made this an issue on which to prove her “firmness”. The poll tax was imposed on the rest of Britain after Scotland, amid increasing resentment and indeed resistance, culminating in widespread rioting in 1990. Her dogmatic attachment to a bad idea had lasted five years and done huge damage – not least, to herself. It was in 1990 that Tory Party grandees decided that they’d had enough of a good thing, or that Thatcher was no longer the good thing she had been, and dumped her.

She could never forgive them. Like all people who have her brand of “firmness’, she knew she could do no wrong. The poll tax hadn’t been her calamitous error, her utter failure of political sensitivity towards the real concerns of voters, it had been a policy that others hadn’t had the courage to see through, preferring instead to bring her down in an act that could only be qualified as treason.

That’s the kind of history we need to recall each time anyone speaks with nostalgia of the Thatcher period. Remember that her departure was the end of an error as well as the end of the era.

But we should also remember that the man who advised her down this destructive route was Oliver Letwin. Thatcher’s gone, but he’s still in government. The Guardian quotes Lord Rothschild expressing some reservations: “…I am nervous lest [the poll tax] is accidentally or deliberately misinterpreted, for example: ‘Tories hit the poor again’, ‘No compassion for the have-nots’.”

How ironic. Those are precisely the charges anyone with empathy for the poor makes of the government in which Letwin, architect of the poll tax, serves today.

Which demonstrates that this kind of story not only provides useful insight on the reputation Thatcher really deserves, it also reveals how balefully her legacy still affects us today.