Blairism: when Labour were happy to support a centre-right government

The publicity around Tony Blair's memoirs reminds us of just how alien he was from many of the Labour party's traditions and perhaps helps to explain why the Liberal Democrats have been so united and robust in responding to criticism from Labour supporters over the coalition.

This week's New Statesman editorial praises his early achievements in office and believes he went off the rails towards the end of his first term.

In fact, the key to the New Labour project, starting with the period of opposition before 1997, was moving political discourse several notches to the right, particularly on crime and taxation, in a way that was anything but progressive. Blair discarded socialism in order to position Labour as a centre-right Christian Democratic party rather than a liberal one.

On criminal justice, where Labour and Liberals might have once made common cause in favour of humane policies, Blair and New Labour started trying to outflank the Tories on the right, in the process attacking the Lib Dems for being 'soft on crime', maintaining such attacks through to 2010. Having disavowed any intention of increasing income tax, in a bid to win over Conservative voters, Labour began attacking the Lib Dems for being 'high on taxes', despite our proposed 1% income tax increase being relatively modest. Such triangulation to the right continued through Labour's time in office, Gordon Brown's abolition of the 10% tax band being part of a bid to offer bonbons to those on middle incomes. Likewise, Labour's new positioning on crime was not just a rhetorical flourish to secure victory in 1997, but continued throughout their time in office, with hundreds of new criminal offences created, together with constant attempts to portray opponents who questioned government policy as 'soft on crime'.

I remember thinking back at the start of the New Labour project that all those old socialists and those of a more liberal-left persuasion in the Labour party would never tolerate this kind of thing. But in fact they were more than happy to campaign as a low tax, tough on law and order party and to support their leaders in carrying this agenda into government. Indeed throughout late Labour government's existence, any civil libertarian sentiment that might exist in the Labour party was noticeable if not by its complete absence then by its muted tones.

The point is that all those who supported Labour through the Blair years made their own accommodation with a right-wing agenda (did I mention the Iraq war?), prioritising tribal loyalty over any attempt to form a progressive consensus. This is why I find it hard to have sympathy with Guardianistas, New Statesmanites etc. who see the Lib Dems joining a coalition with the Tories as a betrayal of progressivism. They already made their 'pact with the devil' or acceptance of political reality in supporting Blairism. What the Blair and Brown years meant was that we could no longer regard Labour as a broadly progressive party and the Conservatives as a reactionary one. Instead both parties include both liberal and authoritarian, progressive and reactionary elements. In the circumstances it made sense to work with the one that offered the best chance of providing stable government and implementing some Lib Dem policy.

CODA: Blair's apparent endorsement of the coalition's budget policies prompts me to the following piece of counterfactual speculation. Had he chosen to face down Gordon Brown and his allies in 2006/07, declared his intention to lead the Labour party into a further general election and gone on to win it, Blair might now be leading a New Labour government pursuing exactly the same policies as the coalition is doing. In such circumstances, Labour supporters who now condemn the budget cuts would no doubt have tutted and harrumphed a bit, but still accepted and defended the policies they are now so quick to condemn.

Surely Sion Jenkins is either innocent or he isn't

The BBC website reports that Sion Jenkins, who was convicted, in 1998 of the murder of his stepdaughter, but later acquitted after two successive retrial juries failed to reach a verdict, has been refused compensation.

I can't profess to any knowledge of the legalities of this, but morally it seems a highly questionable decision. Surely if his conviction has been overturned then he ought to be regarded in the eyes of the law as as innocent of the crime.

Before his arrest he enjoyed a successful professional career (he had just been appointed head teacher of a secondary school) and good standing in the local community. To be arrested, convicted, spend several years in prison for a crime of which he is now deemed not guilty is by any standards personally catastrophic. The state that inflicted such a catastrophe on him surely has some duty to compensate him. Not to do so leaves a sense that his innocence is a mere technicality and he is somehow "guilty really" .

From what I have seen of Jenkins (largely gleaned from watching a documentary about the case) he doesn't come across as a particularly warm or sympathetic character. Perhaps he doesn't really need the compenstion money. Doubtless some people still believe him to be guilty. But that shouldn't matter. Either the state regards him as guilty or it doesn't. And if it doesn't it owes him some reparation for having wrongly convicted and incarcerated him, depriving him of his good name, professional career and family life in the process.

RIP Ben Keith

Neil Young's steel, guitarist who was part of Young's distinctive 'Harvest' sound, but who also played with Patsy Cline died yesterday. The link is to a performance of Neil Young of the song 'Too Far Gone', which perhaps seems appropriate for the moment. Obituary here.

So was there an alternative?

It would have been nice if Liberal Democrat participation in government had led to us being feted in the country and a massive surge in our popularity.

But no one should really be surprised if there has been a dip in Lib Dem support according to the opinion polls, although how far this is the case has been disputed.

While the Lib Dems aim to transcend class-based two-party politics, it is hard to do so completely. The Labour versus Conservative struggle remains a reality, and those people who voted for us, but who defined themselves as 'anti-Tory' were never going to be happy. Likewise, back in the 1980s I can remember canvassing people who has voted Liberal in 1974 but who said they would never vote for us again because we kept the politically bankrupt Callaghan government in power through the Lib-Lab pact.

It is of course sad to find with some friends, loved ones and work colleagues that conversations about politics are now distincly awkward because of the coalition. What is particularly frustrating is to find all attempts at argument based on the post-election arithmetic/need for stable government/number of Lib Dem policies in coalition agreement greeted with 'But you shouldn't have done a deal with the Tories' as if that single sentiment trumps any attempt at reasoning.

Which brings me to last nights interesting but essentially superficial documentary by Nick Robinson, which I imagine will be available for a few days here. Lord Adonis argued that the parliamentary arithmetic was a mere alibi for the Lib Dems who had already decided to to a deal with the Tories. [Mean-spirited aside - It's a bit hard to take Lord Adonis getting all sanctimonious about Lib Dem behaviour when he is a turncoat who quit the Lib Dems in a rather-too-obvious search for high office under Labour.]

My question, therefore, is whether anyone has actually articulated a coherent argument as to how this Progressive wet dream of a Labour-Lib Dem-SNP-Plaid Cymru-SDLP-Alliance-Lady Sylvia Hermon might have actually have worked in practice and delivered stable, reforming, cuddly, spending-cuts-and-VAT-increase-free, electoral reforming with full STV government in practice? Even if Nick Clegg and David Cameron do both talk a bit posh, wear brogues and comb their hair in a similar way, that doesn't mean that Nick wanted a Lib-Con coalition all along.

With the Labour party having been in power for thirteen years and having lost its overall majority and holding fewer seats than the Conservatives, it was always going to be a high hurdle for the Lib Dems to put Labour back in power - really to be justified only if we could achieve full proportional representation. Given that a Lib-Lab coalition would not have had a majority, that many Labour MPs clearly didn't support such a deal, while others were not prepared to work with the SNP (whose support would be needed to sustain the coalition) it really is impossible to see how such a government could have lasted more than a few months before collapsing ignominiously with no achievements to his name. This seems to me a pretty convincing argument and by no means a mere alibi. So has anyone on the left put forward a serious response to it other than 'I don't care, you shouldn't have done a deal with the Tories'?

Staggers Lee

The New Statesman arriving on a Friday is now a mixed blessing, given the unflinchingly hostile line it has taken to the coalition from day 1. The only way is seems able to treat the new government is with retro 80s-style anti-Thatcherite rhetoric.

The theme of this week's issue is 'Politics and comedy' and includes an article on arts funding by alleged comedian Stewart Lee. Deploring the likelihood of cuts in state arts budgets, he comments: 'Artists are sensitive souls who may feel compromised by sponsorship' (article not available online so far as I can tell). But in that case might they not also feel compromised by taking state funds provided by a government that the Staggers editiorial describes (not wholly in jest, I fear) as 'dismembering the country'. One wonders whether artists might not also feel tainted by guilt by association through accepting the dismemberers' shilling.

Despite all this, I don't quite yet share Stephen Tall's gloomy conclusion that: 'I've given up on the Staggers. The book reviews are good but the politics are too formulaicly dull.' I like reading a weekly magazine and there is still good stuff in there: Peter Wilby, Rachel Cooke, Nicholas Lezard and so forth. And if the Staggers is frustrating reading for a Liberal just now, at least it's nowhere near as bad as the Spectator, which is going through a deeply unpleasant phase at the moment, dominated, as Jonathan Calder says, by 'right-wing American nutjobbery'.

I nearly forgot to mention...

What's the good of a blog if one can't use it to blow one's own trumpet?

So I should mention that while this blog was on sabbatical my first full-length research article was published in the journal Parliamentary History. Entitled 'Empire, Patriotism and the Working-Class Electorate: The 1900 General Election in the Battersea Constituency', it is intended as a contribution to the debate on how important a factor the South African war was in the Conservative/Unionist victory in that election. Broadly speaking, it concludes that it was indeed important, and disagrees with those historians who have sought to play down its significance.

This is in many ways an uncomfortable argument to make for someone of my Liberal, cosmopolitan and pacific view. But then, as Liberal Democrats are being all too forcefully reminded in the present day, political realities are often not as one would ideally like them to be.

Sadly, for those readers who can barely contain their excitement, the full text is not available online, or at least not without paying for it. But the printed journal will be available in academic (and perhaps some public) libraries and can also be accessed via the Academic Search Complete database, which many libraries subscribe to. Alternatively, I have a couple of remaining offprints that I could send you on a first-come, first-served basis - but don't get trampled underfoot in the rush!

In praise of Peter Wilby

Sticking with a Leicester University connection I'm pleased to see that it has chosen to honour the journalist Peter Wilby, a native of Leicestershire, with an honorary degree.

Wilby can be credited with having made the New Statesman readable again in his seven years as editor between 1998 and 2005. His weekly column remains the best thing in the magazine. As a columnist, he avoids the Polly Toynbee-ish vice of writing as if senior members of the government are or should be hanging on their every word, so never mind the poor readers.

As an old fashioned leftist, Wilby always writes with a resigned wistfulness that seems to accept that his views will never be mainstream, but which can find some comfort in finding unusual, thought-provoking arguments that stimulate and entertain the reader. This puts him in a noble tradition of left-of-centre columnists that includes Cassandra (Bill Connor), Keith Waterhouse and Alan Watkins.

Less than sterling architecture

Catching up with the weekend papers: I confess to not having been aware that the Stirling Prize for Architecture, the shortlist for which was announced last week even existed.

No doubt Sir James Stirling was an important architect, a great man etc., but my own close encounter with his architecture - walking past the internationally-renowned engineering building at Leicester University during my time as an undergraduate there - left me as rather less than a fan.

None of the engineering students had a good word for the building as a space to work in, and it didn't strike me as more obviously distinguished than the other two rather nasty towers on the Leicester campus.

Perhaps Stirling's best-known British building is the History Faculty Library at Cambridge University, which Wikipedia describes thus:

Although the building was admired by students of architecture it is less well regarded by those who have to work in it. Expensive modifications were necessary to render to usable, and in 1984 the university came close to pulling the whole thing down.[4]

I seem to remember it being parodied in Tom Sharpe's book Ancestral Vices as requiring the heating to remain on right through the summer and the air conditioning through the winter to keep it at a reasonable temperature - although I can't find my copy of the book to check.

Let's hope that the buildings shortlisted for the Stirling Prize are more practical and less brilliant than those of Stirling himself.

Good for Nick!

An interesting blog post and discussion from the BBC's Mark D'Arcy about Nick Clegg's first appearance at prime minister's question time, particularly regarding the 'illegal invasion of Iraq' comment.

There is going to be a fine balance to be struck over the next two years and beyond between having a stable government without constant bickering between the coalition partners and ensuring that the two parties maintain their separate identities.

I am sure most Lib Dems (and many of the party's supporters) will welcome Nick's timely reminder of the party's distinctive position within the coalition.

Is Labour heading for a Clause 4 moment in reverse?

Austerity drive will hand billions to private sector cried the Guardian on Saturday. I'm not sure the story quite justifies the headline, and wonder about the retro language used: 'Rubbish disposal is one of the services under threat of outsourcing' as if we were back to the 1980s. But I was more struck by the comment of Labour's shadow health secretary Andy Burnham that:

Some private operators are going to have a field day, making a fortune from a system which will offer less public accountability

It's as if he has forgotten that neutrality on the question of outsourcing versus direct provision of public services was a key part of the New Labour agenda. As part of its 'Best Value' programme, New Labour insisted that local government should 'consult, compare, challenge, compete' (the four C's) in deciding how to provide services - we were not simply to assume that the in-house team did it best. Likewise in education through the academies programme and in health too, Labour embraced the role of private sector providers.

Is Andy Burnham's comment a sign of Labour re-embracing Clause 4 and rejecting the nasty private sector outright outright? If so, Labour may be looking to a similarly long spell in opposition to that which they enjoyed between 1979 and 1997. But I suspect that it is just rhetoric designed to court union votes in the leadership election.

Richard Grayson, Nick Clegg and 'small-state Liberalism'

There has been much discussion in the Lib Dem blogosphere about Richard Grayson's new pamphlet for the Compass think tank The Liberal Democrat journey to a coalition and where next? Jonathan Calder, David Boyle and Lib Dem Voice, among others, have all had their say. Richard has also been kind enough to draw my attention to the fact that I am briefly mentioned in the pamphlet.

It is a good thing that someone with Richard's knowledge and insight has engaged with the ideoligical issues surrounding the coalition and I very much welcome his triggering a useful debate. Yet I find myself out of sympathy with much of his argument, although in the interests of time and brevity, I will just engage with one of his core contentions, namely that the origins of the coalition:

can be found in the dominance of centre-right small state liberalism in the leadership of the Liberal Democrats

Richard of course will know the leading Lib Dem figures in the coalition better than I do and what makes them tick. But I don't get a sense that Clegg et al are wedded to small state Liberalism. Rather I suspect that they have been driven by political circumstances (the longest ever period of Labour government in Britain) to think about how the Lib Dems differ from Labour and how we would do things differently.

It is perhaps worth noting that in 1979, after Labour had been in power for 11 of the previous 15 years, the Liberal manifesto stated:

Liberals are concerned to simplify the personal tax system and reduce its burden to create a tax structure which encourages initiative and promotes a wider distribution of wealth, and above all to establish principles for a stable tax system which can command the respect of the electorate as a whole: wealthy, poor and average earners.

specifically 'a major switch from taxes on income to taxes on wealth and expenditure'. This has strong echoes of our stance in 2010. Yet, whatever the then Liberal leader, David Steel, few would label him as a 'small state liberal'. (Although John Pardoe, who was no doubt the author of the 1979 tax proposals is probably more a Laws than a Grayson Liberal.)

The Liberal critiques of Labour and Conservative governments are always likely to be different. I doubt very much whether Clegg would have supported a coalition with the Conservatives in 1997 nor felt uncomfortably with the party's call at the time for greater investment in public services. But once Labour had flooded the public sector with money, yet everything in the garden was still not rosy, it was hardly credible for the Lib Dems to say 'We still want just that little bit more public spending than New Labour', because it would have given us a political narrative of 'We're just like Labour only more so'.

Therefore the party needed to think through how it differed from the Labour government, with the Huhne Commission which Richard rightly praises being the start of this. We had to think ideologically and could hardly put forward a viable alternative view of how public services should be delivered if it was predicated on a non-negotiable assumption that the Lib Dems must always support a public sector at least as big as that proposed by Labour.

For what it's worth I think we should be bold and confident enough to put forward our own Liberal agenda without intellectual cap-doffing to Labour, old or new. There are many things Labour spend public money on that we don't agree with at all: Identity cards, the security agenda, the multifarious inspection regimes for local government. Likewise, it's hard to see their rhetoric on crime, drugs and civil liberties as in any way progressive. Equally, I see the Coalition's support for localism as more progressive, liberal, left-wing or whatever you want to call it than Labour's track record. Even free schools (of which I'm admittedly not a huge fan) are the sort of idea that might once have been put forward by the party's radical community politics wing.

It is important that we do have a continuing debate about the future of the Lib Dems. But I fear that social liberals will be heading up a dead end if the root of their argument is about matching the size of Labour's public sector.

I've missed all the fun

A general election campaign, the historic coalition agreement between the Lib Dems and Conservatives, its controversial first budget, the re-election of my dear wife as Mayor of Watford and the disappointment of Sal Brinton not winning the parliamentary seat are all things that I have missed the chance to comment on while this blog has been on hiatus.

Over the past fifteen months such spare time as I have has been taken up working on a long-term project (of which more anon) and maintaining this blog would have been mere work avoidance. To restart it with the intention of making regular posts is a triumph of hope over experience, but let's give it a bash.

Why Cameron should be insisting that Brown DOESN'T need to apologise

As I listened to the media coverage of the Damian McBride/Derek Draper affair this morning, I knew for certain what David Cameron's reaction would be.

We could confidently expect a terse statement along the following lines:

As Mr McBride no longer works for the government, the Conservative Party fully accepts that Gordon Brown and the Labour party can't reasonably be expected to comment and as far as we are concerned that's the end of the matter.

How could I be so sure? Well, when former Conservative candidate for Watford Ian Oakley was convicted for spreading anonymous smears against political opponents (of a rather worse nature than those in the McBride-Draper email), and mounting a sustained campaign of harrassment and criminal damage against them, the Conservatives were reported as saying the following:

A spokesman for the Conservatives said they could not comment on the issue as Oakley was no longer a member of the party.

It is rather odd, therefore, that the BBC website reports Cameron as being 'furious' and calling on Gordon Brown to 'give a guarantee that such messages will not be sent again'. Meanwhile William Hague has 'demanded an apology from the prime minister'. It seems that the official Conservative view about smearing political opponents has temporarily slipped their memories and perhaps the Conservative Central Office aparatchik who released the statement on Oakley should remind them.

By any standards, however repellent McBride's behaviour may be, it pales into insignificance when compared to Oakley's. Unlike Oakley, McBride did not personally make his poisonous material public, he has offered some kind of public statement of regret, and a Labour cabinet minister has repudiated his behaviour (albeit with in my view quite a bit of dissembling).

In contrast, none of Oakley's erstwhile colleages in Watford Conservatives have expressed regret for his behaviour. Cameron now has apologised, but not until seven months after the conviction, and even then only after being directly asked by a member of the public in a way that meant he could hardly avoid doing so. And he certainly didn't offer a guarantee that it wouldn't happen again along the lines that he now demands of Gordon Brown.

Of course the BBC news report cited above probably doesn't quote the whole of the Conservative party's statement on this matter. Perhaps in full it reads:

The Conservative party are furious and believe that Gordon Brown should apologise for Mr McBride's behaviour, but we accept that first of all he should pretend it's nothing to do with him, that any apology should only be made after several months have gone by and even then issued only if the prime minister is put in a position by a member of the public where it would seem churlish and mean-spirited not to express regret.

Why we should welcome the launch of the Social Liberal Forum

Along with many others, I have generally rejected the all-too-easy attempts to categorise Lib Dems as either social or economic liberals (although this was clearly a bit of an aberration.) As I have said before, the Orange Book in fact lacked ideological coherence and really was just a collection of essays by individual authors, hardly suggestive of a right-wing or any other kind of project. In addition, the supposed social liberal riposte, Reinventing the state, had many contributors in common with its supposed adversary.

I suspect that virtually all Lib Dems would sign up to the appellation ‘social liberal’, but would differ as to the extent to which they might use, variously, the free market, individual choice, decentralisation and variations in taxation as mechanisms to achieve a fairer and better society. One can certainly see differences of emphasis between the editors of the Orange book, David Laws and Paul Marshall, and those of Reinventing the state, Duncan Brack, Richard Grayson and David Howarth on these issues. But all have clearly been arguing within a Liberal framework. For myself, I tend to agree with any one or group of the above depending on the issue under discussion. For example, I find Laws’ begrudging attitude to local democracy and Reinventing the state’s lack of attention to wealth creation, as opposed to distribution, equally frustrating.

My real problem has been with Paul Holmes/Tim Farron/Evan Harris and the Beveridge Group, who seem stuck in a rut of defending public sector professionals, higher taxation and greater state intervention in all things, regardless of context, to the exclusion of actually finding liberal solutions to social or economic problems. To them, more or less any fresh thinking appears to be a sign of a right-wing conspiracy and if they don’t exactly stifle debate, they sour the atmosphere in which it is conducted.

I have long lamented the lack of an authentically Liberal forum what for the sake of brevity we will call the left of the party, and I give a cautious but nonetheless warm welcome to the Social Liberal Forum. I certainly think that Charlotte Gore and Alix Mortimer who seem keen to damn it from the start ought at least to give it a chance. If in a year’s time SLF turns out to be a mere vehicle for calling David Laws and Lib Dems who agree with him crypto-Tories then such criticism might be warranted. But let’s wait and see.

There are various reasons why my welcome is both warm and cautious. In the first place, when I notice the presence of Tim Farron and Paul Holmes, contributors of embarrassingly bad chapters to Reinventing the state, on its advisory board, my heart sinks. But the majority of those associated with SLF are not by any means of that stamp. They represent a diverse range of Lib Dem opinion and at least one leading light, James Graham, is more than aware of the shortcomings of the collectivist left of the party.

Likewise I wince a little when I read Richard Grayson’s reference to ‘two approaches’ to Lib Dem policy, ‘Orange Book' and ‘social liberal’. This makes me feel more uncomfortable as I, and no doubt many other Lib Dems, don’t fall neatly into either camp, and don’t find them mutually exclusive. It smacks of a ‘them and us’ attitude to internal debate. But I am sure that is not Richard’s intention and this is confirmed by the reprinting on the SLF website of David Howarth’s generous and inclusive chapter from Reinventing the state.

Both Richard and David appear to place great importance on the rise of so-called New Liberalism a century or so ago as a vital point of departure for social liberalism. If anything, recent historians have called this into question, suggesting that Victorian Liberals may have been rather less and Edwardian Liberals a little more sceptical of state intervention than is often imagined. My hope is that SLF might draw emphasise the democratic element of Liberal social policy, looking to traditions of citizenship, individualism, participation and decentralisation rather than simply advocating collectivism and greater state intervention.

Last but not least, I fear there is a tendency among those who stress ‘social liberalism’ to ignore economics altogether, to consider only how to spend taxes and not how to generate wealth. I always want to ask those who noisily proclaim that they are social not economic liberals: ‘So how would you describe your economic views then – illiberal/social democratic/conservative/Stalinist?’ In current economic circumstances, liberals of all stripes need to think about reinventing rather more than just the state.

SLF has the opportunity to engage in new thinking about liberalism and Lib Dem policy, stimulate genuine debate with a different perspective from, but without hostility towards sister/rival bodies such as Centre Forum. I look forward to seeing how this new initiative develops.

A man's a man for a' that

The 250th anniversary of Robert Burns' birth provides me with an excuse to revive this blog, but sadly it has been neglected elsewhere - at least if the publications I read are anything to go by. History Today, the New Statesman, Guardian and Observer have all arrived with little or no comment on the anniversary, a poor recognition of someone who is not only only Scotland's national poet, but also one with a worldwide reputation and who speaks powerfully of the human condition.

How to explain such neglect. Perhaps it is that with Burns celebrations on 25 January every year, the novelty of a big anniversary doesn't seem that great. I suspect that the London media are tempted to leave Burns to their Scottish counterparts. Secondly, there is a tendency, connived at by at least some Scots, to coat Burns in an aura of tartan tweeness, along with sporrans, Baxter's soup, shortbread and oatcakes.

Whichever way, few enough of us were around for the 200th anniversary or will be for the 300th. This is an opportuninity to celebrate a great lyric poet and a political radical whose writings should be an inspiration to Liberals and everyone with progressive values.

The BBC, under fire from so many quarters just now, has taken the Burns anniversary seriously, so you can watch or listen to any of the programmes listed here. Strangely not listed are is today's edition of Poetry Please on Radio 4, which you can listen to here.

And perhaps also take a little time to read at least one Burns poem, possibly even this one:

Is there for honest Poverty

Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an' a' that;
The coward slave-we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Our toils obscure an' a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The Man's the gowd for a' that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an' a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man's a Man for a' that:
For a' that, and a' that,
Their tinsel show, an' a' that;
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that.

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a cuif for a' that:
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that:
The man o' independent mind
He looks an' laughs at a' that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an' a' that;
But an honest man's aboon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Their dignities an' a' that;
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,
Are higher rank than a' that.

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

Underdogs 2: Montrose FC

One of the delights of my childhood was the occasional visit to Links Park to watch Montrose FC, then, during the mid-1970s, enjoying the most successful years in their history, including finishing one spot off gaining promotion to the Scottish premiership.

Having moved down to Watford, I never had occasion to go back to Montrose and watch the 'Links Park Dynamo' again. But a few years ago, visiting old haunts, I was disappointed to see that the ground had changed out of recognition since the 1970s.

To my delight, therefore, I have found a series of short videos showing Scottish football grounds in the 1980s. Possibly I am the only person in the world (or at least outside Montrose) who is interested in this, but just in case, here is the link. We used to stand in the terrace (now demolished) that ran along the side of the pitch.

Underdogs 1: George Harrison - This Song

In all things I root for the underdog, so naturally I have always believed that George Harrison was the true genius of the Beatles, and I have been rediscovering his solo output recently. To support my case, I cite this early (1976) video This song, a humorous response to being sued over his hit My sweet Lord's resemblance to The Chiffons' He's so fine.

The Cruiser versus the tabloid bruiser

Why is it that when someone dies who was not quite in step with its editorial line the Guardian feels the need to trash them? It isn't big and it isn't clever and merely makes the liberal left look every bit as nasty and mean-spirited as the right.

The most notorious case was Polly Toynbee's attack on Auberon Waugh, which however wrong-headed of itself, at least had the merit of appearing heartfelt and reflecting a genuine clash between opposing styles of journalism.

There is rather less excuse for setting tabloid bruiser Roy Greenslade (editor of the Mirror under Maxwell and assistant editor of the Sun during the Falklands era) to flay the earthly remains of Conor Cruise O'Brien.

Mick Fealty of the Slugger O'Toole website commented on negative postings about O'Brien that 'the answer is not that people should not speak ill of the dead, but that people say something of value about them'. This is the test that Greenslade's piece fails. There is an air of the Guardian feeling that because O'Brien was an apostate from the liberal consensus, they needed a hired gun to dole out a verbal beating, even if it is as ill-informed as Greenslade's article.

He starts by describing the obituaries as a 'hagiographic outpouring', which I suppose they may be if you are a republican-sympathising tabloid journalist unable to recognise the subtleties of nuance and qualification in language. My reading of the obituaries, inluding the one published in the Guardian, was that while they were mostly respectful, as they should be to someone who had had such a long and varied career, few were unqualified by criticism.

On the substance of O'Brien's career, the best Greenslade can do is accuse him of 'flip-flopping', particularly over the partition of Ireland. Where to start here? I suppose some people may regard it as a damning indictment that over the course of 60 years, someone should alter their opinion at all on a given issue. Possibly Greenslade has never had occasion to change his 'mind' on anything. But given that O'Brien had engaged with Northern Ireland, its politics and history alternately as a historian, diplomat, politician and newspaper columnist, over several decades, it is no surprise that his thinking evolved, a concept that Greenslade clearly finds hard to comprehend.

In this case, the criticism is that in the 1940s O'Brien organised anti-partitionist propaganda, then became opposed to irridentist nationalism, then in the late 1990s 'he disavowed the very unionist viewpoints he had been prosyletising for'. At face value, hardly a case of serial flip-flopping, but even less so if we consider the reality. Greenslade article offers a link to the book he cites as justification for this claim, but in fact it just turns out to be the Wikipedia entry on O'Brien. Greenslade appears not to have read the book he cites, or if he has has not understood it, and gives no clear evidence that he even knows which one it is.

In his various publications including States of Ireland and Ancestral Voices (links given in previous posts) O'Brien explained how as a civil servant in the 1940s he conducted anti-partitionist propaganda. At the time opposition to partition was almost a given for anyone involved in politics or administration in the Irish republic. O'Brien realised that the propaganda was not doing much good given Unionist hostility to a united Ireland, but felt it was probably not doing much harm. When the Provisional IRA begin its armed campaign in the early 1970s he concluded that the prevailing anti-partitionism of the Irish state offered a kind of moral justification for the Provisionals and began to re-think his view of partition, defending the rights of Unionists not to join a united Ireland. In the late 1990s, fearful of excessive repulican influence in the peace process, and Sinn Fein gaining power in Northern Ireland and the Republic, he argued in his book Memoir: my life and themes that Unionists should consider whether they would stand more chance of sidelining Sinn Fein and wielding greater influence by joining a united Ireland. It was certainly not a case of returning to old-fashioned nationalism. So while his views hardly remained unchanged between the 1940s and 2008, it was more a case of his opinions evolving in response to the course of events (a practice supported by his hero Edmund Burke) rather than of constantly changing his mind.

Certainly he has been more consistent than republican apologists who made excuses for a quarter of a century of violence and thousands of deaths aimed at creating a united Ireland, only to find Sinn Fein accepting a partitionist settlement after all.

Next Greenslade attacks O'Brien for having the 'temerity' to complain about lack of free speech in Nkrumah's Ghana while denying terrorists and their apologists access to broadcasting airwaves in Ireland. Again, I suppose nuance is lost on Greenslade, although the rest of us might understand the difference between the general proscription of free speech in an incipient dictatorship and specific restrictions on organisations dedicated to overthrowing the state. (In the 1970s at least, the Provisional IRA regarded itself of the legitimate government of the 32 counties and did not recognise the 26-county republic.) Whether or not one agrees with O'Brien's solution to this (although the subsequent Fianna Fail government did not repeal his legislation), it is a genuine dilemma for any democratic government faced with a campaign of paramilitary violence.

Bizarrely, Greenslade claims that such restrictions helped to delay the peace process. While he offers no evidence for this, the implication is that if only people had understood republican arguments sooner, all would have been well. But of course the Provos only formally became part of peace talks once they had declared a ceasefire and on the basis of a partitionist settlement. Republican arguments of the mid-1970s bore little or no relation to the discourse of the peace process. In any case they were never lacking for 'useful idiots' in the British left and liberal media to plead their cause. One does not have to be an unswerving follower of the Cruiser to recognise this. Indeed the Guardian's own Northern Ireland correspondence has just written a book about it, Gunsmoke and Mirrors.

In a final display of petty-mindedness, Greenslade chooses to quibble about O'Brien's exact title when he worked for the Observer, nearly 30 years ago. Goodness knows, that there is enough to disagree with Conor Cruise O'Brien about. Even as a stong admirer of his, I might mention his Euroscepticism, regarding Islam as a monolithic force, support for George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, and his opposition to David Trimble's role in the peace process combined with a misplaced confidence that Ian Paisley would not do a deal with Sinn Fein, as examples of where I part company from him. (Although of course one should make allowances for his advancing years and declining health.)

There was certainly room for considered criticism of O'Brien amid the obituaries, but Greenslade's piece isn't it. It is best regarded as the homage that a bad writer unintenionally pays to a much better one. O'Brien's reputation is enhanced rather than diminished by Greenslade's attack.

PS: In the heat of the moment there I forgot to acknowledge Jonathan Calder for drawing my attention to the Roy Greenslade article.

'We don't do relationships'

I never did quite get round to posting properly on the Haut de la Garenne case in Jersey, nor on the Haringey Baby P issue, as I had intended.

This article by Edinburgh University academic Mark Smith, on the Good Enough Caring website run by my father Charles Sharpe, sheds much light on the current difficulties faced by the social work profession and possibly therefore on both the aforementioned controversies.

It begins:

Having spent almost 20 years working in residential child care I now teach social work. I was horrified (although sadly not altogether surprised) when a student reported back from a field visit that she had been told by a children and families social worker, ‘we don’t do relationships anymore”. It wasn’t even said with regret apparently, just a statement of what the social work role had become.

On the death of Conor Cruise O'Brien

‘He was never afraid to take up unpopular positions, with the result that few ever agreed with him all the time’ was the verdict of Irish Labour party leader Eamon Gilmore on Conor Cruise O’Brien, who died on Thursday.

This is reflected in the ambivalence of many of the obituaries. The Cruiser defied easy ideological categorisation. As a former Irish Labour party politician and a member of that party when he died, he can be seen as a man of the left, the more so in the light of his championing of secular values in Ireland and his hostility to the influence of the Catholic Church. His career in the United Nations, and in particular his involvement in the Congo places him as an anti-imperialist. His long-standing opposition to the Irish republican movement is less easy to pigeonhole, but his strong Zionist sympathies, not to mention his support in his later years for George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, meant that he often drew more praise from right- rather than left-wingers. The more so in view of his later identification with Unionism and his opposition to the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

In truth, once he was freed from involvement in front-line politics in 1977, Cruise O’Brien was that rare thing – an intellectual who did not feel himself bound by the set menu of either left or right, but who was willing to think things out for himself and reach his own conclusions. That is what makes him difficult to pigeonhole and therefore why he is not being mourned as a hero of left, right or centre, however respectful most of the obituaries may be. Of course, some of the reactions to his death have not been respectful at all, and the virulence of some of the comments on, for example, the Slugger O’Toole website from republican sympathisers would no doubt have pleased him as much as the positive tributes. 'A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies', as O’Brien’s fellow Trinity College Dublin graduate, Oscar Wilde, once said

I hope that at least some liberals will shed a tear for his passing and more importantly should read his work, for however much we too will not agree with him on everything, there is much he has to teach us. In the first place, O’Brien was a scathing critic of nationalism and in particular of the dangerous cocktail of nationalism and religion. In Ireland he exposed how republicanism, even when dressed up in secular language, was closely linked to religious notions of blood sacrifice, which enabled its adherents to see themselves as being on a more profound moral plane than those forced to make the shabby compromises of democratic politics. He was particularly critical of ‘sneaking regarders’ - nationalists who formally opposed violent republicanism but nonetheless were ambivalent about confronting it. O’Brien’s critique of Irish nationalism was all the more powerful because he came from a strongly nationalist background, but the wider message is that we should look upon all national movements with scepticism rather than simply assume that national conflicts are a matter of victims versus oppressors and back the ones we regard as the good guys.

When he was a minister in the 1973–77 Fine Gael–Labour coalition, he was much criticised for extending the ban on representatives of and apologists for the republican movement appearing on state broadcasting channels. This was seen as compromising his liberal credentials and was criticised as an attack on free speech. Yet O’Brien justified it on the grounds that an organisation which did not recognise the legitimacy of the Irish state, formally claimed to be the legitimate government, and used violence in order to undermine the state, should not be granted access to the airwaves by the government which it sought to overthrow. In doing this, he tackled head-on the reality that free speech can never be an absolute and that democracies will in extreme circumstances have to protect themselves from their enemies.

Indeed, one of the threads that run through O’Brien’s writing, is that in general order is better than anarchy and that attempts to overthrow governments by violence generally leads to more bloodshed rather than greater justice. This led him, for example, not only to oppose the republican movement in Ireland, but also American attempts during the Cold War to destabilise hostile governments – he was a strong opponent of US funding of the Contras in Nicaragua during the 1980s.

It is perhaps no surprise therefore, that the historical figure with whom O’Brien most closely identified was Edmund Burke, the eighteenth century Whig reformer who became the earliest and most trenchant critic of the French revolution. His biography of Burke, The Great Melody, is a brilliant, though highly personal study of his fellow Irishman, which argues that in supporting reform of British rule in America, India and Ireland, while opposing revolution based on abstract theory, Burke was being consistent by objecting to abuse of power, no matter from which quarter it came. As I am inclined to think that liberals too easily cede Burke to the ranks of conservative thinkers, I would recommend The Great Melody to Liberal readers of this blog as a way of gaining an insight not only into the mind of one of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century, but also one of the most important public intellectuals of the twentieth.

It is the fate of writers of non-fiction that books go out of print very quickly, but for those who wish to understand the conflicts in Ireland over the last century in its emotional and spiritual as well as political dimensions, it is worth tracking down O’Brien’s States of Ireland, his response to the start of the Provisional IRA armed campaign and also Ancestral Voices, his later reflection on the links between religion and Irish nationalism.

If nothing else, at least read the obituaries, which are many and various, including those in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Irish Times, The Times, New York Times.

There is also a very interesting interview from the 1990s in the UC Berkeley Conversations with History series on Youtube.