Oliver Kamm

Foot on Shelley

This is my last comment, for a while at least, on Paul Foot. It deals with his venture in literary criticism, Red Shelley - a subject that I touched on only briefly in my general post assessing Foot's work. I give it a separate post, for the book needs to be considered in context in order to appreciate how misconceived it is.

For a number of commentators on Foot's writings, Red Shelley represents a bravely heterodox work. Here, again, is Nick Cohen:

Red Shelley, published in 1980, remains one of the finest interventions in literary criticism of our time. Shelley, another revolutionary who came from the establishment, was a comrade. Foot rescued his reputation from the critics and syllabus setters who sought to portray him as a love poet and showed him to be what he was, a poet of rebellion.

This is certainly what Foot liked to believe. Appropriating Shelley as a precursor for the socialist tradition, he claimed that the poet had been subjected to 'a hundred castrated editions' that threw out the politics. And he saw his task as:

... restor[ing] to Shelley the political ideas without which his poetry loses its magic, its music and its meaning. I want to pass on Shelley's political enthusiasms to today's socialists, radicals and feminists.

The trouble is that Foot's picture of Shelley criticism isn't even a caricature so much as a fallacy. The political issues that concerned Shelley have lost their salience, but critics do acknowledge the centrality of his political ideas. Foot is not even a pioneer in claiming Shelley for his own form of politics. There is a cottage industry in claiming Shelley for diverse radical political traditions: I have on my shelves one particularly ambitious attempt called Shelley and Non-Violence, written by a radical pacifist of the Students for a Democratic Society a generation ago. ("In the nonviolent philosophies of Shelley and Gandhi, Truth is God and Love is God." This may be meaningless mush, but the author, one Art Young, at least gives a more faithful account than Foot of Shelley's ideas on political violence.)

But Shelley's political ideas debilitate many of the larger-scale works. Foot is so busy hurling imprecations at those he considers reactionaries, that it doesn't occur to him that editors of Shelley may be engaged in something other than censorship of radical politics. He declaims that 'the castration of Shelley at British places of learning has not been confined to rowing oafs' - but fails to draw the inference that there may in that case be some problem with his own understanding of the critics.

The case against Shelley has never been better put than by his contemporary, William Hazlitt. Foot cites Hazlitt's radical judgements on politics approvingly, but apparently (for they are nowhere mentioned in the book) he is unfamiliar with Hazlitt's observations on Shelley. In his review of Shelley's volume of Posthumous Poems, in the Edinburgh journal in 1824, Hazlitt noted:

[Shelley] has single thoughts of great depth and force, single images of rare beauty, detached passages of extreme tenderness; and in his smaller pieces, where he has attempted little, he has done most.... but give him a larger subject, and time to reflect, and he was sure to get entangled in a system.... The success of his writings is therefore in general in inverse ratio to the extent of his undertakings; inasmuch as his desire to teach, his ambition to excel, as soon as it was brought into play, encroached upon and outstripped his powers of execution.... he was crushed beneath the weight of thought which he aspired to bear, and was withered in the lightning-glare of a ruthless philosophy.

Ever since Hazlitt, critics have maintained that Shelley's poetry is undermined by its lack of metaphors adequate to expounding a complex philosophical scheme. So far from 'castrating' Shelley by ignoring or denouncing his political ideas, this criticism treats the political ideas as central. That indeed is the problem with the large-scale poetry (though not the smaller-scale works, as Hazlitt notes). Characteristically, Foot can't believe there is a genuine issue of literary criticism here. He says of the critic F.R. Leavis:

His objection to Shelley was not, as he pretended, purely literary. It was political. And because his criticism refuses, in the name of literary objectivity, to engage Shelley in the real argument which Leavis had with him, it is criticism by subterfuge.

This is a nice illustration of what makes Red Shelley such a bad book. Failing to grasp the literary objections to Shelley's more ambitious work, Foot imagines a political sub-text where none exists, even accusing those he disagrees with of 'subterfuge' in conveying their opinions. The irony is that Foot himself 'refuses to engage Shelley' in textual exegesis. In my main post on Foot's work I alluded to what I believe to be his serious misreading of Shelley's most celebrated achievement, Prometheus Unbound. To Foot, the poem has a central and, to him, congenial purpose:

Reform, the poem concludes, is impossible without revolution.

He bases this judgement on an allegorical interpretation of the role of Jupiter's vanquisher, Demogorgon, whom Foot identifies as the masses:

Who was Demogorgon? One answer, a very obvious one which is often overlooked, is that he was who his name said he was. Shelley was always making up names from Greek words. Demos in Greek means the people; gorgon, the monster. Demorgon is the 'people-monster'.

In case it isn't obvious enough, Foot also cites (following, but not crediting, E.P.Thompson) a radical paper started in 1818 called Gorgon. The trouble is that this idea is nothing like as obvious as Foot makes out. Prometheus is generally held to be a symbol of the poet or intellectual; in his prose works written at the same time, Shelley depicts the masses as having exactly the opposite effect on the reforming zeal of the poets, 'the unacknowledged legislators of mankind'. As he wrote to the novelist Thomas Love Peacock in August 1819, political reform should be driven by those in the higher orders, lest it lead to anarchy and thence despotism. Foot has no real evidence for his thesis (which is not to say that it must therefore be wrong), but that isn't the main objection to the way he treats the poem: rather, by fitting the poem to his own political scheme, he attributes to it a dramatic quality that it doesn't possess, and overlooks the significance of Prometheus's curse and recantation.

My objection to Red Shelley is not primarily to its interpretations, few of which are as forced as this one. Rather it is the idle accusation of censorship levelled at those who take Shelley a lot more seriously as a poet than Foot himself does. Poetry is a medium, not an instrument, of ideas. If your interest in poetry is the cogency of the ideas, then you might as well be reading prose.

"We do not have to spin lies..."

Fringe political parties almost invariably claim that they are disadvantaged by a lack of coverage in the press and broadcasting media. The truth is the opposite: they typically gain from the fact that few people will bother to correct their more extravagant claims. Take this one:

Respect won the best ever by-election vote in England for a party outside the three major parties when it fought the Leicester South parliamentary by-election. Respect’s candidate, Yvonne Ridley, won 12.7 percent of the vote in the election on 15 July this year.

'Plan to follow up election success', Socialist Worker, 31 July 2004

According to my recollection, this is precisely 46 points short of the truth: Dick Taverne won 58 per cent of the poll for the Democratic Labour Party in the Lincoln by-election in 1973. Or as one Respect activist wrote in the same paper a couple of weeks ago:

[The media] can attempt to fool the British public with their lies and ignorance. We do not have to spin lies to make ourselves seem better than we really are.

Assessing Paul Foot

In his Observer encomium to Paul Foot, Nick Cohen states:

[M]ost of the best investigative journalism doesn't come wrapped in a big shiny package which can be opened in a rush on Christmas morning. Foot's campaign to free the four men falsely convicted of the murder of Carl Bridgewater was the result of a relentless exposure of the flaws in the prosecution case. Year in, year out, he refused to accept that he was becoming a bit of a bore on the subject. He banged on until four broken men finally received a belated sliver of justice.

This is true. Foot's obsessiveness on this and other miscarriages of justice did an appreciable amount of good - obviously for those who had been wrongly convicted, but also for our culture in exposing the fallibility of a nominally disinterested system of criminal justice. (It has furnished an overwhelming argument against capital punishment.) But it's not only the system of criminal justice that's fallible. The Guardian's account of Foot's death included this extraordinary statement:

Among his later exposes were the miscarriages of justice including the Carl Bridgewater murder case and the execution for murder of James Hanratty.

Those cases are not the same. The case of James Hanratty and the A6 murder was not a miscarriage of justice: Hanratty was guilty as charged. We know this because the science of DNA testing has progressed to the point where what was once an intractable case can now be resolved. As the Telegraph reported two years ago:

SCIENTIFIC evidence establishes "beyond doubt" that James Hanratty was the man who committed the notorious A6 murder more than 40 years ago, the Court of Appeal ruled yesterday. Dismissing Hanratty's posthumous appeal, three judges headed by Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, said there was "overwhelming proof of the safety of the conviction". Ironically, it was Hanratty's family who sought DNA tests on two items of evidence that had been preserved since the trial.

During the appeal, Hanratty's counsel conceded that, provided the possibility of contamination could be excluded, analysis of these items pointed conclusively to Hanratty having been the man who murdered Michael Gregsten, 36, a civil servant, and raped Mr Gregsten's lover, Valerie Storie, then 23.

The Hanratty campaigners now rest their case on the argument that contamination cannot be excluded, yet as a witness from the Forensic Science Service told the BBC in a Horizon documentary examining this evidence:

NARRATOR: [Scientists'] confidence stems from a simple act of logic. If James Hanratty is not the killer then where is the killer's DNA? For scientists can only find one male profile on the exhibits.

ROGER MANN: We only have one profile. That profile matches James Hanratty. If that was a contaminant, if that was due to contamination we would expect two profiles, one from James Hanratty due to the contamination and one from the original killer.

Commenting on this evidence, Paul Foot told the same programme:

I'm a complete illiterate in relation to the science of DNA, physics and so on. I know nothing about it at all. My doubts stem solely from my, a very, very clear belief that this man did not commit this murder, so if the science is saying he did commit the murder I say well that clashes with my belief that he didn't commit the murder and there must be something wrong with the science.

That is the credo of the biblical creationist confronted with geological evidence for the age of the Earth. Foot's campaign for Hanratty wasn't a passion for justice against a pitiless state machine: it was an idee fixe, impervious to evidence, that has itself devastated the lives of innocent victims. According to the Telegraph, in an accompanying report on the Court of Appeal ruling in 2002:

At the age of two, Anthony Gregsten's father had gone for ever and the boy's life would never be the same again. By the age of eight, he learned that Michael Gregsten, a 34-year-old physicist, had been shot dead, in 1961, after he and a woman friend were ambushed in their car by a gunman. Mr Gregsten knew, too, at primary school, that a man called James Hanratty had been convicted and hanged for the murder, and the shooting of his father's lover, Valerie Storie.

It was a difficult burden for any child. He was shaken to the core, however, by the publication of a book, in the early 1970s, by the journalist Paul Foot. It was entitled Who Killed Hanratty? and raised the suggestion that his mother, Janet Gregsten - who had been aware of her husband's affair with Miss Storie - had been involved in some way in setting up the attack.

Mr Gregsten, a 42-year-old furniture designer, said: "Many people lose a parent, sometimes in the most tragic circumstances. You get over it. In this case they [campaigners] dragged it out for 40 years . . . 40 years to clear the name of a man who was found guilty by a jury.

Anyone, in a long career and with a voluminous output, can make a mistake. The fact that the British justice system did wrong to those falsely accused of the Birmingham pub bombings doesn't overturn the notion of the rule of law; the fact that Foot's campaign on the Hanratty case was misconceived doesn't invalidate his other campaigns. But you would have thought Foot could at least have acknowledged his error and apologised to those harmed by it; instead he continued insisting he was right regardless of the evidence. That was not merely "becoming a bit of a bore".

At the same time as the Hanratty appeal, my friend John Sweeney, formerly of The Observer and now of the BBC, was investigating the horrifying case of Sally Clarke, wrongfully convicted for the murder of her two baby sons who had in fact both died of natural causes. Sweeney's patient inquiry and lucid argument was an important contribution to the successful campaign for Mrs Clarke's freedom. But one of the reasons I implicitly trust Sweeney's judgement on this type of issue is that in addition he knows that his inquiries have limits: he will go only so far as the evidence permits. When journalists and campaigner pursue not the evidence but their deeply-held convictions, people can get hurt.

Politics is not irrelevant to this methodological question. Foot was a longstanding public advocate for a party that in the Iraq war called for military victory for Baathist tyranny. Sweeney, on the other hand, over many years exposed the cruelties of that same regime, and showed courage, strength and indefatigability in confronting its apologists. His brilliant BBC expose of Saddam's propaganda campaign over sanctions earned him a round-robin campaign of character assassination, falsehood and abuse. I know whom I regard as the better campaigning journalist: it's the one who doesn't defend the indefensible in any circumstances, even where - especially where - his prior convictions are at stake.

Ironically for one who professed the politics of solidarity, Foot's campaigning worked better on a smaller scale - miscarriages of justice, rather than great campaigns. That's true in politics as well as the legal system. When he aimed at specific targets - Archer, Poulson - he deployed formidable research and could draw blood. At book-length it could work too. His 1969 book The Rise of Enoch Powell was powerful and original. Its particular value lay in its portrayal of Powell as the opposite of the austere and consistent statesman. Powell's demagoguery on race, Foot argued, was tailored to the chances of his own political advancement. I consider Foot's judgement was vindicated by almost everything Powell did after that, notably his call for a Labour vote in 1974 and his bizarre anti-nuclear speeches in the 1980s. The consistent thread was not free-thinking heterodoxy but a vain attempt to be seen to influence electoral outcomes once his ministerial career had imploded.

Foot's attempt to dissect not the tergiversations of a maverick but The Politics of Harold Wilson (1968) was much less successful. Two-thirds of the book consider Wilson as Prime Minister. Taking aim at the Government's abandonment of socialist principle, Foot succeeded in demonstrating his own unfamiliarity with the policy issues that the Government foundered upon, notably the run on sterling:

Perhaps the saddest personal aspect of [a speech by Wilson in July 1968] was its complete abandonment of the cheeky language with which Wilson had, on occasions, mocked the received doctrines of the Bank of England, and sterling speculators.

Foot's concern was to present Wilson as the creature of the scheming Lord Cromer, Governor of the Bank of England and guardian of financial rectitude. The reality was somewhat different. There was a perfectly sensible option available to Wilson in his discussions with Lord Cromer (and which according to Edmund Dell's The Chancellors he actually threatened), which was to float sterling, whereupon the Government's policy mix would have become internally consistent and thereby invulnerable to pressure from the currency markets. The policy that Wilson in fact adopted was inconsistent, because he was then unable to target the exchange rate while at the same time having his other policy goals (too many policy goals for the instruments available to target them). Foot's is a poor book because it scarcely begins to consider the policy debates that exercised his subject - economically the best-qualified Prime Minister ever to hold office, who produced an almost incomparably bad record in economic management (exceeded only by Heath and Barber).

The 1970s were the period of Foot's greatest activity as a propagandist for Socialist Worker. The deadening of his prose and the crudeness of his analysis are exemplified in his booklet written for the launch of the Socialist Workers' Party (a grandiose scheme of the party founder Tony Cliff, heedless of the minuscule size of the membership) from its origins in the International Socialists, Why You Should be a Socialist (1977). Here he is depicting 'Capitalism - Class and Crisis':

Go down to a Tory Party conference or listen in to a BBC current affairs programme any week and you will hear the argument for the profit system. It is that there are only a few people in our society with initiative and enterprise.... Unless we allow these people to have the maximum 'incentive', they won't use their initiative and enterprise.

Well, no, that isn't the argument - or at least, it's only a minor argument - for 'the profit system'. The argument more properly has to do with knowledge and co-ordination, not incentives, and is well known not only to economic liberals such as Friedrich von Hayek but to socialist economists as well. As one of the best of those socialist economists, Alec Nove, wrote in The Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983), concerning the Soviet experience:

If millions of prices are to be fixed, whoever determines or approves them must collect information (on costs and demand) , information which needs cross-checking, in view of the possible interest of the information-providers in higher prices.... Furthermore, even if it were decided that prices should be flexibly adjusted to changes in supply-demand relationships, it would be quite impracticable to do this administratively, that is, through price control by the government and/or the planners. There would simply be far too many prices to control.

The problem that the 'profit system' (more accurately, the system of shifting relative prices) addresses is, in short, not a fabrication of Tory Party conferences. Of that problem, you will read not a word in Paul Foot's writings, and that's a fundamental omission. But at least you can attribute that to nothing more serious than the author's unwillingness to read the case of those he dismisses. It's a different matter when Foot claims:

Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, is usually painted as a tyrant. In fact he was the opposite.

By the time of a new edition of this booklet, The Case for Socialism (1990), this preposterous - and for Foot's reputation, humiliating - remark had become:

The thousands of intellectuals then and since who abused Lenin as a 'tyrant' and a 'dictator' cannot have read The State and Revolution, which again and again repeats that socialism and democracy are indivisible.

That's like saying, "Those who describe Stalin as a dictator can't have read the Soviet constitution of 1936." It is of course true that The State and Revolution envisages a post-revolutionary order without compulsion, still less repression (save for a brief period of "the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of wage slaves of yesterday"). That was not, however, the post-revolutionary order that Lenin created. It never could have been, because it envisaged a social unity in which "all take part in the administration of the state". In this vision, there was no concept of opposition; when massive opposition in fact arose, Lenin imposed a police state to crush it. I wish I could say that the means of doing so are well-known, but they aren't. Former Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev has made it the work of what remains of his life to document the cruelty of the system this produced, and he has published his findings in A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Among innumerable horrifying statistics and anecdotes contained in the book, this one stands out for me:

Documents show that even after the campaign for "thinning out" [yes, that's some euphemism - OK] the concentration camps in July 1921, the camps in Tambov province still held more than 450 hostages aged one to ten.

One of the reasons this stuff is still not widely known among the general public is that wise and good men in the East, such as Yakovlev, still have to contend with the durable romantic illusions of frivolous men in the West, such as Foot. If admiration for the creator of this abominable system had been a mere idiosyncrasy on Foot's part, then some allowance might be made for it. But again and again in Foot's writings one comes across sentiments that are callous as well as shallow. In his 1989 booklet Ireland: Why Britain Must Get Out (in the short-lived Chatto CounterBlast series), he dismissed fears of a "bloodbath" in Northern Ireland after the withdrawal of British troops:

In the past, British governments, after deciding to withdraw from colonies, have not been overly squeamish about bloodbaths. When Britain left India there was a bloodbath. When Britain left the Central African Federation there was a bloodbath. Yet no one but the most oddball reactionaries argued then (or argue now) that Britain should not have left those places.

Let us, for sake of argument, accept Foot's ahistorical designation of Northern Ireland as a British colony. Let us also overlook his failure to mention that in India there was of course not only bloodshed but partition - exactly what Foot erroneously believed his proposal for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland would avoid. Even then, is it not striking how easily he accepts the prospect of loss of life to accord with his own political proposals? Does that not say something about the quality of the proposal, even if it is just that human values are incommensurable?

In his Guardian columns after 9/11 Foot kept on displaying a reactionary casuistry rather than an appreciation of the import of political violence. Exactly a week after the attacks he wrote this about suicide terrorism:

I much prefer the advice of Leon Trotsky who became a socialist largely out of hostile reaction to the individual terrorism and assassinations practised by so many rebels against Russian tsarism in his youth ... "In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish their mission."

And that, for Foot, was sufficient judgement on the issue. The notion that suicide terrorism is a moral abomination because it targets civilian life doesn't enter into it; the salient characteristic about the act of slamming aeroplanes into office blocks and killing thousands of civilians is that it imbues the masses with false consciousness.

In March 2002 Foot amplified his views on suicide terrorism:

The violence of the Israeli army and police in [the West Bank] is the violence of the oppressor, and the consequent violence of the Palestinians is the resistance of the oppressed. Anyone who favours the Israeli occupation of the areas, or the settlements, or who denies the right of violent resistance to the Palestinians is siding unequivocally with the oppressor against the oppressed.

This is a statement not of support for terrorism, but of ideological apology for it. It insidiously invokes a vapid slogan - "resistance of the oppressed" - to obfuscate a specific type of act: suicide-bombing of buses, shopping malls, discotheques and restaurants. If there is to be a territorial settlement comprising sovereign and independent states of Israel and Palestine living peacefully alongside each other, then it most certainly requires "denying the right of violent resistance" to those who target civilian life. It requires an assertion of the necessity of politics, and of politics alone.

Foot's position was not only ethically flawed but also intellectually idle. In October 2001, as Parliament voted in favour of military action in Afghanistan, Foot asserted:

Appeasement of Israel has been the lynchpin of US and British policy in the Middle East, and is obviously connected, at whatever distance, to the terrorist attacks on September 11.

At whatever distance. I must remember that formulation the next time I'm challenged on links between Saddam and al-Qaeda. It's impervious to being falsified: whatever distance you travel, you can always travel further and thereby maintain that the connection exists even if it's not been uncovered yet. For good measure, I could always claim that evidence is unnecessary because the phenomena I'm trying to establish links between are "obviously connected".

Of course there is in some sense a connection between Western policy on Israel and al-Qaeda's murderous ideology. That's because Israel is a Jewish state and al-Qaeda urges holy war on Jews. There is nothing, literally nothing, that Israel can do to meet al-Qaeda's minimal requirements, because the minimal requirement is death. But that's the point: al-Qaeda's programme is not a set of negotiable grievances but an apocalyptic pursuit of the annihilation of western civilisation. That isn't merely what al-Qaeda is accused of: it's what al-Qaeda says. As Peter Bergen explains in the first and best book to have been published about Osama bin Laden after 9/11, Holy War Inc:

Bin Laden articulates an all-encompassing world view with a much wider appeal than simple hatred of Israel. Of course, he is opposed to Israel, but he also calls for the end of US military actions against Iraq; demands the creation of a 'Muslim' nuclear weapon; claims it is a religious obligation to attack American military and civilian targets worldwide because of the continued presence of US troops in the Gulf; criticises the governments of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia for not instituting what he sees as true Islamic law; and supports a multitude of holy wars around the globe.

The unintended irony of Foot's piece is his assertion, after listing half a dozen of his own complaints about the international order:

That doesn't excuse the fanatical and suicidal terrorism of September 11. But it helps to explain it.

No, it doesn't. Foot's catechism doesn't even begin to explain Islamist terrorism, because it doesn't attempt to examine critically what the Islamists actually stand for. It's a conceptual as well as a moral evasion.

Nick Cohen concludes his commendation of Foot for beatification with a tribute to his late friend's enthusiasm for Romantic poetry:

Red Shelley, published in 1980, remains one of the finest interventions in literary criticism of our time. Shelley, another revolutionary who came from the establishment, was a comrade. Foot rescued his reputation from the critics and syllabus setters who sought to portray him as a love poet and showed him to be what he was, a poet of rebellion.

Red Shelley may rank as the worst book published on a literary subject since the war. There is a tradition of the man of letters illuminating our understanding of literature through exposition of his own insights (think of Chesterton on Browning and Dickens). Foot's work belongs instead to the tradition of the dilettante determined to wrench his literary enthusiasms to his own image. It emulates the misplaced ingenuity of Churchill's minister Duff Cooper in writing Sergeant Shakespeare, an attempt to prove from internal evidence that Shakespeare must have had extensive military experience. Foot's Shelley is "a man with revolutionary ideas" that by a remarkable coincidence turn out to be Paul Foot's ideas:

Shelley wanted the truth about repression and exploitation to go ringing through each heart and brain, so that each heart and brain would unite in action to end that repression and exploitation. So, particulanly in his later poems, he concentrated all his mastery of language, all his genius with rhyme and rhythm into translating the ideas of the revolution to the masses.

After 160 years he survives for us not as a lyric poet but as one of the most eloquent agitators of all time. That is why we must read him, learn him, teach him to our children. He will help us to communicate our contempt for the corporate despotism under which we live and our faith in the revolutionary potential of the multitude.

To say this is a misreading of Shelley is to understate the case. Foot's wider incomprehension is of poetry itself. In his political prose, Shelley explicitly rejected Foot's "ideas of the revolution". He believed in social reform by peaceful means. In his Declaration of Rights he wrote:

No man has a right to disturb the public peace by personally resisting the execution of a law, however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason to promote its repeal.

If we're going to play at snatching a poet's reputation to bolster modern political views, I think I'll appropriate Shelley for David Blunkett's stress on social improvement through a building of moral character. Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam both stress a moral revolution in concert with a change in the temporal order. Prometheus Unbound expresses a liberal politics of forgiveness, not revolution, and an awareness of the destructiveness of revolt. With these words Prometheus repents of the curse that he had called down on Jupiter:

It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;/ Grief for a while is blind, and so was mine./ I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

Foot's exposition of Shelley's poetical worth is as philistine in its way as the right-wing populism that decries experimental art. The value of poetry lies not in "translating ideas to the masses" but in creating worlds of imaginative experience for the reader and allowing him to explore them. Certainly poetry and other forms of literature have the power to shape our external world and influence our ideas of how that world should be ordered. But literature makes us at home in the world by explicating how things feel - the life of the mind and the emotions - as well as by explaining how the world is.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Clive James, then television critic of The Observer, watched an edition of the BBC programme Question Time and wrote about the contrast between two members of the panel:

Paul Foot sat relaxed under his re-entry vehicle hairstyle and pithily made points. The admiral [Lord Hill-Norton], burdening himself with that upper-class drawl by which near inarticulacy presumes to disguise itself as a stiff upper lip, could not convey even the simplest opinion in under five minutes and looked outraged when Robin [Day] cut him short. Yet forced to choose between the admiral's view of life and Paul Foot's most people would probably choose the admiral's, if only because it shows fewer signs of having been hatched in a cosy upper-middle-class incubator. Paul is absolutely certain that outmoded institutions must be swept away. You have to be brought up in sheltered circumstances to have that absolute certainty.

Press coverage over the past week has underlined that Paul Foot was held in high regard and affection by very many people. If he had ever managed to escape his absolute certainty borne of sheltered circumstances, presumably there would be fewer of them.

UPDATE: A correspondent quite correctly upbraids me for my hyperbolic description of the ranking of Foot's book Red Shelley. There are, of course, many bad books on literary subjects, and I was meaning to exclude the obvious crank theories such as those on the authorship of Shakespeare (on which subject my favourite of all web sites does a valiant job of refuting the literary equivalents of the UFO conspiracy theorists). Let us say merely that Red Shelley is a bad book that perpetrates anachronisms, unwarranted inferences and misinterpretations. I'll try and post a longer explanation for that judgement later in the week, as I am an enthusiast for Shelley, but note here merely that by imposing a retrospective taxonomy of Shelley's political beliefs (e.g. a misconceived attempt to explicate the poet's wavering attitude to means of social change), Foot ends up looking at the wrong bits entirely. The essence of Prometheus Unbound, for example, is not the overthrow of Jupiter by Demogorgon (and Demogorgon is not the masses), but the hymns of transcendental humanism that make up the fourth act.

"Vanessa's loonies"

The erstwhile Times columnist Bernard Levin used to have a catch-all term "Vanessa's loonies" to denote the fringe of the political fringe. It was certainly an unsophisticated and arguably a puerile term, but you have to employ something like that from time to time.

On the letters page of the Sunday Telegraph Vanessa Redgrave demonstrates the point once more in defending her brother Corin. I have no insight into whether the Workers' Revolutionary Party was financed by Libya, as she denies, but the Redgrave siblings' political realism may be inferred from this accompanying judgement:

Mr [Kevin] Myers has every right to express his views, to wit, my brother and I are lunatics baying at the moon, that the WRP (which we left in 1986) was vile, evil, etc. He did not mention that Trotsky exposed to the world all the horrors of Stalin's regime before any writer in the West.

Perhaps instead of 'exposed to the world' she meant to say 'was responsible for'. It would make more sense.

Trotsky declared in a speech on 29 June 1918:

... now let [the former ruling classes] clean [the dirt] which they are leaving behind, until such time as they join the working class in the pursuit of a common goal.... Let every bourgeois house be marked as one in which so many families live who lead a parasitic mode of life, and we shall post yellow tickets on these houses.

Ah yes, those yellow signifying marks for enemies of the state....

Here's a comment from the same author, from 1930:

If the realisation of communism should require the sacrifice of Jewry in its entirety, this would be the most beautiful mission that could ever fall to the lot of any people.

Both statements are quoted by Leonard Schapiro in his review article 'Trotsky as he really was', originally published in Government and Opposition, volume 17, Summer 1982, and reprinted in the posthumous collection Russian Studies (1986).

Death and liberalism

I'd intended to defer my critical assessment of the late Paul Foot's writings till at least his funeral, but may post sooner. I should explain my reasoning on both points.

I maintain it's desirable, after the death of a popular political figure or commentator whom you do not esteem, usually to delay an attack till after the eulogies. In this I disagree with Foot, who wrote in his Guardian column three days after the death of Ronald Reagan:

Almost exactly 10 years ago, I wrote this column in some dismay at the eulogies for the dead former US president (and crook), Richard Nixon. Instead of the day of mourning called for by President Clinton, I suggested a day of rejoicing. I feel very much the same about the oceans of drivel pouring out in honour of the dead former president, Ronald Reagan.

The reason I take this view is not sentimentality or even a concern with people's feelings, but something more pragmatic. Those who adhere to (in the broadest sense) liberal principles acknowledge the limits of politics. We recognise that there is a private sphere into which the public realm may not intrude. Within a very broad range, a person's political opinions or actions are a firmly subordinate part of his personality, even if he happens to be a politician. Those who hold to illiberal views of Left or Right do not recognise that distinction. To them, the public sphere is central. In totalitarian ideologies, such as Leninism or fascism (or the amalgam of the two that I wrote about last week), it is defining: a social unity in which we have our own choices guided by the General Will. It's because the death of Richard Nixon (a man I consider, incidentally, to have been a disastrous President even without taking Watergate into account) or Ronald Reagan involved a private citizen first and a public servant second that I deprecate Foot's comment. What's wrong with it is not that attacking a politician is illegitimate - quite the opposite - but that it refuses to recognise the primacy of private and family relations even among those one passionately disagrees with. In insisting upon the distinction that the ideologues reject, we express our values.

The distinction can't always be upheld, but the exceptions are extreme cases outside democratic politics. I had no hesitation in immediately welcoming and rejoicing in the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons. But the reason I believe that was the proper response was not merely that they were evil men: it was that their deaths had a huge significance for politics now. They made the cause of our totalitarian enemies in Iraq and elsewhere more difficult. That isn't a case remotely comparable to politicians constrained by the conventions or statutes of constitutional democracies. It isn't even comparable to evil men who are no longer politically dangerous. My response to the death of Idi Amin was indifference. How can it be otherwise when the monumental, pitiless damage has already been done? Can you imagine a day of rejoicing on the death of Stalin?

I hope I've explained that there is serious issue of liberal principle, and no sentimentality, involved in this issue. I should add that one of the reasons it's worth explicitly stating this approach is that on one occasion this blog did not follow my own maxim. Not long after I had launched this site as a vehicle for militant liberalism, and being hopeful of attracting a readership, I posted a hostile assessment of Edward Said on the day of his death. I don't resile in any respect from my judgement of either his cultural criticism or his politics, but I regret having posted it when I did.

In the case of Paul Foot, I've decided to post shortly (it will probably be the post after this one, and within 24 hours) - for two reasons, plus a trivial one. First, a certain time has elapsed in which many eulogies have already been delivered publicly. Secondly, I appear to be the only person in the world, at least among those who write either in the press or in web logs, who is unmoved by them. My own contribution is in these circumstances of a high order of insignificance. Thirdly, one of my more excitable correspondents has been unable to prevent himself from serial ventilation of his conviction, on grounds that remain opaque, that there is something nefarious in disclosing my conclusion in advance of my reasoning. I naturally do not wish to prolong his mental anguish on the matter.

If there is any writer who can convince me that my judgement of Paul Foot is wrong, then it is someone of independent judgement and uncompromisingly democratic politics. It is, in fact, Nick Cohen, who in The Observer argues that Paul Foot was irredeemable:

'Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,' said George Orwell. Paul Foot, militant atheist, revolutionary socialist and a man who couldn't listen to a pious sentiment without barking out a guffaw, would have agreed. It is only when the risk of hearing his exasperated laughter passed with his wretchedly early death last week that anyone could dare make the prosecution case that Foot had shown suspicious signs of saintliness for decades.

I am willing to believe this of anyone in private life if those affected tell me so, for the private life of a stranger is none of my business. It is in the public campaigning and writings that the case for the defence rests, and it's probably time it was stated.

Hobsbawm again

My post immediately below, on Eric Hobsbawm, has been appended with comments that are well worth commenting on in turn.

I referred to the pamphlet Hobsbawm co-authored with Raymond Williams on Stalin's invasion of Finland, and to Hobsbawm's lamenting in his memoir that he had been unable to find a copy of this pamphlet in the intervening six decades. Unfortunately for him, the pamphlet has not been lost; Paul Anderson, a Tribune contributor, owns a copy and has posted here some extraordinary quotations from it. Paul has also very kindly sent me a scan of the pamphlet, and I have spent an incredulous hour reading it.

The quotations are representative of an argument whose evasions have to be read to be believed. Nowhere in the pamphlet - literally nowhere - is there an acknowledgement, even implicit, of the reason for war. The issue is presented entirely as one of western aggressive designs against the Soviet Union. (The notion that Stalin's aggression represented merely a border dispute was also debunked by Molotov when he insisted in this context that "the Soviet system ... shall reign everywhere". As the American historian R.C. Raack comments in Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-1945 (1995): "In other words, the real reason for the Finnish war ... was not simply to expand the Soviet state to former tsarist borders but to expand the Soviet system.")

Another contributor writes:

It might be worth adding as a footnote that Raymond Williams left the Communist Party during World War II, as he began to see the extent of Stalinist repression, and also objecting to the party's political screening of his fiancée. It is perfectly obvious that Williams articulated his objections to Hobsbawm, making the latter’s continued party adherence even more reprehensible.

It's certainly true that Williams gives a much more revealing account of the writing of this pamphlet than Hobsbawm does. (On my reading, however, the quotation from Williams that I give below is unintentionally revealing, and redounds to Williams's permanent discredit.) In Politics and Letters (1979), a collection of interviews he gave to New Left Review, Williams says this in answer to a question on what he did for the Communist Party while he was at Cambridge (emphasis added):

You were put into a group according to the subject you were reading: there you would discuss the intellectual problems of the subject. Ours was called the Writers' Group, because we were in the English Faculty. In that capacity we were often called to do rush jobs in propaganda. An example of the sort of task one was given was the pamphlet Eric Hobsbawm and I were assigned to write on the Russo-Finnish War, which argued that it was really a resumption of the Finnish Civil War of 1918 which had been won by Mannerheim and the Whites. We were given the job as people who could write quickly, from historical materials supplied for us. You were often in there writing about topics you did not know very much about, as a professional with words. The pamphlets were issued from on top, unsigned.

Everyone is entitled to make mistakes in youthful political activity. But Professor Eric Hobsbawm, Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has had 64 years in which to acknowledge this one.

Finally, Observer columnist Nick Cohen sends fraternal greetings:

I can't find the exact reference, but somewhere in Interesting Times Hobsbawm says that on his first and only visit to Stalin's Soviet Union he was 'surprised' by how few intellectuals he came across in Moscow. WRONG PART OF RUSSIA, ERIC! If you wanted intellectuals, you should have gone to Siberia. Ho hum. I shouldn't be too harsh. My grandfather was his party commissar. I must therefore end with a Fraternally yours, Nick

Exactly. It's on page 199, where Hobsbawm comments:

It was an interesting but also a dispiriting trip for foreign communist intellectuals, for we met hardly anyone there like ourselves.

Admittedly, Hobsbawm does indicate an awareness that the absences of some of those he and his colleagues had asked to meet were not entirely due to health problems. But he does so at a terrible cost, for he reflects immediately afterwards, in one of the most depressing sentences I have ever read:

At all events I am certain that, standing by the Finland Station in the marvellous winter light of that miraculous city I shall never get used to calling St Petersburg, what we thought about the October Revolution was not the same as what our guides from the Leningrad branch of the Academy of Sciences thought.

Never mind the reality: we stick with the dream.

It takes an intellectual to find excuses for Stalinism

The following article appears in The Times today.

THIS week Prospect magazine announced the outcome of a readers’ poll to identify the top five public intellectuals in Britain. In fourth place was the octogenarian historian Eric Hobsbawm. The oddity of this rests in the magazine’s stated criterion for a public intellectual: “We are stressing current contributions — by which we mean the past five to ten years.” Readers thus voted for Professor Hobsbawm not for his scholarly works of 19th-century history, but for his serial attempts in the past decade to exculpate a lifetime’s commitment to the Communist Party of Great Britain.

In his memoir Interesting Times (2002), Hobsbawm writes of his fellow student Communists of the 1930s: “Hardness, indeed ruthlessness, doing what had to be done, before, during and after the revolution was the essence of the Bolshevik.” He means it descriptively rather than approvingly — yet the principle has stayed with him. According to the historian Robert Conquest, Hobsbawm was asked by Michael Ignatieff in a BBC interview in 1994: “What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?” He replied: “Yes.”

Hobsbawm concedes that greater knowledge of Stalinist Russia would not have dissuaded its partisans, but maintains irrelevantly: “Of course we did not, and could not, envisage the sheer scale of what was being imposed on the Soviet peoples.” Perhaps not the scale, but certainly the character of Stalin’s repression was well known to readers of such esoteric material as the American Saturday Evening Post, which published the memoirs of the Soviet defector and former intelligence officer Walter Krivitsky in 1939. It took an intellectual not to see it.

HOBSBAWM has rarely missed an opportunity even after communism’s demise to obfuscate its record. “One might also claim,” he proffers demurely in The Age of Extremes (1994), “that in the Bolshevik Party constructed by Lenin, orthodoxy and intolerance were to some extent implanted not as values in themselves but for pragmatic reasons.” The notion that Lenin — of whom Bertrand Russell remarked after meeting him, “His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold” — was not merely pragmatically intolerant but congenitally bloodthirsty is too unsophisticated a thesis to merit Hobsbawm’s consideration.

Moving to more recent panegyric, Hobsbawm remarks in On History (1997): “Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.” He means the 27 Soviet divisions, 6,300 tanks and 400,000 troops sent into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to snuff out political reform.

Though Prospect is interested only in recent work, the seeds of Hobsbawm’s obtuseness lie much farther back. In his memoir he accords a fleeting mention to a pamphlet he wrote at Cambridge with the future literary critic, Raymond Williams, on the Russo-Finnish War. Hobsbawm laments: “Alas, (the pamphlet) has been lost in the alarums and excursions of the century. I have been unable to rediscover a copy.” This is just as well, because the Russo-Finnish War consisted in Stalin’s invasion of Finland two months after his non-aggression pact with Hitler. As loyal Communists, Hobsbawm and Williams supported both the invasion and the pact.

Prospect’s “five intellectuals” are to be accorded dinner with a Cabinet minister and a newspaper editor, with the conversation recorded for the magazine. If Hobsbawm’s interlocutors have any gumption, they will refuse to sit with him.

The Red and the Brown

I have not yet commented on the death of the journalist Paul Foot, but shall be posting in due course a review of his writings. As my conclusion is hostile, I'll leave more time to elapse before doing so - and will at this point acknowledge that I consider at least one of his political books to be prescient and valuable. In The Rise of Enoch Powell, published in 1969, Foot did a fine and original job in dissecting the record of a vastly overrated politician, and his overall judgement of the man could scarcely be bettered. Alluding to Powell's speeches on immigration and race over the previous year, Foot stated:

The truth was that this 'austere' politician, who over more than twenty years of public life had established for himself a reputation for altruism and integrity, had embarked on one of the most dangerous and opportunist escapades in the history of British politics.

Beyond that, having little favourable to say, I shall say little more for the moment. But it is always sad to find a stylish writer reduced to enervating and unintentionally comic prose of the type required by a totalitarian ideology. (Try this, from Foot's brochure for the newly-established Socialist Workers' Party in 1977, Why You Should be a Socialist: "Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, is usually painted as a tyrant. In fact he was the opposite.") And for someone with a much-vaunted enthusiasm for English literature, it was striking how little of the canon he had read that challenged his political views.

In the many encomia that Foot has received, there is not quite an embarrassed silence about his activism for the SWP and its predecessors over 40 years but at least the sense that this was an idiosyncrasy founded on admirable qualities. He was a "passionately committed socialist of the old school", according to The Times; "part of the conscience of the Left", according to The Standard. It's probably therefore worth pointing out that the "socialism of the old school" that the SWP represents is not the democratic socialism of, say, Michael Foot or Fenner Brockway, still less the astringent anti-totalitarianism of Ernest Bevin or George Orwell, but Leninism. The Leninism of the SWP, moreover, is of a type that I consider deserves a more specific ideological description, and that is the subject of this post.

The obituaries also described Paul Foot as an anti-war campaigner, but this was not true. As I have pointed out before, the SWP - the moving force behind the Stop the War Coalition and the Respect Coalition - didn't so much object to the Iraq war as believe the wrong side won it. It explicitly favoured military victory for Saddam Hussein, a tyrant who modelled his regime on that of Nazi Germany. Party ideologue Paul McGarr wrote in Socialist Worker, 23 March 2003:

The best response to war would be protests across the globe which make it impossible for Bush and Blair to continue. But while war lasts by far the lesser evil would be reverses, or defeat, for the US and British forces. That may be unlikely, given the overwhelming military superiority they enjoy. But it would be the best outcome in military terms.

Allying with tyranny in preference to supporting the western democracies is, of course and unfortunately, hardly novel for the far Left. But I want to argue something more. The SWP stands in a more specific and identifiable position of far-Left support for fascism. There are innumerable historical instances of where the term 'fascist Left' has become a literal and not merely metaphorical description. Not only Mussolini, but the French statesman and arch-collaborator Pierre Laval was a pro-Lenin and anti-war socialist in 1914-18. Laval's compatriot the Communist leader Jacques Doriot founded a pro-Nazi and antisemitic party in the 1930s, and was the political mentor of John Amery, the British traitor (and son of the Cabinet Minister Leo Amery) hanged after the war. German Communists actively supported the Nazis in the Prussian referendum of 1931 and the transport strike of 1932. Between 1929 and 1933 the Japanese Communist Party (including members of the Central Committee of the Comintern) adopted en masse the doctrines of race and nation.

Regular readers of this blog may recall a long series of posts last year in which I discussed the neo-Nazi ideology of the terrorist Left associated with the Red Army Fraction in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Again, I mean 'neo-Nazi' literally: there are few other terms adequate to describe those who bombed a Berlin synagogue on the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1969 in order to protest against Israeli policies, or who supported the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games three years later. The principal leftist spokesman who extolled the Munich massacre, Horst Mahler, is these days a spokesman for the far-Right party National Democratic Party, which the German government recently (and unsuccessfully) tried to ban on suspicion of its being implicated in the firebombing of the homes of Turkish immigrants.

I thought I knew Mahler's political history well, but a new book, Bringing the War Home - a study of the revolutionary violence in the US and Germany in this period - by the American historian Jeremy Varon, has taught me something I didn't know. Mahler had another political incarnation before becoming an overt Nazi:

Horst Mahler broke with the [Red Army Fraction] in 1974 and affiliated with traditional Marxism-Leninism.... Mahler ultimately lumped terrorism with unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, and criminality as expressions of a society in crisis. Far from being the "cure" for capitalism's pathologies, the RAF was itself one of capitalism's pathologies.

It is my considered view that the SWP is best described as a fascist party of the Left, even without taking into account the Islamist connections that have brought the party such scorn on the liberal Left. It has, moreover, a striking characteristic in common with the far Right: an increasingly overt antisemitism. I am indebted to a correspondent who has brought to my attention a recent instance of this campaigning. The SWP'S recent jamboree, Marxism 2004, was graced by the presence of someone billed as "acclaimed jazz musician Gilad Atzmon". Atzmon was interviewed in Socialist Worker last month under the heading "Zionism is My Enemy", and very predictable he was too:

GILAD ATZMON wanders on stage in Brighton tugging on a customary cigarette. "Smoking kills," he announces. "But Blair kills more." On clarinet or saxophone, Gilad is now among the top UK-resident jazz musicians, winning awards and plaudits from all corners. Last year his Exile album won both the Radio 3 and Time Out awards for jazz album of the year. But Gilad's fearless tirades against Zionism-the ideology behind the Israeli state-have cost him in terms of lost gigs and constant vigilance about personal security. He describes his composition "Jenin" as a warning to what he calls "the BBS axis of evil"-Bush, Blair and Sharon. "I want to see the world as a BBS-free zone. I am working towards that aim," he says.

The interview concludes with a common euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish state, ardently wished for by this former Israeli reservist:

As to the future of Palestine, Gilad has no doubts over the way forward. "Only one way round this problematic issue. One-state solution," he says. "In other words, full equality and a conclusive right of return for the Palestinian people."

Socialist Worker helpfully appends the information:

Gilad Atzmon will speak and perform on Tuesday 13 July at the Marxism 2004 festival and conference in London. You can find out more about his life and work at his website.

Well, here is Atzmon's web site. If you go to the selection of articles under the heading 'Politics', it will take your breath away. Here is Atzmon "review[ing] some current typical Zionist arguments" (emphasis added):

Zionists complain that Jews continue to be associated with a conspiracy to rule the world via political lobbies, media and money. Is the suggestion of conspiracy really an empty accusation? The following list is presented with pride in several Jewish American websites. [There follows a list of Jewish members of the Bush administration.]

Let me assure you, in Clinton's administration the situation was even worse. Even though the Jews only make up 2.9 per cent of the country's population, an astounding 56 per cent of Clinton's appointees were Jews. A coincidence? I don't think so.

We have to ask ourselves what motivates American Jews to gain such political power. Is it a genuine care for American interests? Soon, following the growing number of American casualties in Iraq, American people will start to ask themselves this very question.

Since America currently enjoys the status of the world's only super power and since all the Jews listed above declare themselves as devoted Zionists, we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously. It is beyond doubt that Zionists, the most radical, racist and nationalistic Jews around, have already managed to turn America into an Israeli mission force. The world's number one super power is there to support the Jewish state's wealth and security matters. The one-sided pro-Zionist take on the Israeli­ Palestinian conflict, the American veto against every 'anti-Israeli' UN resolution, the war against Iraq and now the militant intentions against Syria, all prove beyond doubt that it is Zionist interests that America is serving. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least. Whether the Americans enjoy the deterioration of their state's affairs will no doubt be revealed soon.

I am thick of skin and firm of constitution, but I find myself almost physically sickened by sentiments like these. According to this man, there is a Jewish conspiracy to control the world that accords with the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. And to him, the authenticity of the Protocols is a matter of "debate"!

In discussing Jewish concerns about the Mel Gibson film on the passion of Christ, Atzmon makes it clear who the trangressor is: it's the Jews, who are once again crucifying Jesus:

Perhaps the Zionist tendency to associate themselves with their ancestors can help us to understand the oppression and the atrocities against the Palestinian people in terms of a repetition of Christ's via dolorosa, the way of suffering. Apparently the Palestinian people are today's Jesus....

Mr. [Abram] Foxman [of the Anti-Defamation League] realises very well that such an interpretation of Gibson's film will lead western people towards some rethinking. A pang of conscience towards the Palestinians['] misery is inevitable. I would guess that Mr. Foxman and his Zionists allies realise that the artificial myth of Judo-Christian [sic] companionship is about to collapse. Again, it isn't that surprising. A brief reading of the history of those rival beliefs reveals a story rich in bitter conflicts. We are talking here about two distinct worldviews. The differentiation is clearly reflected in the quotes above [from Foxman and Gibson]. While Foxman's reaction is pretty precise, addressing the favourite Jewish topic of economy of hatred, Christianity as it is reflected in Gibson's response is all about "love for each other".

There's more. Much, much more. But you get the idea. My correspondent who drew this stuff to my attention makes the following apt point:

Would an organisation, or a publication, that wasn't anti-Semitic interview someone like this without ever once drawing attention to these views, other than to describe them as "fearless"? No, is my guess.

Mine too, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Yes, Stephen, you were wrong

It's unappealing, I know, but I am the King of Smug. A day after I told Stephen Pollard that he had been wrong, he writes that he was wrong:

Ok, I've linked to a piece about road pricing and I maintain that Ken Livingstone deserves praise for his implementation of road pricing in London.

But I have to admit that I was wrong to support his re-election as mayor.

All credit to him. I was interested that a number of commentators I respect - Anatole Kaletsky in The Times was another - argued for supporting Livingstone for Mayor on the single issue of road pricing. To them, I would say that there is more to life than economics. I am forever influenced by my recollection of Livingstone's tenure as leader of the Greater London Council in the early 1980s. In 1982, at a demonstration against Israel's war in Lebanon, he expressed the view that Israel had no right to exist as a Jewish state, because Judaism is a religion not a nationality. I will not on this occasion go into the misconceptions that generated his judgement, but merely repeat an observation made at the time by an SDP councillor and Times columnist Ann Sofer (who unlike Livingstone had actually been elected to her position: she had resigned as a Labour councillor and fought a by-election). Mrs Sofer observed (and I paraphrase from memory) that in a great and polyglot capital city, you cannot responsibly have the leader of the seat of municipal government espousing a position that on this issue is identical to that of the National Front. I agree, and am not in the least surprised that Livingstone has ended up discrediting his office by confusing multiculturalism with genuflection towards bigotry.

(In order to anticipate comments that are not the direct subject of this post, I should perhaps add that from different premises I also protested against the Lebanon war, being then a sympathiser of the Israeli Peace Now organisation, which had recently been set up. I have since then, and on the evidence of the behaviour of Israel's interlocutors, changed my mind about Peace Now, for it promulgates the misleading impression that it is open to Israel unilaterally and immediately to create peace in the region. I wish that were so, for Israel would certainly then do it - but it isn't.)

That week in politics

Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph takes a more considered view of the Butler Report than many of his fellow Conservatives:

Butler reminds us that we did not go to war "on the basis of a lie". This was not only because the dossier was not a lie - a deliberate untruth, rather than a document with some flaws - but also because, true or not, it was not the basis for war. The Attorney-General made clear that the legal justification for war could not be self-defence against the threat from WMD, since this was not proved, but rather Saddam's breach of UN resolutions about his obligations to disarm. When the dossier was published, it was not presented as the case for war, but for international action of some sort....

His investigation shows that intelligence was occasionally wrong and more often wrongly used and that the information the JIC provided was politicised and distorted by being published. It implies that the JIC should have resisted this process more strongly, and it states that Mr Blair's style of government is too "informal", concentrating too much power on him. These are all serious criticisms. They do not show either that the war was wrong, or that Tony Blair is an evil, lying bastard.

Precisely - and well put. Moore's careful analysis also nicely contrasts with that of another stable of newspapers: the Standard carried as its banner headline, alluding to the earlier Hutton Report, "Whitewash (Part Two)", while a few pages further on the former BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan claimed that Butler had vindicated him - a nice instance of incoherence compounded by obtuseness.

There is a real problem with the style of government practised by New Labour, and it's one that - while I have every sympathy with the halting Blairite process of party reform - has been evident in the Prime Minister's language since he became party leader ten years ago. It has nothing specifically to do with Iraq; it is more comparable to the Prime Minister's embarrassing affectations of Britain's being a "young country", which in turn followed the Clinton administration's self-conscious informality. If you try to make afresh the practice of government and administration - particularly in the absence of a written constitution - by jettisoning checks, balances and conventions, you risk a great deal. In this case, it is clear that politics and government became enmeshed where they ought to have been kept separate.

Yet the best thing that this government has done in domestic policy has been to do the opposite in the single most important part of policy-making - that of monetary policy, which it has insulated from political pressure by devolving it to an independent body under the auspices of the Bank of England. In other areas of policy - huge discretionary intervention in fiscal policy, and an assumption of prime ministerial responsibility where benign neglect would have been preferable (e.g. the Northern Ireland peace process) - the government has gone the other way.

When, amid the controversy early in the life of this government regarding the Ecclestone affair (in which the government was accused of going soft on the banning of tobacco advertising on account of financial donations from an interested party), the Prime Minister issued an explicit appeal to be regarded as a "pretty straight kind of guy", he didn't grasp the import of the issue. Of course he is an honest man, and only the most prejudiced of partisans would doubt it; but the practice of government cannot be dependent on the character of its office-holders. It must be disinterested in procedure and not merely in personality. Under New Labour, it isn't. There is a suspicion of public service (in which I started my career, and which I learned to value) that is almost as intense as that of the later Thatcher years, when the Prime Minister's dependence on her personal advisers eroded the authority of her government. It derives in part, I believe, from an instinctive suspicion of what the Prime Minister - in a notorious and truly terrible Party Conference speech - once castigated as the forces of conservatism. The forces of conservatism, properly understood and effectively marshalled, would in fact be an aid to good government.

I am sorry that Labour lost Leicester South (where I grew up - my early political activity consisted in canvassing in the 1979 general election for the sitting Labour MP, Jim Marshall, whose premature death precipitated the by-election) to the Liberal Democrats, because I think Tony Blair is incomparably the most authoritative figure among the party leaders and deserves admiration for his handling of the Iraq war. (I should also congratulate Labour MP Tom Watson for his robust campaigning in the Hodge Hill by-election; apparently it annoyed a lot of Liberal Democrats, which saddens me greatly.) The obvious opportunism of Tory leader Michael Howard in complaining that he would not have voted for war on the basis of claims of Iraqi weaponry had he known the intelligence was flawed demonstrates the point. It brings to mind Christopher Hitchens' succinct summary, on the same issue, of the campaigning message of John Kerry: "Vote for me: I'm easily fooled."

But nothing, I believe, in the main parties' campaigns compares in disrepute to the opportunism of the Liberal Democrats. Having failed to get the conclusions the party wanted out of either Hutton or Butler, the party is now demanding yet another inquiry into the reasons we went to war. In short, the Liberal Democrats are demanding that politics be supplanted in favour of quasi-judicial processes until they get the result they want. It's a disturbingly anti-democratic approach, which was compounded by the party's behaviour in the Leicester South by-election. In that election, Charles Kennedy called, at a local Islamic centre, for Muslims to make a moral protest vote against the government for taking us to war (i.e. for taking a position that morality and liberal principle required). In doing so, he explicitly targeted a part of the electorate on the basis of its ethnicity or faith; I don't recall having seen that before, and it is a notable contribution to the Balkanisation of British politics. As a liberal, I certainly hope the party that disingenuously appropriates that name does not succeed.

Of the Respect Coalition, I shall write later in the week. At this point, I would note merely that its 12% support in Leicester is significantly lower than the support gained in the city by another extremist party, the National Front, in the 1970s. In the council elections of 1976, the National Front received 43,000 votes (i.e. from around 15,000 voters with three votes each) across the city, almost a fifth of those cast. Yet by the 1979 general election, the NF had all but evaporated as a political force, after energetic work from a commendable local campaign called Unity Against Racism. The significance of the NF was not its electoral support but its corrosive effect on community relations. That, I believe, is the sole significance - though that's hardly a trivial matter - of the Respect Coalition's intervention in Leicester. My plea, and my practice, is merely to call Respect by its proper name. Whereas euphemisms about the party abound ("left-wing anti-war party" appears to be a favourite), the moving force behind it is an alliance of heterogeneous totalitarianisms, of which one - the Socialist Workers' Party - distinguished itself in the anti-war movement by calling for military victory for Saddam Hussein. Those who take an interest in modern fascism will recall Jean-Marie Le Pen's trip to Baghdad in 1991 to shake hands with Saddam and express solidarity with him - and will draw the appropriate inference.