Oliver Kamm

Miliband reflects grimly on Labour's future

 

Steve Richards writes in The Independent:

Yesterday morning, Miliband proved he has a ruthless streak, one that can change the political landscape. The article in which he focused on the future of Labour without mentioning Gordon Brown ensured that the noise around the leadership question got a lot louder. More significantly, he would have known that this would be the consequence of his intervention. For the first time, the tumultuous speculation about Labour's future had acquired deadly definition.

He's right, of course. There is little purpose in Gordon Brown's lieutenants complaining of disloyalty to the leader. Nor is there much credibility in it, when you consider Brown's conduct towards Tony Blair from 1994 to 2007. David Miliband's bid for the leadership is a rational course, from his own point of view and that of the party.

It might have been prudent for Miliband to appear less jaunty in his response to press questions yesterday, but he is responding to a risk of unprecedented electoral defeat. Labour has suffered electoral meltdown before - in 1931 and 1983 - but has recovered to win landslide victories (coincidentally, 14 years later in each case). Labour faces heavy defeat again, and on a scale that might precipitate a decline like that of the French Communists - once the dominant force on the French Left, now a rump. In previous landslide defeats, Labour has at least been able to hold on to its regional redoubts. Even in 1983, the party still retained more than 200 seats. The party is now in uncharted territory. There is literally not a seat in the country that it could confidently expect to retain in a by-election. Scotland and Wales are no longer Labour strongholds. The party has lost the mayoralty of London to a Tory candidate who was widely (and clearly mistakenly) regarded as a joke when he launched his campaign.

(Incidentally, and on a point of autobiographical interest to me though no interest to anyone else, the reason I never supported the SDP in the 1980s - unlike many of my friends of similar political outlook - was a straight assessment that there could be no successful left-of-centre party independent of Labour. I don't claim this was a principled way of reasoning, and I don't think in retrospect that it was legitimate for an Atlanticist to vote Labour in the 1983 election, as I did, even knowing that the party had no chance of victory. But it was how I thought at the time about Labour's purported programme for government - alternately incredible and disgraceful. I do not think the same calculation would necessarily hold now.)

On Miliband's political draw, I recommend a column by my colleague Camilla Cavendish in The Times today. She writes:

The hole that Labour is in goes deeper than the economy. So it is important to understand what “platform for change” Mr Miliband is proposing. His pitch is that a refreshed Labour Party must combine “government action and personal freedom”. But he is shy about saying where the balance should be struck. To be fair, he has been saying for two years that people want more control over their lives, and that Labour must devolve more power to people. He said it again yesterday - but without a whit of detail. The only policies that he mentioned sounded strangely like a manifesto for more government - windfall taxes on utilities, family-friendly employment laws, state-funded childcare, and “more protection from a downturn made in Wall Street”. (By which he emphatically did not mean letting taxpayers keep more of their own money - one of his aides laughed when I made that suggestion.)

This is an acute observation. I do not perceive in David Miliband the Blairite impulse. In my view, Tony Blair was so keen to reconcile Labour to a market economy that he even went too far in consulting with corporate interests (which is not at all the same thing, business being merely one lobby among many). But it was a mistake in an understandable direction. I assume that, as Miliband does not mean an easing of the tax burden, he must mean some sort of regulatory change that would make the economy less vulnerable to ructions in the financial sector.

Heaven knows, I'm aghast at what's happened in the financial system. Unserviceable mortgages in the US were sold on to investors in various forms of asset-backed securities. The world's credit and monetary system has now seized up, with costs felt by ordinary consumers. But I wonder how far Miliband has thought through his proposed remedies, if indeed he has any. I don't mean that disparagingly. It's just that regulation in response to a financial crisis has a habit of not working as it's intended, while imposing unnecessary costs. On this and much else, Miliband's political instincts are not clear from the leadership pitch he's making. Labour's position is far too weak for such studied ambiguity.

Recalling Eric Varley

Lord Varley, former Energy Secretary and Industry Secretary in the Wilson and Callaghan Governments, died yesterday. The Guardian carries an interesting obituary by Geoffrey Goodman. I half-agree with Goodman's assessment:

It would be grossly unfair to describe Eric Varley, who has died aged 75 of cancer, as a premature Blairite: yet that is how some of his few surviving ministerial colleagues from the Wilson-Callaghan era might well perceive him as they reflect back across more than 30 years. Unfair perhaps, but, alas, unfairness is a timeless professional hazard of all political life.

To describe someone as a premature Blairite is, in my opinion but clearly not in Goodman's, the highest praise you could give to a politician. But I can think of literally none to whom it would apply. Blair is a politician sui generis; there is no one else like him in Labour's history. Varley was a capable minister within the constraints that he faced. But to recall the decisions and debates in which Varley was involved is to recall a different age in economic management.

As Goodman recalls, Varley swapped jobs in 1975 with Tony Benn, whose move to become Energy Secretary was widely and rightly interpreted as demotion. (The opportunity for his demotion by Harold Wilson, if not the proximate cause of it, was the Yes vote in the European referendum. Benn had been a leading campaigner on the No side, as well as a significant liability for it.) Benn was at this time forming what came to be known as the Alternative Economic Strategy - a programme for a command economy involving greater industrial investment, import controls and compulsory planning "agreements" with large companies.

Labour did not take that route, but an immense amount of money and time was wasted on schemes that were scarcely more credible. Varley did his best to limit the damage, though not always for the right reasons. Goodman puts the background succinctly:

Then as Varley was moving from energy to industry, less than a year before Wilson resigned and Callaghan took over in April 1976, the American-owned Chrysler motor company tossed a massive bombshell at the UK car industry and the government: Chrysler announced a plan to shut down their entire British operation, affecting plants employing some 25,000 jobs divided between Coventry and Linwood in Scotland. Wilson, supported by his cabinet colleague Harold Lever rapidly produced a £200m rescue plan, which Varley opposed in cabinet. He wanted to fight Chrysler's threat, which he saw as economic blackmail. But he was overruled, and had the task of steering the Wilson-Lever rescue scheme through parliament in the face of fierce Tory opposition, alongside Labour critics who wanted the government to take over the Chrysler UK operation in British Leyland-style. For Varley it was a no-win situation.

It was no win for the British economy either. Varley and Edmund Dell argued in Cabinet that it was madness to spend millions on rescuing Chrysler. The arguments that swayed Cabinet, however, were first that employment needed to be safeguarded by public funds; and secondly that Britain was at risk of "de-industrialisation". They were arguments entirely without merit, but they had a perverse political logic to them. Still more disreputable was the diplomatic pressure exerted by the Shah of Iran, and to which the Government acquiesced. Chrysler UK manufactured Hillman Hunter kits that were then assembled in Iran.

This was one of the craziest decisions taken by Labour in the 1970s. The Government spent £162 million to rescue Chrysler UK, and undertook to cover more than £70 million in losses over four years. In return, Chrysler agreed not to shut down its UK operations. It also undertook to take part in a planning "agreement" with the Government - a meaningless gesture that was ever after touted by the Bennites as an example of what industrial planning could achieve. 

Varley was right to oppose this. But his principal reason for doing so was that Chrysler was a direct competitor of British Leyland, to which the Government was also committed. In that year, 1978, Varley was pouring public money into the company, in the form of a £450 million aid package to support its corporate restructuring.

The amount of public money that ought to have been committed to British Leyland and in guarantees to Chrysler, either directly or through the misnamed National Enterprise Board, was zero. The principle of the industrial strategy was misconceived. Government was unable to pick industrial winners. All it succeeded in doing was throwing away public money. Varley went part of the way to acknowledging this. He deserves credit as one of the better ministers in a government whose principal achievement was to repair some of the damage that it had earlier inflicted.

Incidentally, the BBC report of Lord Varley's death states: "Among the other Labour Party figures paying tribute was Tony Benn, who succeeded Lord Varley as Energy Secretary in 1975 and also took over from him as Chesterfield MP in 1984 after boundary changes meant Mr Benn lost his Bristol South East constituency."

This is strictly true but misses out information that is worth recalling. Benn's constituency of Bristol South-East was indeed abolished, but Benn then sought the candidature in Bristol South. He failed to secure this against Michael Cocks, the Chief Whip - who was one of the few clear successes of the 1974-79 Government. Benn became instead the candidate for Bristol East. In the 1983 general election he lost that seat; he also, of course, lost the seats of scores of other Labour MPs and then did his level best to compound the damage. No wonder Varley retired from politics the next year. Varley was a minor figure in Labour's pantheon, but an honourable one in difficult times.

Selective memory

Peter Hitchens, writing in the Mail on Sunday, appears to be competing in a contest to see who can cite the most historical questions to which the answer is obviously "no":

What bothers me is the question that never seems to get answered – why Yugoslavia went from being a peaceful holiday destination into a pit of blood in less than five years.

Could it have been connected with the ruthless economic liberalisation forced on it by dogmatic Westerners at the end of the Cold War?

Might it have anything to do with Germany’s revived interest in the Balkans, and the hurried, railroaded EU recognition of Croatia as an independent state that suited German policy so well, but accelerated the bitter break-up of Yugoslavia?

Whatever you make of Hitchens's political views, to which I am exactly opposed in every essential and almost every particular, these are extraordinary remarks. You have to assume that Hitchens has never heard of Karadzic's Svengali, Slobodan Milosevic.

Milosevic became President of the Serbian League of Communists in 1986. He indicated his plans very early, by welcoming an open letter from the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts that called for a Greater Serbia, carved out of the terrorities of other republics. This was the signal for the resurgence of a vehement xenophobia and imperialism, which Milosevic confirmed in 1989 by revoking the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina. It was an obvious and deliberate incitement to Croatian independence that Serbia thereby became the dominant single player in the Yugoslav federation, with three votes out of eight.

The answer to the question why Yugoslavia became a battleground in the early 1990s is thus Slobodan Milosevic, er, ruthless economic liberaliser.

UPDATE: I originally said in this post that the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina had been revoked in 1987. The correct date (see comments) is of course 1989.

Unnatural history lesson

The political editor of The Spectator, Fraser Nelson, declares: "Obama needs a history lesson."  The required lesson is that "America was moulded along Adam Smith’s lines while Scotland imported the disastrous ideas of the French Enlightenment which continue to dominate discourse today... Essentially, the Scots Enlightenment stood for individual liberty and small government while the French one stood for power, and big government."

The "essentially" is a nice touch. If this is your idea of a history lesson, then you'll probably also wish to consult the bio-energy expert Dr Karadzic for an exposition of recent advances in medical science.

The "disastrous ideas of the French Enlightenment" that so exercise Fraser were strongly influenced by admiration for the English (note: not the Scots). Consider Voltaire's gushing idealisation of England in his Lettres philosophiques ou Lettres anglaises of 1733, letter 8:

Voici une différence plus essentielle entre Rome et l’Angleterre, qui met tout l’avantage du côté de la dernière: c’est que le fruit des guerres civiles de Rome a été l’esclavage, et celui des troubles d’Angleterre, la liberté. La nation anglaise est la seule de la terre qui soit parvenue à régler le pouvoir des rois en leur résistant, et qui d’efforts en efforts ait enfin établi ce gouvernement sage où le prince, tout-puissant pour faire du bien, a les mains liées pour faire du mal; où les Seigneurs sont grands sans insolence et sans vassaux, et où le peuple partage le gouvernement sans confusions.

For the philosophes, England was the nation of liberty and free thought. It wasn't true, but Voltaire's starting point was the exercise of arbitrary authority in France. I fear that Fraser thinks the French Enlightenment is another name for Paris's revolutionary tribunal that sat a full 60 years after Voltaire wrote. If so, then that is an error.

The French Revolution was not caused by the Enlightenment. It gave office to those who had been influenced by the Enlightenment, such as Lafayette and La Rochefoucauld. These were not agents of "power and big government" - indeed Lafayette had given military service and substantial funds to the American Revolution, which Fraser is concerned to claim for Scottishness. The reforms enacted by the Constituent Assembly from 1789 to 1791 were quite limited, but went in the direction of secularism and the removal of the hereditary principle. Those who believe, crudely, that the American Revolution was good and the French Revolution bad might explain why the sainted Thomas Jefferson, as ambassador to Paris, saw these causes as consistent. (Conor Cruise O'Brien, one of the great polymaths and statesmen of our time, does in fact have an explanation. In his book The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1998, he argues that Jefferson - Jefferson! - was inconsistent with the American Revolution, and should be regarded as an ideological forerunner of Pol Pot. That really is his thesis; Pol Pot is his own analogy. At least O'Brien recognises the problem, even if his solution is bizarre.)

Fraser - as I'm addressing him - might explain also why the revolution of 1789 was so admired throughout Europe, including Britain (and I do mean Britain) and particularly in Germany. This was not a "disaster": it was, like the American Revolution, a historic moment for the cause of reform, secularism and (I use the term without irony) progress. The turning point was war with Austria and Prussia in 1792. This precipitated a second revolution and all that followed: regicide, terror, and the reassertion of autocracy and nationalism. There was no reason that European governments should have sought to undermine the movement of 1789, and in doing so they became steadily more authoritarian at home.

Here's a more recent analogy. Most of my readers will probably hold Lenin responsible for the repressive character of the Soviet state and what turned into the horrors of Stalinism. I certainly do. But I do not hold Alexander Kerensky responsible for them. He stood for the principles of democratic government against reaction. Likewise the notion that the French Enlightenment was a force for repression and arbitrary authority is baloney.

I suspect I know what's behind this historical revisionism. The American historian Gertrude Himmelfarb's book The Roads to Modernity was recently published in the UK, with a foreword by the prime minister. The book is a sustained attempt to distinguish the British and American Enlightenments from the French tradition. There is a clear subtext here about modern politics that takes precedence over the history, and that I don't in any case find as appealing as some of my fellow Atlanticists do. I'm still less convinced by the preposterous message inferred by the political editor of The Spectator: "That so many people in Europe still believe the French principles (government virtuous, masses selfish) shows how this continent never could quite shake off the hierarchies."

The comments underneath Fraser's post are obviously not his fault. But there's one who signs himself with the self-explanatory moniker "TGF UKIP", and who is enthusiastic about the "fascinating and illuminating post and series of comments". I quote him not to embarrass Fraser but because I think he's understood Fraser's point very well, more's the pity.

Some links on politics and history

I've added two links to the side-bar. These are PoliticsHome, which is a valuable source of political coverage, and Standpoint, a new magazine, edited by Daniel Johnson, that has many good things. On Standpoint's web site, the Cambridge historian Brendan Simms writes illuminatingly about Serbia after the capture of Radovan Karadzic:

[T]here are still demons on the loose in Serbian political life, in the security apparatus, in intellectual circles, and in public opinion. Much of the population had still not quite come to terms with what was done in their name during the 1990s. Belgrade will therefore need help, rhetorical and practical, to make the last leap into Europe by arresting Ratko Mladic. Now is the time for Europe to reach out. Serbia has once more begun to find its soul, and we must make sure that it does not lose it again.

I very much agree. Another angle, and one well worth examining, about the life and times of Karadzic is provided by Rose Shapiro in The Guardian. It is far from being a frivolous point that the man responsible for a campaign of hatred and genocide later adopted a clandestine career as a practitioner of mumbo-jumbo, or "alternative medicine" as it's sometimes know. Ms Shapiro writes:

Just because Karad[z]ic was a war criminal, it doesn't follow that all alternative practitioners are genocidal maniacs, and indeed many practitioners sincerely believe in what they are doing and want to help their clients. But there have surely been enough cases now of blatant recklessness if not outright deceit to confirm that practising alternative medicine is very often the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The next item doesn't belong in history, and it doesn't belong in the noble tradition of the exposure of pseudoscience, but it's a pleasing juxtaposition. The New Statesman carries a review of a book called A People's History of the World by Chris Harman. Harman's entire adult life has been spent in the service of the Leninist sect the Socialist Workers' Party. He has edited the party's newspaper and theoretical journal, and is a longstanding member of the party's Politbureau.

Being a leading member of the SWP is no barrier to writing a good book. Another former editor of the party's journal, Nigel Harris, wrote a book a few years ago on immigration, Thinking the Unthinkable, that I thought was excellent. And I concede that I have not read Harman's book. But I note with complacence that Harman's publisher, Verso, carry on their web page for the book the commendation of the 9/11 conspiracy theorist Howard Zinn, likening Harman's work to his own.

The Statesman's reviewer is not a historian but a blogger called Richard Seymour. Nothing wrong in that - except that Seymour is also a member of the Socialist Workers' Party. That's a singular editorial decision, as a member of the SWP is, by definition, bound by the views of the party's Central Committee. The SWP, being a Leninist organisation, adheres to the principle of "democratic centralism". This bizarre concept was coined by Lenin in 1906 as the guiding organisational principle of the revolutionary party. As one political theorist has usefully summarised it (Joseph Femia, Marxism and Democracy, 1992, p. 136): 'By "democratic", Lenin meant that the elected Party Congress was to be supreme over policy. By "centralism", he meant that once general policy was agreed, the everyday decisions of the central bodies were absolutely binding on all members, who were expected to march in step, whatever their private reservations.'

It's no great surprise, in the circumstances, that Seymour is overwhelmed by the profundity of the book under review, which is 'a dizzying tale of change "from below", with political, economic and cultural narratives interwoven, and occasional pauses to point out intriguing theoretical vistas'. The Statesman has an unfortunate record of not disclosing the interests of its book reviewers, and it's time this policy was tightened up.

Incidentally, it looks to me as if the SWP regards Seymour as a popular exponent of historical issues. A nice instance was an article in Socialist Worker a year ago, in which Seymour discussed the case of the atomic spy Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel ("executed on trumped up charges by the US state"). Seymour explained:

Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that dozens – sometimes he claimed hundreds – of communists were active in the government. Through the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was able to bully and slander hundreds of US citizens.

The exact number of US citizens whom Senator McCarthy was able to bully and slander through the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) was zero. McCarthy was not a member of the Committee. As its name indicates, HUAC was a committee of the House of Representatives; Senator McCarthy, as his title indicates, was a member of the Senate. The House of Representatives and the Senate are not the same thing. If any constitutional theoreticians of the SWP are reading this, I undertake further to explain that the Queen's Speech is not in fact written by the Queen, and that the Lord Privy Seal isn't in charge of locks on the lavatory.

Labour's choices

The BBC reports on Labour's woes: 'Former home secretary David Blunkett told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that unlike the Conservatives, Labour was not a "hatchet job" party which would ditch a leader at the "drop of a hat".'

I do think this is right. Labour does not dispense with leaders as readily as the Tories do. Unlike Blunkett, and writing as a Labour supporter, I do not consider this is anything to be proud of. So extended was the Tory death wish after the 1992 election that it's been easy to overlook the Conservative Party's distinctive historical characteristic. It is an astonishingly efficient vehicle for attaining public office by constant adaptation. This is what's happening now. The most repellent aspects of modern Conservatism - plainly racist rhetoric from MPs; hostility to single parents and homosexuals; distrust of foreigners - have not been eradicated but they have been confronted.

Labour, by contrast, operates by mythology rather than electoral logic. Prime Ministers, Chancellors and Foreign Secretaries who deal with the world as it is - with external threats that need to be deterred, and financial markets whose trust needs to be won - rather than with the world as party activists would like it to be become hate figures. Leaders who are plainly not up to the job but whose hearts are judged to be in the right place are indulged. This no way to run a mollusc franchise, let alone a government.

On Labour's strategy, I recommend today's main leader in The Times (not written by me). There will be a temptation for the Government now to abandon the principles of effective governance, and pursue a populist strategy in the hope of holding on as long as possible. It would be a terrible political legacy for the party and the country if this happened:

It was Harold Wilson's ambition to make Labour the natural party of government. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, this ambition came close to becoming a reality. There was a good reason why it did so. Mr Blair's combination of moderation, free markets, social justice and Atlanticism is electorally potent and a good governing philosophy.

For Gordon Brown, the challenge of staying alive and hoping for the best may tempt him to squander that mandate in acts of politcal expediency. The task of tomorrow's Labour leaders is to protect the competence of the Government. Not just in the interests of the country, but their own.

Incidentally, a measure of how useless the Parliamentary Labour Party is comes from the quoted views of one Glasgow Labour MP, according to the BBC report I've linked to: "Mohammad Sarwar, Labour MP for Glasgow Central, said he was 100% behind the prime minister, and blamed the world economy for the government's unpopularity."

Quite extraordinary.

More on Glasgow East

John Rentoul comments:

This morning's result in Glasgow is the worst possible for Gordon Brown and the best possible for the Labour Party. A margin of 365 votes is so close that it means that, if almost anybody else had been Prime Minister, Labour would have held the seat. The Labour Party may be the nice party, but it is not that nice. Previously I had given Brown up to another 365 days in No 10; this cuts that short.

I wonder if John is overestimating the party's rationality. Historically, Labour does not forgive leaders who are right.

Consider that James Callaghan and his Chancellor, Denis Healey, became figures of genuine hatred within the party in the 1980s. This was due first to the Government's accepting the need to cut public spending, at the behest of the IMF, in the sterling crisis of 1976. Callaghan allowed extensive debate within Cabinet, in which - from different starting points - Tony Benn and Tony Crosland advocated the destructive nonsense of import controls in preference to accepting the IMF's terms. Secondly, Callaghan made a brave and necessary speech in the middle of the 1983 general election campaign in which he condemned Labour's policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

But Labour is highly indulgent with leaders who tell the party what it wishes to hear. What explanation can there be for the reverence in which Michael Foot is held, and how he was treated at the time? It was completely obvious during Foot's leadership that he would take the party to catastrophe. Yet only two MPs, Jeff Rooker and Gerald Kaufman, told him to his face that he should go. Labour is surely the sentimental party; the Tories are the ruthless one.

John also comments, very reasonably, that he predicted that Glasgow East would be a defeat for Labour. Perhaps I might add that I was one of the 13 per cent of the PHI 100 panel that predicted an SNP victory. In fact, I was the one per cent that predicted a comfortable majority for the SNP, so I was uniquely wrong. It seemed to me, and does so even more now, that Labour is beyond any hope of recovery. Gordon Brown (quite unlike Callaghan, incidentally) is neither a capable prime minister nor one who has public respect. He is a huge electoral and political liability. Things can only get worse.

Game over

A few points about Labour's huge by-election defeat in Glasgow East.

It's surprising that political commentators didn't see this coming. The Politics Home Index panel of commentators, for example, overwhelmingly expected Labour to hold on. (I am a member of this panel.) Possibly this reflected the history of the SNP in by-elections. The party has only ever won five of these, and then with high-profile candidates such as Margo MacDonald (Glasgow Govan in 1973) and Jim Sillars (the same seat in 1988). In yesterday's by-election, Labour had the stronger candidate, yet she was unable to withstand the popular hostility towards the Government. The turnout was surprisingly high, at 42 per cent, and anti-Labour feeling coalesced around the candidate best placed to defeat Labour. 

Politics is no science, and parties' fortunes are not pre-determined (other than in Zimbabwe, of course). But when things start unravelling for a Government, its ability to change the terms of political debate is severely limited. Labour will lose the next general election, and lose it big. The Tories, who did well in Glasgow East to beat the Lib Dems, are not a popular brand but they are now a decontaminated one. Note, for example, that the veteran right-wing MP for Macclesfield, Nicholas Winterton, who knowingly broke parliamentary rules on expenses, claims he is being forced out by the party leadership. I hope this is true, and it's at least clear that Winterton's is not the voice of modern Conservatism. (Winterton was, incidentally, a staunch defender of the anti-communist credentials of the apartheid regime in South Africa - which speaks for itself.)

The most destructive elements on the Labour side, meanwhile, are giving unsolicited advice that would be disastrous for the remaining credibility of the Government. Labour remains the only serious vehicle for moderate left-wing politics in Britain. That was demonstrated by the party's eventual recovery from the schism that its then extremist policies caused in the 1980s. Gordon Brown is not up to the job of Prime Minister, but it is open to him to protect the legacy of his predecessor.

Tony Blair's reforms of the party, in organisation and ideology, were inadequate but well-directed. Labour is not a socialist party: it is a party of incremental social improvement that has done useful things in welfare policy, and in creating a framework of rules in economic management. Labour will be in opposition, probably for a long time. The last thing it should do now is abandon the approach of its most successful leader ever, and thereby ensure its consignment to the wilderness.

More on Karadzic's crimes

I pointed yesterday to a long and fine article in The Guardian by Ed Vulliamy on his recollections of the appalling Radovan Karadzic. Martin Bell was another journalist close to this war, and I have learned much from him. He has a long piece today in the Telegraph, which I also recommend.

Martin saw and describes some terrible things, but one sentence in his piece stands out. I hadn't heard it before; it's Karadzic's justification for the destruction of Sarajevo's library. Martin writes:

I knew Karadzic quite well. He was usually affable, but impossible to deal with. He seldom appeared before midday, but would talk all night over a bottle of Ballantine's whisky about the sufferings of the Serbs since 1389. He referred to the Muslims as Turks. He described Sarajevo's magnificent library, which his forces destroyed, as a storehouse of fundamentalist literature.

It is not the worst of Karadzic's crimes. But the man who fancied himself part of a cultural elite was in reality a vandal and a dunce.

I turn, not with great enthusiasm, to one or two charges that have been made in the comments of my post yesterday by readers who are not sympathetic to my thesis. Almost from the outset of this blog, I've had correspondence on Balkan affairs from people who believe Slobodan Milosevic was a maligned (and later murdered) genius. I should therefore have anticipated that the first comment under my post yesterday would be from someone (a Neil Craig, who has often posted inflammatory nonsense here but won't be doing so in future) who repeated a libel made against the ITN reporters who exposed the inhuman conditions at the detention camp at Trnopolje. The comment directly accused Ed Vulliamy (not of ITN, but of The Guardian) of fakery. That's a patently defamatory statement, and I had no hesitation in deleting it and blocking its author from commenting here again. That's just the way it is, I'm afraid.

English libel law as it relates to to the Internet is a mess, and is in urgent need of reform. But as I understand it (going by the precedent of the Mumsnet libel case), Ed would in theory now be entitled to damages from me, as the unwitting publisher of that libel, even though I deleted it as soon as I saw it, and have made clear my view of it.

I'm sorry to see that another comment further down the thread repeats some of the hollow propaganda that has been retailed by apologists for the defamers of honest journalists. The comment states:

I don't know what Neil Craig has written but, ITN won the libel case against Living Marxism because LM were not able to prove that ITN deliberately misrepresented the TV pictures. But in his summing up the judge said "Clearly Ian Williams and Penny Marshall and their television teams were mistaken in thinking they were not enclosed by the old barbed-wire fence, but does it matter?"

On this point, see an outstanding article by David Campbell, in the Journal of Human Rights, March & June 2002. Campbell dissects and then puts in context the the libellous claims made against ITN. Here is what he has to say about the reporting of the judge's conclusions (emphasis added):

Despite their legal loss, LM magazine and like-minded supporters throughout the world have not let the issue rest. [Mick] Hume denounced the court verdict in an unapologetic statement that re-stated his faith in Deichmann's claims, the key element of which he maintained was never seriously challenged in court. Nick Higham, the BBC's media correspondent, who had told various journalists after the publication of Deichmann's article he believed ITN's pictures were misleading, reported the trial’s outcome for the Six O’Clock News on BBC1. In his report, Higham noted that “the judge, Mr Justice Morland, told the jury LM's facts might have been right, but he asked, did that matter?” This summary was subsequently deemed by the Broadcasting Standards Commission to be misleading and thus unfair to ITN and its journalists.

(Mick Hume was editor of LM magazine, which folded as a result of its loss in this case. Thomas Deichmann was the author of the article that libelled ITN's reporters.) I've removed Campbell's footnotes, but this is the one relating to the last sentence I've quoted.

Not surprisingly, Higham's statement was embraced by LM after the verdict; see Mick Hume, "The Only Things this Case has Proved". ITN, Marshall and Williams lodged a formal complaint with the Broadcasting Standards Commission (BSC) about Higham’s report. In upholding the ITN complaint, the BSC concluded that “the BBC’s paraphrase of the judge’s summing up could have left viewers with the false impression that ITN had got its facts wrong and won its case on a technicality.” See BSC, “Complaint about unjust or unfair treatment by ITN on its own behalf and on behalf of Ms Penny Marshall and Mr Ian Williams submitted on 25 April 2000 about the Six O’Clock News on BBC1, broadcast on 14 March 2000,” 3 October 2000. The adjudication is summarised in BSC, Bulletin, No36, 26 October 2000, 1.

If you follow Internet discussions on the vexed question of propaganda in the Balkan wars - as you're doing now - it's highly likely you'll come across claims such as the one Campbell debunks here. I recommend being armed with Campbell's treatment of this entire case. Also, see Ed Vulliamy's article in The Guardian immediately after LM's court defeat. Ed writes:

But history - the history of genocide in particular - is thankfully built not upon public relations or melodrama but upon truth; if necessary, truth established by law. And history will record this: that ITN reported the truth when, in August 1992, it revealed the gulag of horrific concentration camps run by the Serbs for their Muslim and Croatian quarry in Bosnia.

Some people who ought to have known better (and also some, such as Noam Chomsky, of very poor judgement indeed) maintained that ITN's libel suit was an attack on the free speech of a small magazine. I have no doubt at all that ITN was justified in taking legal action and in defending the integrity of its journalism.

About Karadzic

Here are some things worth reading about the capture of the man aptly described by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, as the Osama Bin Laden of Europe.

First, I strongly recommend the recollections of Ed Vulliamy in today's Guardian. Ed is an outstanding foreign correspondent (and a close family friend). No journalist did more to reveal to an English-speaking audience the depravities of the the war conducted by Karadzic under the malign influence of Slobodan Milosevic. In his dogged pursuit of truth, Ed was among the first journalists to expose the Serb detention camps. On a visit to London in July 1992, Karadzic - when confronted with allegations of Serb atrocities - had challenged journalists to "come and see for themselves". He was presumably counting on his ability to erect Potemkin villages, or at least clean up the camps before the journalists got there. Ed, along with the ITN reporters Penny Marshall and Ian Williams, famously got there in time to expose the grotesqueries at Omarska.

But that's far from all. In his piece today, Ed writes:

But Karadzic is charged with ordering so much more during those three years between Omarska and Srebrenica - the latter being iconic of so much atrocity in so many places that Srebrenica's notoriety now tends to distract from, rather than draw attention to. Atrocity in places whose names are barely known and soon forgotten in the world outside. Who talks now about Bosnian Serb massacres at Zvornik, Vlasenica, Brcko or Bijeljina? (Or, indeed, sites of Croatian atrocities, such as Ahmici, or the Bosnian Muslim camp at Celebici.)

On this issue - the character of the Bosnian war as a campaign of genocidal aggression, and not an incomprehensible explosion of ancient ethnic conflicts - The Guardian got it right very early. The quality of its reporting from the region remains a great strength. 

I'd also direct your attention to a leader in The Independent today, which makes an essential point:

What this Byzantine saga [the capture of Karadzic] reveals is the influence of the European Union at its deepest level. The lumbering behemoth, for all its superstructure of political controversy, has a profoundly benign influence on the cultural as well as economic polity of the region. The arrest of Karadzic shows how the EU works as a "soft power". The lure of membership leads those who want to join into changes which are social and legal as well as political. A place in the European family depends on embracing European values of justice and human rights.

I agree with this almost evangelically. I'm pro-European not primarily owing to an economic judgement - I think, for example, the economic and financial arguments for the euro are good but not conclusive - but because of the role of the EU in reforming institutions and making conflicts more tractable. Bosnia's prospects are immeasurably better now that Serbia and Croatia have the same end in view, namely membership of the EU.

Finally, let's recall who was pulling the strings. We know, from records of telephone conversations between Milosevic and Karadzic in July 1991, that Belgrade was making clandestine shipments of arms directly to the Bosnian Serbs. This was in preparation for the adoption by the UN Security Council, at the request of Yugoslavia, on 25 September 1991 of Resolution 713 imposing an arms embargo. The resolution thus left the newly independent states helpless against Serb aggression. It was a terrible moment in international diplomacy. The least that Western governments, working through supranational institutions, can do now is ensure that the perpetrators of genocide are brought to justice.