As anyone who has read this blog down the years will not be surprised, I am pleased that Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of the Labour Party. After the May 2015 election I did not have any expectation that the Labour Party will be re-elected. The demographics are against them and as has been quoted before, the British public is Conservative and only occasionally votes Labour. Indeed the New Labour it voted for was simply a pale blue version of the Conservative Party with a better publicity machine. Corbyn is refreshing because he puts forward an attitude that many, if only a large minority, have felt have been missing from British politics (though clearly not the politics of Greece or other European countries) for so long.
It is not surprising that the right-wing media have attacked Corbyn on every basis from what songs he might sing to who he slept with forty years ago to his fashion sense to made-up policies they think sound poor. In some ways I welcome that fact as it does suggest that they see him as a genuine threat to their distortions and scares peddled to the population. If Andy Burnham had won, I doubt he would have attracted a fraction of the attention that Corbyn has done.
'The Guardian' feels that Corbyn and his camp could have rebuffed false accusations if they had had their 'media machine' set up quicker. In some ways, however, I am heartened by the fact that it was not. To feel an obligation to rebuff every last accusation as soon as possible is simply to play the game of the right-wing; it shows that you feel that you can be harmed by them, rather than ignoring the rubbish thrown at you because it is in fact nothing more than rubbish, often fabricated and always plastered with indignation.
Corbyn is facing a man who left a child unattended in a pub and has no grasp of how 95% of the UK population live. Even when he is pictured on public transport, it is clearly faked. Corbyn looks like he belongs on the underground train, travelling home from work, looking tired, like literally millions of other Londoners. Part of the problem are the Blair years. The Blairite government made themselves masters of media manipulation. However, they also made themselves vulnerable by seeming to care whether one MP stepped off a very narrow line about a policy. They created a context in which it is felt that unless an entire political party is full of drones mouthing exactly the same words on everything it has somehow failed. This makes it very difficult for genuine debate to occur not just over the big issues but also the nuances within them. That does not aid British democracy. Why is it acceptable for the Conservatives to have a spectrum of opinion from people wanting immediate exit from the EU to those who want to stay in forever and yet even moderate differences on the issue are seen as a 'failure' by Corbyn. I suppose because we lack a left-wing media.
The anti-Corbyn campaign has been so relentless that it is unsurprising that it is picked up unquestioned and every crumb used as gospel truth by a lot of the population. I work where people generally have to have a decent level of education to be employed. However, I have been harangued by the fact that Corbyn wants to wreck the UK economy by scrapping the Queen and he will abolish the Army the moment he comes into office. Even then, to me such policies seem pretty rational alongside ones such as compelling schools to become academies and allowing the private sector to take over handling prisoners and hospitals. Given how shoddy and expensive the British railway system is, why is it not shouted down whenever anyone suggests it is not re-nationalised?
I do not expect people to agree with me. This is a democracy, there are different parties and there is a range of views within every political party no matter how the Conservatives and the media portray it. Yet, Corbyn politics in a matter of a week have been made to appear illegitimate even to discuss and at best something very naive. No other political leader has reinvigorated a movement in this way for decades. Perhaps Sir Keith Joseph and following in his footsteps, Margaret Thatcher did for the Conservatives and that was forty years ago now. Yet if I ever say anything positive about a Corbyn policy people titter as if I am foolish. I would be happier to accept them being angry about my approach. However, the right seems to be winning as it did in the 1980s by simply making Labour policies not seem a threat but simply not worthy of even considering and viewing anyone who proposes them as 'loony'. It worked before, so I should not be surprised that it is working now. It is exasperating for a number of reasons.
I could stand in a French or a Greek workplace and outline political views at odds with the people around me and they might disagree perhaps vocally, but they would not look on me as a child; they would not strip me of my right to hold that opinion. To do so in Britain is a form of censorship which is in fact akin to the approach of dictatorships, not that of other mature democracies. A further point is that I could state that the world was created in 7 days in 4004 BC; that dinosaur bones were laid in the strata by God to show man the passing of all things and that one day the righteous will be lifted into the skies during the Rapture and no-one would be allowed to laugh or ridicule my views without risking a disciplinary action for discrimination. I subscribe to a political stance which is rational and in my view would be better for the bulk of people living in my country than the current policies. Yet, because those very few who control our society and economy feel threatened by such views, they have schooled their minions in the population to ridicule and simply dismiss even the expression of that view. Is it any surprise that people say Britain has only a partial democracy?
Showing posts with label UK political system. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UK political system. Show all posts
Sunday, 20 September 2015
Sunday, 7 August 2011
The Continued Relevance Of 'Walls Come Tumbling Down'
A couple of years back it became apparent that, while adults are big consumers of music which in past decades would have remained the preserve of teenagers and even MPs felt obliged to list their favourite pop artists, there was a demand for pop music to be played that people in their late 30s, 40s and even 50s remembered from when they were that bit younger. This was seen on television with the popularity of 'Top of the Pops 2' and on numerous radio stations with programmes, often on a Sunday, presumably to appeal to listeners in that age bracket at home with their families, featuring music from the punk era and the 1980s. The persistent nostalgia for the 1980s and the parallels between the economic and political situations of that time (especially in the UK) and now have only contributed further to this trend. Of course, there are songs that have never really gone away, but with the extent of this programming on radio with numerous 'golden hour' or 'time tunnel' programmes too, many forgotten gems are being thrust back into our memories.
One song that I heard probably for the first time in 20 years was 'Walls Come Tumbling Down' (1985) by The Style Council. The Style Council lasted 1983-9, having 16 Top 40 hits but no No.1s. Interestingly they combined a somewhat at times overly polished, self-consciously snappy image with songs that were either almost like easy-listening, notably, 'Long Hot Summer' (1983), almost 'power' pop songs like 'Shout To The Top' (1984) to those like 'Walls Come Tumbling Down' which were very political. The most prominent member of the group was Paul Weller (1958-) who also wrote 'Walls Come Tumbling Down'. By the time he did, he was already very successful from his career with The Jam (1972-82; recording from 1977; 18 Top 40 hits including No. 1s in the UK) who had had a Mod style with a support for Britishness but also often challenging lyrics to social and political issues. The strength of many of their songs was carried on into some of The Style Council's work with almost classic styling that seemed to refer back to music of the 1960s referenced by The Jam's style. Saying this, the 'Sound Affects' (1980) album had almost psychaedelic elements, almost as if, like The Beatles, The Jam had evolved into this phase. The politics of The Style Council was far more apparent than even in songs like 'Eton Rifles' (1979) and 'Town Called Malice' (1982). I have been tempted however, to write how relevant I feel those songs remain recalling 1980s problems now we face so many of them again in the 2010s.
Anyway, in The Style Council, Paul Weller's left-wing political stance, presumably shared with band members Mick Talbot (keyboard, co-founder), Dee C. Lee (vocals; Weller's wife 1988-94) and Steve White (drums), became more apparent. Weller was involved with both The Council Collective in December 1984 a band which raised funds for the striking coal miners and then in Red Wedge (1985-90) an umbrella organisation led by Weller, Billy Bragg and Jimmy Sommerville which aimed to raise awareness and funds through concerts to help prevent the Conservatives winning their third consecutive election victory at the 1987 election, a task at which they failed. Weller is rather resentful of this period feeling he concentrated too much on the politics rather than the music, possibly contributing to the decline in popularity of The Style Council, tensions with record companies and its break-up. However, in my eyes and I am sure of many others who lived through the 1980s we were grateful that they put in the effort to produce something that challenged the enduring Thatcher regime and provided music which was more than simply consumerist, peddling and reinforcing the anti-social trends of the Thatcherite greed era.
Weller has continued to have a very successful musical career and though he may be uneasy with some of the activities he was involved with in the past, he retains immense credibility both musically and for his political record. I would be very happy if someone re-released or covered this now. Given the kind of semi-folk revival led by people like Mumford and Sons, perhaps there are groups/individuals out there who could release something like this. I do not know enough about their politics to know if it would appeal and perhaps these days record companies are far too much part of the exploitative sector of society to even countenance allowing a song like this back to see the light of day.
Unlike some of the political tracks of the 1980s, this one is more timeless. If you do not know 'Number 10' refers to 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the prime minister. These days were are used to songs having expletives that have to be bleeped or tuned out, but for the opening line to feature the word 'crap' which was coming into usage in the UK (from the USA) at the time, it was a forceful startling opening. I guess if you recorded it these days the references to 'colour TV' and 'video machine' and certainly to 'H.P.', i.e. hire purchase, a way of buying items on credit which was pretty dated even by the 1980s, would have to be revised, but I am sure you could get DVD, smart phone and credit card in there somewhere. The sentiments about consumerism remain as valid, how it has become the 'opiate of the people' in the UK in particular. The point about dangling jobs 'like a donkey's carrot' is certainly applicable in 2011 as is 'they take the profits/you take the blame': it could have been written specifically to refer to the banking crisis. Similarly the attempts by government and employers to provoke division among ordinary people by designating some as 'undeserving' or 'scroungers' continues to be a policy.
The whole song certainly could be a rallying cry for those students who protested and those who rioted earlier this year. I fear even more than in the 1980s when there were still memories of student protests of the 1960s and trade union ones of the 1970s, now people assume that protest is simply criminal, a perception almost the entire media and certainly all political parties put effort in portraying it as. To adopt such a passive attitude is to let them abuse you without even a fight. Anyway, for anyone who has never heard the lyrics of 'Walls Come Tumbling Down' or for those who like me, they had become a distant memory, here they are for perusal and discussion. However, I do suggest that you listen to the original if not least to hear Paul Weller really belt it out ably assisted by Dee C. Lee.
'Walls Come Tumbling Down' - The Style Council
You don’t have to take this crap
You don’t have to sit back and relax
You can actually try changing it.
I know we’ve always been taught to rely
Upon those in authority -
But you never know, until you try,
How things just might be,
If we came together so strongly.
Are you going try to make this work
Or spend your days down in the dirt?
You see things can change -
Yes and walls can come tumbling down!
Governments crack and systems fall
’cause unity is powerful -
Lights go out - walls come tumbling down!
The competition is a colour TV
We’re on still pause with the video machine
That keep you slave to the H.P.
Until the unity is threatend by
Those who have and who have not -
Those who are with and those who are without
And dangle jobs like a donkey’s carrot -
Until you don’t know where you are.
Are you going to realise
The class war’s real and not mythologized?
And like Jericho - you see, walls can come tumbling down!
Are you going to be threatened by
The public enemy at Number 10?
Those who play the power game:
They take the profits - you take the blame.
When they tell you there’s no rise in pay
Are you goning to try and make this work
Or spend your days down in the dirt?
You see things can change -
Yes and walls can come tumbling down!
P.P.
I must say I am sometimes heartened by what I can find on the internet. Surprisingly I have found the lyrics to 'Soul Deep' the only single released by The Council Collective, you can even find footage of their performance of it on 'Top of the Pops' which seems pretty incredible now given how the striking miners were being condemned as the 'enemy within' at the times and civil liberties were being flouted in an attempt to break the strike. I include it here for interest's sake. I do wonder if you would ever see anything similar performed on a television pop show (not that there are many left) these days; certainly I doubt it would ever appear on SkyTV given the Murdoch connection. The reference to death I presume, refers to expenditure at the time on cruise and trident nuclear missiles. The TUC is the Trades Union Congress, the umbrella body for British trade unions which was ambivalent towards the strike given that an official secret ballot for strike action had never been held. It is as critical of the Labour Movement as it is of the Conservative government. There is also reference to the North-South Divide in British society, more apparent than ever in the 1980s. The reference to oppression by employers
'Soul Deep' - The Council Collective
Getcha mining soul deep - with a lesson in history
There's people fighting for their communities
Don't say this struggle - does not involve you.
If you're from the working class, this is your struggle too.
If they spent more on life as they do on death,
We might find the money to make industry progress.
There's mud in the waters - there's lies upon the page;
There's blood on the hillsides and they're not getting paid.
There's brother 'gainst brother - there's fathers against sons
But as for solidarity, I don't see none.
(Let's change that - let's fight back)
Going on 10 months now - will it take another 10?
Living on the breadline - with what some people send.
Just where is the backing from the TUC?
If we aren't united there can only be defeat.
Think of all those brave men - women and children alike,
Who built the unions so others might survive
In better conditions - than abject misery
Not supporting the miners - betrays that legacy
There's brother 'gainst brother - there's fathers against sons:
Let's change that - let's fight back!
Up North the temperature's rising;
Down South she's wine and dining.
We can't afford to let the government win:
It means death to the trade unions
And the cash it costs to close 'em
Is better spent trying to keep 'em open.
Try to feel the pain in those seeds planted
Now are the things that we take for granted
Like the power to strike if we don't agree
With the bosses that make those policies
That keep us down and keep us dumb
So don't settle for less than the Number One!
One song that I heard probably for the first time in 20 years was 'Walls Come Tumbling Down' (1985) by The Style Council. The Style Council lasted 1983-9, having 16 Top 40 hits but no No.1s. Interestingly they combined a somewhat at times overly polished, self-consciously snappy image with songs that were either almost like easy-listening, notably, 'Long Hot Summer' (1983), almost 'power' pop songs like 'Shout To The Top' (1984) to those like 'Walls Come Tumbling Down' which were very political. The most prominent member of the group was Paul Weller (1958-) who also wrote 'Walls Come Tumbling Down'. By the time he did, he was already very successful from his career with The Jam (1972-82; recording from 1977; 18 Top 40 hits including No. 1s in the UK) who had had a Mod style with a support for Britishness but also often challenging lyrics to social and political issues. The strength of many of their songs was carried on into some of The Style Council's work with almost classic styling that seemed to refer back to music of the 1960s referenced by The Jam's style. Saying this, the 'Sound Affects' (1980) album had almost psychaedelic elements, almost as if, like The Beatles, The Jam had evolved into this phase. The politics of The Style Council was far more apparent than even in songs like 'Eton Rifles' (1979) and 'Town Called Malice' (1982). I have been tempted however, to write how relevant I feel those songs remain recalling 1980s problems now we face so many of them again in the 2010s.
Anyway, in The Style Council, Paul Weller's left-wing political stance, presumably shared with band members Mick Talbot (keyboard, co-founder), Dee C. Lee (vocals; Weller's wife 1988-94) and Steve White (drums), became more apparent. Weller was involved with both The Council Collective in December 1984 a band which raised funds for the striking coal miners and then in Red Wedge (1985-90) an umbrella organisation led by Weller, Billy Bragg and Jimmy Sommerville which aimed to raise awareness and funds through concerts to help prevent the Conservatives winning their third consecutive election victory at the 1987 election, a task at which they failed. Weller is rather resentful of this period feeling he concentrated too much on the politics rather than the music, possibly contributing to the decline in popularity of The Style Council, tensions with record companies and its break-up. However, in my eyes and I am sure of many others who lived through the 1980s we were grateful that they put in the effort to produce something that challenged the enduring Thatcher regime and provided music which was more than simply consumerist, peddling and reinforcing the anti-social trends of the Thatcherite greed era.
Weller has continued to have a very successful musical career and though he may be uneasy with some of the activities he was involved with in the past, he retains immense credibility both musically and for his political record. I would be very happy if someone re-released or covered this now. Given the kind of semi-folk revival led by people like Mumford and Sons, perhaps there are groups/individuals out there who could release something like this. I do not know enough about their politics to know if it would appeal and perhaps these days record companies are far too much part of the exploitative sector of society to even countenance allowing a song like this back to see the light of day.
Unlike some of the political tracks of the 1980s, this one is more timeless. If you do not know 'Number 10' refers to 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the prime minister. These days were are used to songs having expletives that have to be bleeped or tuned out, but for the opening line to feature the word 'crap' which was coming into usage in the UK (from the USA) at the time, it was a forceful startling opening. I guess if you recorded it these days the references to 'colour TV' and 'video machine' and certainly to 'H.P.', i.e. hire purchase, a way of buying items on credit which was pretty dated even by the 1980s, would have to be revised, but I am sure you could get DVD, smart phone and credit card in there somewhere. The sentiments about consumerism remain as valid, how it has become the 'opiate of the people' in the UK in particular. The point about dangling jobs 'like a donkey's carrot' is certainly applicable in 2011 as is 'they take the profits/you take the blame': it could have been written specifically to refer to the banking crisis. Similarly the attempts by government and employers to provoke division among ordinary people by designating some as 'undeserving' or 'scroungers' continues to be a policy.
The whole song certainly could be a rallying cry for those students who protested and those who rioted earlier this year. I fear even more than in the 1980s when there were still memories of student protests of the 1960s and trade union ones of the 1970s, now people assume that protest is simply criminal, a perception almost the entire media and certainly all political parties put effort in portraying it as. To adopt such a passive attitude is to let them abuse you without even a fight. Anyway, for anyone who has never heard the lyrics of 'Walls Come Tumbling Down' or for those who like me, they had become a distant memory, here they are for perusal and discussion. However, I do suggest that you listen to the original if not least to hear Paul Weller really belt it out ably assisted by Dee C. Lee.
'Walls Come Tumbling Down' - The Style Council
You don’t have to take this crap
You don’t have to sit back and relax
You can actually try changing it.
I know we’ve always been taught to rely
Upon those in authority -
But you never know, until you try,
How things just might be,
If we came together so strongly.
Are you going try to make this work
Or spend your days down in the dirt?
You see things can change -
Yes and walls can come tumbling down!
Governments crack and systems fall
’cause unity is powerful -
Lights go out - walls come tumbling down!
The competition is a colour TV
We’re on still pause with the video machine
That keep you slave to the H.P.
Until the unity is threatend by
Those who have and who have not -
Those who are with and those who are without
And dangle jobs like a donkey’s carrot -
Until you don’t know where you are.
Are you going to realise
The class war’s real and not mythologized?
And like Jericho - you see, walls can come tumbling down!
Are you going to be threatened by
The public enemy at Number 10?
Those who play the power game:
They take the profits - you take the blame.
When they tell you there’s no rise in pay
Are you goning to try and make this work
Or spend your days down in the dirt?
You see things can change -
Yes and walls can come tumbling down!
P.P.
I must say I am sometimes heartened by what I can find on the internet. Surprisingly I have found the lyrics to 'Soul Deep' the only single released by The Council Collective, you can even find footage of their performance of it on 'Top of the Pops' which seems pretty incredible now given how the striking miners were being condemned as the 'enemy within' at the times and civil liberties were being flouted in an attempt to break the strike. I include it here for interest's sake. I do wonder if you would ever see anything similar performed on a television pop show (not that there are many left) these days; certainly I doubt it would ever appear on SkyTV given the Murdoch connection. The reference to death I presume, refers to expenditure at the time on cruise and trident nuclear missiles. The TUC is the Trades Union Congress, the umbrella body for British trade unions which was ambivalent towards the strike given that an official secret ballot for strike action had never been held. It is as critical of the Labour Movement as it is of the Conservative government. There is also reference to the North-South Divide in British society, more apparent than ever in the 1980s. The reference to oppression by employers
'Soul Deep' - The Council Collective
Getcha mining soul deep - with a lesson in history
There's people fighting for their communities
Don't say this struggle - does not involve you.
If you're from the working class, this is your struggle too.
If they spent more on life as they do on death,
We might find the money to make industry progress.
There's mud in the waters - there's lies upon the page;
There's blood on the hillsides and they're not getting paid.
There's brother 'gainst brother - there's fathers against sons
But as for solidarity, I don't see none.
(Let's change that - let's fight back)
Going on 10 months now - will it take another 10?
Living on the breadline - with what some people send.
Just where is the backing from the TUC?
If we aren't united there can only be defeat.
Think of all those brave men - women and children alike,
Who built the unions so others might survive
In better conditions - than abject misery
Not supporting the miners - betrays that legacy
There's brother 'gainst brother - there's fathers against sons:
Let's change that - let's fight back!
Up North the temperature's rising;
Down South she's wine and dining.
We can't afford to let the government win:
It means death to the trade unions
And the cash it costs to close 'em
Is better spent trying to keep 'em open.
Try to feel the pain in those seeds planted
Now are the things that we take for granted
Like the power to strike if we don't agree
With the bosses that make those policies
That keep us down and keep us dumb
So don't settle for less than the Number One!
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
What If Harold Wilson Had Been Overthrown In A Coup D'Etat?
My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other
Lives: 'What If?' Essays about Famous People in History’. It is available for purchase on Amazon:
UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Lives-Essays-History-ebook/dp/B00E6SODN2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375524378&sr=8-1&keywords=Rooksmoor+Other
Canadian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Lives-Essays-History-ebook/dp/B00E6SODN2/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375524438&sr=1-17&keywords=Rooksmoor
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Encountering Michael Foot
I met the veteran British Labour politician, Michael Foot, who died last week at the age of 96, twice, with a spread of twenty years between the two occasions. The first time I met him was in the Autumn of 1979 a few months after the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher had come to power that May. He was 66 at the time and had broken his ankle. I remember hobbling up to the urinal next to the one I was using. I engaged him as best I could while we washed our hands. He was speaking at a talk on 'Forty Years On' from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, something he had witnessed as an MP and in 1940 had written 'Guilty Men' attacking the appeasers of Hitler. Interestingly he wrote it under the Classical pseudonym Cato and later wrote another book under the name Cassius. In some ways I feel an affinity with him in terms of the need to protect your private life and especially those you love, when making political points.
The thing about Foot which I was to witness that day was though at times his speeches wandered, they were always engaging and full of life. He was able to quote extensively and was very adept at using people's own words against them. On the day of his death I listened to the speech he made in 1979 (in those days there was only radio coverage not television coverage) at the time of the vote of no-confidence in the Labour government of James Callaghan; it was played on the Parliament channel. It was both funny and poignant in the ideas and challenges it laid out. I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a political speech so much.
I met Michael Foot again when he was launching 'Dr. Strangelove, I Presume' (1999). He was standing in Bloomsbury waiting to be collected. I had seen him at a bus stop in the Charing Cross Road a couple of years earlier. Despite his age (86 in 1999), he seemed full of energy. I had once met his doctor who outlined how he walked vigorously across Hampstead Heath. He had been rejected from volunteering for the army for the Second World War on the grounds of his asthma and he seemed to wear thick glasses all his life. One might have thought in his late 80s he was going to slow down, but as it turned out he had another entire decade of life ahead of him.
Anyway, again I had encountered Foot on his way to an event that I was actually attending myself. I took the opportunity to approach him and recounted how we had met twenty years earlier, though of course he would not have remembered. The world seemed incredibly different to 1979 to me and I got a bit of a sense of how the full expanse of his life appeared. The event was a small scale thing and had a kind of collegiate atmosphere. Some of the audience seemed to presume that his age was making him forgetful and this seemed to be the case when he did not respond to one question. The same question was asked again and very honestly, he said that he had not responded to it earlier, though he had taken in on board fully, because he had no answer for it. It was clear that his mind was as sharp as ever.
Michael Foot was an easy focus for ridicule, something that really haunted him when he was leader of the Labour Party, 1980-83. He was ridiculed for appearing at the Cenotaph in a duffel coat as if it was offensive. However, in my eyes, it was practical for a man of his age (Thatcher was 54 when she came to office) standing around in November and to some degree the extent of the ridicule suggests that he was still seen as a challenge by the Conservatives. In her first term of office Thatcher was not as secure as people now assume. There was uncertainty even within her own party about the direction she was going in, certainly away from the policies of Edward Heath towards an anti-European Community (ironically something she shared in common with Foot), far more pro-America and certainly pro-nuclear policy, backed by New Right monetarist economic policies which were wrecking so much of British industry. If it had not been for the Falklands Conflict of 1982 and the populist chauvinism that that threw up she would have found it far harder at the 1983 election than she did. Politics had turned very nasty as seen by the comedian Kenny Everett's (1944-95) call to a baying Conservative crowd to 'kick away Michael Foot's stick!'. Foot had used a stick to walk since a car accident in 1963.
Neil Kinnock made a very important point last week about Foot's role in keeping the Labour Party alive during the dark days of the Thatcher regime. The tendency among many Labour supporters in 1979 and beyond was to become more radical and move over to revolutionary politics. This threatened to remove the Labour Party from the mainstream of British politics, and as we know from the extreme left and extreme right parties, let alone people like the Green Party, such a location means not having representation in the UK parliament. Thatcher stated that she wanted to move towards a political system like that of the USA with two parties that were pretty close together around a rather right-wing 'centre' and in a television interview said she wanted to see the end of Socialist and semi-Socialist parties (a way she had characterised the Liberal Party on another occasion). A more radical Labour Party would possibly have allowed her to do that. However, given the fact that we have the kind of political pattern that Thatcher wished for, circulating around the Thatcherite Consensus with Labour and the Conservatives so close, perhaps the purging of the extremists under Kinnock after he became leader in 1983 might suggest that it meant moving to what Thatcher desired.
Foot's integrity and willingness to embrace challenging, if not utterly radical policies, meant he could not be beaten down by extremists like Militant Tendency, within his own party. While Labour now might be shorn of true radicalism it is intact and in fact that might be Foot's greatest legacy. The creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) including disgruntled right-wing Labour MPs in 1981, showed the risks of fragmentation for the Labour Party. Even if Labour managed to lose the argument for reforming policies the party did not shatter in the way it had after 1931 condemning it to impotence for a decade or the way the Liberal Party did after 1922 leaving it feeble for the rest of the 20th century. Becoming a number of small differently shaded left-wing parties would have meant no hope for anyone opposed to Thatcher. Kinnock had a party to take over even if it had to lose a lot of what he and Foot had stood for before it could come back to power, or, perhaps not, given the irregularities of the 1992 election.
Foot was particularly condemned in the 1980s for supporting unilateral nuclear disarmament. He did this because he had long believed in the immorality of nuclear weapons, but of course there would have been a real economic benefit for the UK if it had given up on nuclear weapons in the 1980s. The Trident nuclear weapons cost £1 billion per year to keep and the estimated total is £97 billion by the time they will have been scrapped. To replace them will costs £130 billion. These are sums which make bailing out the banks look pretty minor. The Polaris system, that preceded Trident, which the UK bought for £300 million in 1962 (worth around £6 billion at today's values) . If this money had gone into hospitals or transport or education or power generation, Britain would be in a very different situation to where it is today. We know that the fear of a Soviet invasion was constantly falsified and certainly from the 1970s onwards the USSR would have found it impossible to invade West Germany even if they had wanted to. The Soviets had minimal concern about the UK and yet we had to cripple our economy for the sake of a fantasy, making lots of US arms manufacturers very rich in the meantime. Even President General Dwight Eisenhower (president 1953-61) spoke of the 'military-industrial complex' that was so influential in the USA and clearly in the UK too. British jobs were not created by the regular purchase of US nuclear weapons. The current Labour government does not support the abolition of the UK's nuclear weapons, only the SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party) backs such a policy even though the Cold War has been over for twenty years.
In many ways, however, Foot represented an older generation of politician. He was probably out of date even in the 1960s when Labour prime minister Harold Wilson had adopted his pipe and raincoat as his trade marks for the television era. Foot appeared as he was, an ordinary old man of the kind you might see in the post office. However, the public want someone with a certain style than marks them out from the ordinary; John Major only really succeeded by being painfully ordinary. For Foot it would always be ideas and good policies that would mark out a politician but the public no longer felt that, for them style was now more important than substance.
Foot was more of the style of the Gladstone era in which long speeches which showed the erudite knowledge of the speaker were the norm and were a kind of entertainment and education as well as stirring. In the sound bite age, his wandering speeches could not be easily 'chunked' for the short attention span viewers. His legacy fed into Neil Kinnock, his successor as leader of the Labour Party, who though far younger (41 when he became Labour leader in 1983) did not shake off the lengthy expositions that Foot had favoured. These men were right, politics is not simple and simplifying it makes policies have a tendency to error. However, after the 1970s British society was 'tired of politics' and no-one can be bothered to listen to policy outlined, they would rather have emotionally swaying chunks of information that they can be certain are 'true' without analysing them at all.
Foot held fast to the deeply held views he had. He was not a pragmatist as that would have been to betray his views. He was a republican (seeking abolition of the monarchy) and was ardently opposed to nuclear weapons at a time when they had been made to seem 'vital' for Britain despite their huge expense and the hazard they presented. Similarly he believed in a mixed economy, i.e. with state-run and privately-run businesses, which ironically in the era of the enduring Thatcherite consensus fostered by Tony Blair, we have ended back with. Yet, the 1980s were seemingly all about 'free enterprise', well in fact not really free, just enterprise for the privileged and the already wealthy. Whilst millions were losing their jobs this fantasy of a society where ordinary people could be rich was sold very successfully to too many voters. Foot could not have lied to the public that way. Providing opportunity for all is costly but is morally right. In that respect, Foot can be seen as contributing to a humanist morality (he was an atheist) something which seems very at odds in the current UK where we have a choice between selfish, (in effect immoral), behaviour fostered by the right and the left seemingly to adhere to a sense that only faiths can supply morality, especially fostered by the Blairite New Labour, though more muted under Gordon Brown.
Michael Foot was a living reminder of a different, moral-based, intellectually-engaging form of politics which we seem so far away from these days even though the extremities of Thatcherism have been curtailed (for now). One has to admire someone of such ability and conviction and I feel proud that I was able to meet and talk with him on two occasions.
The thing about Foot which I was to witness that day was though at times his speeches wandered, they were always engaging and full of life. He was able to quote extensively and was very adept at using people's own words against them. On the day of his death I listened to the speech he made in 1979 (in those days there was only radio coverage not television coverage) at the time of the vote of no-confidence in the Labour government of James Callaghan; it was played on the Parliament channel. It was both funny and poignant in the ideas and challenges it laid out. I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a political speech so much.
I met Michael Foot again when he was launching 'Dr. Strangelove, I Presume' (1999). He was standing in Bloomsbury waiting to be collected. I had seen him at a bus stop in the Charing Cross Road a couple of years earlier. Despite his age (86 in 1999), he seemed full of energy. I had once met his doctor who outlined how he walked vigorously across Hampstead Heath. He had been rejected from volunteering for the army for the Second World War on the grounds of his asthma and he seemed to wear thick glasses all his life. One might have thought in his late 80s he was going to slow down, but as it turned out he had another entire decade of life ahead of him.
Anyway, again I had encountered Foot on his way to an event that I was actually attending myself. I took the opportunity to approach him and recounted how we had met twenty years earlier, though of course he would not have remembered. The world seemed incredibly different to 1979 to me and I got a bit of a sense of how the full expanse of his life appeared. The event was a small scale thing and had a kind of collegiate atmosphere. Some of the audience seemed to presume that his age was making him forgetful and this seemed to be the case when he did not respond to one question. The same question was asked again and very honestly, he said that he had not responded to it earlier, though he had taken in on board fully, because he had no answer for it. It was clear that his mind was as sharp as ever.
Michael Foot was an easy focus for ridicule, something that really haunted him when he was leader of the Labour Party, 1980-83. He was ridiculed for appearing at the Cenotaph in a duffel coat as if it was offensive. However, in my eyes, it was practical for a man of his age (Thatcher was 54 when she came to office) standing around in November and to some degree the extent of the ridicule suggests that he was still seen as a challenge by the Conservatives. In her first term of office Thatcher was not as secure as people now assume. There was uncertainty even within her own party about the direction she was going in, certainly away from the policies of Edward Heath towards an anti-European Community (ironically something she shared in common with Foot), far more pro-America and certainly pro-nuclear policy, backed by New Right monetarist economic policies which were wrecking so much of British industry. If it had not been for the Falklands Conflict of 1982 and the populist chauvinism that that threw up she would have found it far harder at the 1983 election than she did. Politics had turned very nasty as seen by the comedian Kenny Everett's (1944-95) call to a baying Conservative crowd to 'kick away Michael Foot's stick!'. Foot had used a stick to walk since a car accident in 1963.
Neil Kinnock made a very important point last week about Foot's role in keeping the Labour Party alive during the dark days of the Thatcher regime. The tendency among many Labour supporters in 1979 and beyond was to become more radical and move over to revolutionary politics. This threatened to remove the Labour Party from the mainstream of British politics, and as we know from the extreme left and extreme right parties, let alone people like the Green Party, such a location means not having representation in the UK parliament. Thatcher stated that she wanted to move towards a political system like that of the USA with two parties that were pretty close together around a rather right-wing 'centre' and in a television interview said she wanted to see the end of Socialist and semi-Socialist parties (a way she had characterised the Liberal Party on another occasion). A more radical Labour Party would possibly have allowed her to do that. However, given the fact that we have the kind of political pattern that Thatcher wished for, circulating around the Thatcherite Consensus with Labour and the Conservatives so close, perhaps the purging of the extremists under Kinnock after he became leader in 1983 might suggest that it meant moving to what Thatcher desired.
Foot's integrity and willingness to embrace challenging, if not utterly radical policies, meant he could not be beaten down by extremists like Militant Tendency, within his own party. While Labour now might be shorn of true radicalism it is intact and in fact that might be Foot's greatest legacy. The creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) including disgruntled right-wing Labour MPs in 1981, showed the risks of fragmentation for the Labour Party. Even if Labour managed to lose the argument for reforming policies the party did not shatter in the way it had after 1931 condemning it to impotence for a decade or the way the Liberal Party did after 1922 leaving it feeble for the rest of the 20th century. Becoming a number of small differently shaded left-wing parties would have meant no hope for anyone opposed to Thatcher. Kinnock had a party to take over even if it had to lose a lot of what he and Foot had stood for before it could come back to power, or, perhaps not, given the irregularities of the 1992 election.
Foot was particularly condemned in the 1980s for supporting unilateral nuclear disarmament. He did this because he had long believed in the immorality of nuclear weapons, but of course there would have been a real economic benefit for the UK if it had given up on nuclear weapons in the 1980s. The Trident nuclear weapons cost £1 billion per year to keep and the estimated total is £97 billion by the time they will have been scrapped. To replace them will costs £130 billion. These are sums which make bailing out the banks look pretty minor. The Polaris system, that preceded Trident, which the UK bought for £300 million in 1962 (worth around £6 billion at today's values) . If this money had gone into hospitals or transport or education or power generation, Britain would be in a very different situation to where it is today. We know that the fear of a Soviet invasion was constantly falsified and certainly from the 1970s onwards the USSR would have found it impossible to invade West Germany even if they had wanted to. The Soviets had minimal concern about the UK and yet we had to cripple our economy for the sake of a fantasy, making lots of US arms manufacturers very rich in the meantime. Even President General Dwight Eisenhower (president 1953-61) spoke of the 'military-industrial complex' that was so influential in the USA and clearly in the UK too. British jobs were not created by the regular purchase of US nuclear weapons. The current Labour government does not support the abolition of the UK's nuclear weapons, only the SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party) backs such a policy even though the Cold War has been over for twenty years.
In many ways, however, Foot represented an older generation of politician. He was probably out of date even in the 1960s when Labour prime minister Harold Wilson had adopted his pipe and raincoat as his trade marks for the television era. Foot appeared as he was, an ordinary old man of the kind you might see in the post office. However, the public want someone with a certain style than marks them out from the ordinary; John Major only really succeeded by being painfully ordinary. For Foot it would always be ideas and good policies that would mark out a politician but the public no longer felt that, for them style was now more important than substance.
Foot was more of the style of the Gladstone era in which long speeches which showed the erudite knowledge of the speaker were the norm and were a kind of entertainment and education as well as stirring. In the sound bite age, his wandering speeches could not be easily 'chunked' for the short attention span viewers. His legacy fed into Neil Kinnock, his successor as leader of the Labour Party, who though far younger (41 when he became Labour leader in 1983) did not shake off the lengthy expositions that Foot had favoured. These men were right, politics is not simple and simplifying it makes policies have a tendency to error. However, after the 1970s British society was 'tired of politics' and no-one can be bothered to listen to policy outlined, they would rather have emotionally swaying chunks of information that they can be certain are 'true' without analysing them at all.
Foot held fast to the deeply held views he had. He was not a pragmatist as that would have been to betray his views. He was a republican (seeking abolition of the monarchy) and was ardently opposed to nuclear weapons at a time when they had been made to seem 'vital' for Britain despite their huge expense and the hazard they presented. Similarly he believed in a mixed economy, i.e. with state-run and privately-run businesses, which ironically in the era of the enduring Thatcherite consensus fostered by Tony Blair, we have ended back with. Yet, the 1980s were seemingly all about 'free enterprise', well in fact not really free, just enterprise for the privileged and the already wealthy. Whilst millions were losing their jobs this fantasy of a society where ordinary people could be rich was sold very successfully to too many voters. Foot could not have lied to the public that way. Providing opportunity for all is costly but is morally right. In that respect, Foot can be seen as contributing to a humanist morality (he was an atheist) something which seems very at odds in the current UK where we have a choice between selfish, (in effect immoral), behaviour fostered by the right and the left seemingly to adhere to a sense that only faiths can supply morality, especially fostered by the Blairite New Labour, though more muted under Gordon Brown.
Michael Foot was a living reminder of a different, moral-based, intellectually-engaging form of politics which we seem so far away from these days even though the extremities of Thatcherism have been curtailed (for now). One has to admire someone of such ability and conviction and I feel proud that I was able to meet and talk with him on two occasions.
Saturday, 21 February 2009
'Alien to British Culture': A Myopic View of Britain's History and Society
I have just started reading 'The Strange Death of Socialist Britain' (1992) by Patrick Cosgrave (1941-2001). I read the book that inspired the title of 'The Strange Death of Liberal Britain' (1935) by George Dangerfield which I read about eight years ago. Both books look at how and why what seemed to be the political and even social consensus of an era faded away. Dangerfield was looking back to the period of 1906-14 in which the Liberal Party was in power and brought about social welfare reforms. In addition, there seemed to be a consensus about a liberal society and democracy which following the First World War and the dictatorships of the 1920s and 1930s, people were nostalgic for. However, as Dangerfield shows that despite the popular image, in fact Britain of the early 1910s was facing immense social upheaval with pressure from organised labour, female suffrage supporters and those seeking an independent Ireland, that some feared the country was verging on civil war or a revolution.
Cosgrave looks at a different period, stretching from 1945 victory the Labour Party and the mixed economy and welfare state that was created and seemed to be accepted right across the political spectrum up to the end of the period of Thatcher in power and the unexpected defeat of the Labour Party in the 1992 election. That period is seen as the last gasp of Socialism in Britain and Labour was only able to come back to power in 1997 by turning into a post-Thatcherist party focused on an individual. I have long argued that the Labour Party, not even New Labour, came to power in 1997, rather, the Blairite Party came into office along the lines of a Gaullist or Peronist party seen in other countries. Of course the current economic crisis with the governments of the UK and other countries taking over banks and companies suggests that maybe Socialism in practice is not entirely dead.
Given that Cosgrave is a biographer of Margaret Thatcher, Lord Carrington, Enoch Powell, R.A. Butler and Sir Winston Churchill, I was not expecting a liberal or left-wing appreciation of the period under scrutiny. However, even given that it was written at the time when Thatcherism seemed to be scattering all rivals to the winds it seems an astoundingly narrow, almost deluded approach. Cosgrave goes beyond anything the Thatcher regime voiced. It soon becomes apparent that he feels that the loss of the British Empire 1947-80 or there abouts as being a huge error and that in some way Britain should have clung to its colonies, not least, because independence only led to dictatorship and wars, of course neglecting the reasonably peaceful development of India, the most populous of Britain's former colonies after the 1940s. Cosgrave wants all or nothing. He did not want the colonies to go and yet he sees the Commonwealth, the looser connection between elements of the former British Empire as a huge error too, but more on that in a minute.
Now anyone who believes that Britain (or any European state) could have clung to its empire in Africa and Asia has absolutely no idea of history. If the American War of Independence 1776-83 and Spain's loss of its American colonies in the 19th century show nothing about trying to keep hold of colonies as they mature, then Cosgrave and others should simply look to the experiences of those countries who did try to retain their colonies beyond the due time. Not only does it ignore the ongoing conflicts in many colonies in the 1880s-1910s but also what happened after 1945. France fought in Indochina effectively 1945-54 and in Algeria 1954-62. These conflicts led to over 178,000 locals and French dying and another 225,000 being wounded; torture was used and there were massacres in Paris in 1961 and in Oran in 1962. It also came close to plunging France into a civil war 1958-60. Is this the kind of experience Cosgrave wanted for Britain? Another example is the Portuguese Colonial War 1961-74 between the colonial power of Portugal which had held colonies in Africa for over 400 years, far longer than Britain, and the states of Mozambique and Angola fighting for independence. This killed untold thousands of locals, over 8000 Portuguese troops and led to the displacement of over a million people. Even closer to home, it can be argued that Britain's continued occupation of Northern Ireland (and I know this is a controversial argument as many argue that that state is entirely a part of the UK) but that conflict from the start of the 'Troubles' in 1969 to 1998 led to the death of over 3000 people and brought the conflict to mainland Britain in bombing campaigns. Does not Cosgrave understand that if Britain had tried to cling to every colony it would have suffered such an experience many times over. Perhaps he wants a police state under martial law, because that is the kind of UK you would have ended up with if Britain had not let its colonies go, not some kind of paternalist dream he seems to subscribe to.
Then Cosgrave has a problem with the Commonwealth, well as he puts it, not the entire Commonwealth but the ''new' or coloured Commonwealth'. He feels it was wrongly constructed because it permitted free immigration of people from those countries to the UK and so leading to 'large pockets of immigrants alien to British culture'. Now that is poor analysis and basic bigotry on so many levels. For a start he seems to think that immigration to the UK started with the arrival of the ship the 'Empire Windrush' in 1948, whereas of course people have been moving into the UK for many centuries. People came from Africa and the Middle East with the Romans and right throughout Britain's involvement with the slave trade. Refugees from France came in the 16th century and refugees from China and Russia were coming through the 19th century. Too many people look in askance when a television series does not show an all white population in Victorian Britain especially in the cities, but of course an all-white population is simply a myth it was never like that as you can see easily from paintings of the time. The Commonwealth did not create immigration, in fact it made it harder to immigrate into the UK. Under the British Empire at its height, an era when passports were restricted to those autocracies like Russia and the Ottoman Empire, people moved freely around the empire. They might face prejudice but at that stage there were not legal restrictions.
Like many people Cosgrave makes the mistake that the British Nationality Act of 1948 somehow opened doors that had been closed. In fact it simply regulated relations between countries that were now not part of an empire but had a different, increasingly independent relationship with Britain. Decades after the Republic of Ireland was formed, Irish people still have rights to stand as candidates in the UK and vote, and a whole raft of rights as if we were still connected and not two sovereign states. What would have been Cosgrave's alternative to the evolving Commonwealth, to say 'well, yes, I know we conquered you, exploited you, messed up your economy and got you to fight in our wars for us, but I am sorry, we owe you nothing, you have no right to come to the UK'. To have closed access in that way would have seemed incredibly mean-spirited and Cosgrave forgets that even Conservatives of that era did not see the world in the harsh terms that he does. Those countries such as France and Portugal who fought bitter wars of decolonisation, even they formed communities with their former colonies, so Britain would have appeared peculiar not to have done the same. Of course Cosgrave's 'me first' attitude to the states of the Commonwealth is the same as his attitude to workers too.
Cosgrave forgets that economic migration works like a lot of economics through supply and demand. Immigrants would not have been brought to the UK (Enoch Powell himself despite his racism, brought West Indian nurses to work in the health service) if there were not jobs for them. Cosgrave forgets that until the economic crises of the 1970s, Britain like most of western Europe had 'full' employment (usually reckoned to be 92-97% of the working population in employment, there is deemed to be a need for 'transitional' unemployment as people move between jobs) and that was with the immigrants he loathes. Britain without immigration would (as it had done in the late 1940s when it experienced labour shortages in many key industries) have faced difficulties in its transport, health and retail sectors in the 1950s and 1960s. There were insufficient white UK people to do the jobs needed by the booming economy, especially at the wage rates employers were willing to pay. Cosgrave forgets this too, that despite of his love of the Thatcherite principle of a flexible labour force willing (or compelled) to work at the lowest cost to an employer possible, that low wages promote immigration. Cosgrave is clearly wrapped up in the attitude that the white British population shop accept its 'station' and do poor jobs at low wages and certainly not complain (he loathes trade unions as much as he does immigrants). It is noticeable how many Polish workers have returned to Poland now the British economy is suffering. Of course writers like Cosgrave believe there is something inherently attractive about Britain that we need to repel those unlucky not to have been born here from languishing in the wonders of Britain. This is, of course, why immigration into Britain in recent years has almost been matched by emigration of Britons especially to France, Spain, the USA and Australia.
Cosgrave also makes an error when he portrays the culture of immigrants to Britain as 'alien' to British culture. For a start, what is British culture? I have debated this before, but it is certain that it is not something static. Even if people have a nostalgia for a Britain of the past, it is an edited past (for example with the black faces and malnourished removed from the picture). British culture is diverse and constantly evolves. Immigrants have always been part of that and have been assimilated in the UK faster than in some other countries, Germany being a notable example. Of course immigrants by definition are people with 'get-up-and-go' as they have travelled hundreds or thousands of kilometres to get here. The passive people who accept their place in the world are those still back in India or Jamaica. By definition immigrants want to get on and want their children to become doctors and not work the long hours they worked. Of course this eagerness to shake up society and to pull your family up social levels upsets Cosgrave no matter what ethnicity the individual trying to achieve it. Here he again marks himself out from a strong strand of Conservative tradition which encourages the individual and their family (even Margaret Thatcher lauded families) to prosper and get on and sees the Conservative way as a better way to promote such advancement rather than the 'Nanny state' controls they associate with Labour. Cosgrave is a pre-Disraelian Tory and seems to favour a feudal hierarchy with no chance of advancement. Of course with his bigoted, racialist (as opposed to racist) approach he could not accept 'coloured' immigrants gettting off the bottom rung. In addition, many immigrant families whether they felt they should or because they genuinely believed in it, were stronger advocates of elements seen as being at the heart of British culture such as church attendance and sports like cricket than most white British families. Of course this stemmed from how such things were transmitted across the Empire and remain even now in the Commonwealth. In particular to speak of Commonwealth immigrants as being 'alien' to British culture is most misguided as their arrival here often speaks of their faith and adherence to that culture in a way that people arriving from other countries would find impossible.
I suppose I am not surprised that I picked up this copy of Cosgrave's book for £1 (reduced from £16.95). I was hoping for something that came close to Dangerfield's account and analysis and instead found a book which is even out-of-step with the contemporary Conservative view of society and recent history and tends towards being an attempt at a respectable history from the BNP (British National Party) perspective. Of course you can argue that the whole basis of his book is on a faulty foundation and that there never was a Socialist Britain. The welfare state built on the Liberal social welfare policies of the 1910s; Keynes was a Liberal and certainly not a Socialist and what we saw by the end of the 1940s was not Socialist economics with a directed economy, it was kind of Keynesian approach though prosperity meant many elements of Keynesianism were not needed until the mid-1970s. Nationalisation is seen as being Socialist economics, but again the approach adopted to nationalised industries was one of being at arm's length which was part of the problem and so the form was little different to the rationalisation of the railways carried out by the Conservatives in the 1920s or the muncipal gas boards of the 19th century. British foreign policy was not Socialist. Decolonisation was pressed most strongly by Franklin D. Roosevelt, US President and the Conservative governments oversaw far more decolonisation than Labour ever did. Labour was anti-Soviet and brought Britain into NATO and kept it out of the ECSC which formed the basis of the EEC and thus the EU. It was the Conservatives who moved Britain to participating in Europe. So, one can look hard for a Socialist Britain and not find one.
It would be more accurate to have titled Cosgrave's book, 'The Strange Death of Tory Democracy Britain' as what we saw from 1975/9 onwards was actually the overthrowing of the Disraelian tradition of the Conservative Party (which spent 48 years of the 20th century in power and another 20 years in coalition governments, usually in a dominant position) by the New Right and how far that marks a jump from the kind of society the party that tends to be in power most often in the UK wants to try to foster. Given that I would argue that we need another Attleean revolution now (i.e. a Liberal one) to deal with the financial crisis and its human consequences, it is important to blow away the false divide that authors like Cosgrave have put up and see in fact that we have experienced first the Conservatives then Labour be shorn of their social conscience so dumping us into a situation where greed dominated. As to rising bigotry, well that fills the headlines today and needs to be challenged by us all. Given that Cosgrave has irritated me so quickly I can imagine I am going to be stimulated to write more about this doyen of Thatcherism.
Cosgrave looks at a different period, stretching from 1945 victory the Labour Party and the mixed economy and welfare state that was created and seemed to be accepted right across the political spectrum up to the end of the period of Thatcher in power and the unexpected defeat of the Labour Party in the 1992 election. That period is seen as the last gasp of Socialism in Britain and Labour was only able to come back to power in 1997 by turning into a post-Thatcherist party focused on an individual. I have long argued that the Labour Party, not even New Labour, came to power in 1997, rather, the Blairite Party came into office along the lines of a Gaullist or Peronist party seen in other countries. Of course the current economic crisis with the governments of the UK and other countries taking over banks and companies suggests that maybe Socialism in practice is not entirely dead.
Given that Cosgrave is a biographer of Margaret Thatcher, Lord Carrington, Enoch Powell, R.A. Butler and Sir Winston Churchill, I was not expecting a liberal or left-wing appreciation of the period under scrutiny. However, even given that it was written at the time when Thatcherism seemed to be scattering all rivals to the winds it seems an astoundingly narrow, almost deluded approach. Cosgrave goes beyond anything the Thatcher regime voiced. It soon becomes apparent that he feels that the loss of the British Empire 1947-80 or there abouts as being a huge error and that in some way Britain should have clung to its colonies, not least, because independence only led to dictatorship and wars, of course neglecting the reasonably peaceful development of India, the most populous of Britain's former colonies after the 1940s. Cosgrave wants all or nothing. He did not want the colonies to go and yet he sees the Commonwealth, the looser connection between elements of the former British Empire as a huge error too, but more on that in a minute.
Now anyone who believes that Britain (or any European state) could have clung to its empire in Africa and Asia has absolutely no idea of history. If the American War of Independence 1776-83 and Spain's loss of its American colonies in the 19th century show nothing about trying to keep hold of colonies as they mature, then Cosgrave and others should simply look to the experiences of those countries who did try to retain their colonies beyond the due time. Not only does it ignore the ongoing conflicts in many colonies in the 1880s-1910s but also what happened after 1945. France fought in Indochina effectively 1945-54 and in Algeria 1954-62. These conflicts led to over 178,000 locals and French dying and another 225,000 being wounded; torture was used and there were massacres in Paris in 1961 and in Oran in 1962. It also came close to plunging France into a civil war 1958-60. Is this the kind of experience Cosgrave wanted for Britain? Another example is the Portuguese Colonial War 1961-74 between the colonial power of Portugal which had held colonies in Africa for over 400 years, far longer than Britain, and the states of Mozambique and Angola fighting for independence. This killed untold thousands of locals, over 8000 Portuguese troops and led to the displacement of over a million people. Even closer to home, it can be argued that Britain's continued occupation of Northern Ireland (and I know this is a controversial argument as many argue that that state is entirely a part of the UK) but that conflict from the start of the 'Troubles' in 1969 to 1998 led to the death of over 3000 people and brought the conflict to mainland Britain in bombing campaigns. Does not Cosgrave understand that if Britain had tried to cling to every colony it would have suffered such an experience many times over. Perhaps he wants a police state under martial law, because that is the kind of UK you would have ended up with if Britain had not let its colonies go, not some kind of paternalist dream he seems to subscribe to.
Then Cosgrave has a problem with the Commonwealth, well as he puts it, not the entire Commonwealth but the ''new' or coloured Commonwealth'. He feels it was wrongly constructed because it permitted free immigration of people from those countries to the UK and so leading to 'large pockets of immigrants alien to British culture'. Now that is poor analysis and basic bigotry on so many levels. For a start he seems to think that immigration to the UK started with the arrival of the ship the 'Empire Windrush' in 1948, whereas of course people have been moving into the UK for many centuries. People came from Africa and the Middle East with the Romans and right throughout Britain's involvement with the slave trade. Refugees from France came in the 16th century and refugees from China and Russia were coming through the 19th century. Too many people look in askance when a television series does not show an all white population in Victorian Britain especially in the cities, but of course an all-white population is simply a myth it was never like that as you can see easily from paintings of the time. The Commonwealth did not create immigration, in fact it made it harder to immigrate into the UK. Under the British Empire at its height, an era when passports were restricted to those autocracies like Russia and the Ottoman Empire, people moved freely around the empire. They might face prejudice but at that stage there were not legal restrictions.
Like many people Cosgrave makes the mistake that the British Nationality Act of 1948 somehow opened doors that had been closed. In fact it simply regulated relations between countries that were now not part of an empire but had a different, increasingly independent relationship with Britain. Decades after the Republic of Ireland was formed, Irish people still have rights to stand as candidates in the UK and vote, and a whole raft of rights as if we were still connected and not two sovereign states. What would have been Cosgrave's alternative to the evolving Commonwealth, to say 'well, yes, I know we conquered you, exploited you, messed up your economy and got you to fight in our wars for us, but I am sorry, we owe you nothing, you have no right to come to the UK'. To have closed access in that way would have seemed incredibly mean-spirited and Cosgrave forgets that even Conservatives of that era did not see the world in the harsh terms that he does. Those countries such as France and Portugal who fought bitter wars of decolonisation, even they formed communities with their former colonies, so Britain would have appeared peculiar not to have done the same. Of course Cosgrave's 'me first' attitude to the states of the Commonwealth is the same as his attitude to workers too.
Cosgrave forgets that economic migration works like a lot of economics through supply and demand. Immigrants would not have been brought to the UK (Enoch Powell himself despite his racism, brought West Indian nurses to work in the health service) if there were not jobs for them. Cosgrave forgets that until the economic crises of the 1970s, Britain like most of western Europe had 'full' employment (usually reckoned to be 92-97% of the working population in employment, there is deemed to be a need for 'transitional' unemployment as people move between jobs) and that was with the immigrants he loathes. Britain without immigration would (as it had done in the late 1940s when it experienced labour shortages in many key industries) have faced difficulties in its transport, health and retail sectors in the 1950s and 1960s. There were insufficient white UK people to do the jobs needed by the booming economy, especially at the wage rates employers were willing to pay. Cosgrave forgets this too, that despite of his love of the Thatcherite principle of a flexible labour force willing (or compelled) to work at the lowest cost to an employer possible, that low wages promote immigration. Cosgrave is clearly wrapped up in the attitude that the white British population shop accept its 'station' and do poor jobs at low wages and certainly not complain (he loathes trade unions as much as he does immigrants). It is noticeable how many Polish workers have returned to Poland now the British economy is suffering. Of course writers like Cosgrave believe there is something inherently attractive about Britain that we need to repel those unlucky not to have been born here from languishing in the wonders of Britain. This is, of course, why immigration into Britain in recent years has almost been matched by emigration of Britons especially to France, Spain, the USA and Australia.
Cosgrave also makes an error when he portrays the culture of immigrants to Britain as 'alien' to British culture. For a start, what is British culture? I have debated this before, but it is certain that it is not something static. Even if people have a nostalgia for a Britain of the past, it is an edited past (for example with the black faces and malnourished removed from the picture). British culture is diverse and constantly evolves. Immigrants have always been part of that and have been assimilated in the UK faster than in some other countries, Germany being a notable example. Of course immigrants by definition are people with 'get-up-and-go' as they have travelled hundreds or thousands of kilometres to get here. The passive people who accept their place in the world are those still back in India or Jamaica. By definition immigrants want to get on and want their children to become doctors and not work the long hours they worked. Of course this eagerness to shake up society and to pull your family up social levels upsets Cosgrave no matter what ethnicity the individual trying to achieve it. Here he again marks himself out from a strong strand of Conservative tradition which encourages the individual and their family (even Margaret Thatcher lauded families) to prosper and get on and sees the Conservative way as a better way to promote such advancement rather than the 'Nanny state' controls they associate with Labour. Cosgrave is a pre-Disraelian Tory and seems to favour a feudal hierarchy with no chance of advancement. Of course with his bigoted, racialist (as opposed to racist) approach he could not accept 'coloured' immigrants gettting off the bottom rung. In addition, many immigrant families whether they felt they should or because they genuinely believed in it, were stronger advocates of elements seen as being at the heart of British culture such as church attendance and sports like cricket than most white British families. Of course this stemmed from how such things were transmitted across the Empire and remain even now in the Commonwealth. In particular to speak of Commonwealth immigrants as being 'alien' to British culture is most misguided as their arrival here often speaks of their faith and adherence to that culture in a way that people arriving from other countries would find impossible.
I suppose I am not surprised that I picked up this copy of Cosgrave's book for £1 (reduced from £16.95). I was hoping for something that came close to Dangerfield's account and analysis and instead found a book which is even out-of-step with the contemporary Conservative view of society and recent history and tends towards being an attempt at a respectable history from the BNP (British National Party) perspective. Of course you can argue that the whole basis of his book is on a faulty foundation and that there never was a Socialist Britain. The welfare state built on the Liberal social welfare policies of the 1910s; Keynes was a Liberal and certainly not a Socialist and what we saw by the end of the 1940s was not Socialist economics with a directed economy, it was kind of Keynesian approach though prosperity meant many elements of Keynesianism were not needed until the mid-1970s. Nationalisation is seen as being Socialist economics, but again the approach adopted to nationalised industries was one of being at arm's length which was part of the problem and so the form was little different to the rationalisation of the railways carried out by the Conservatives in the 1920s or the muncipal gas boards of the 19th century. British foreign policy was not Socialist. Decolonisation was pressed most strongly by Franklin D. Roosevelt, US President and the Conservative governments oversaw far more decolonisation than Labour ever did. Labour was anti-Soviet and brought Britain into NATO and kept it out of the ECSC which formed the basis of the EEC and thus the EU. It was the Conservatives who moved Britain to participating in Europe. So, one can look hard for a Socialist Britain and not find one.
It would be more accurate to have titled Cosgrave's book, 'The Strange Death of Tory Democracy Britain' as what we saw from 1975/9 onwards was actually the overthrowing of the Disraelian tradition of the Conservative Party (which spent 48 years of the 20th century in power and another 20 years in coalition governments, usually in a dominant position) by the New Right and how far that marks a jump from the kind of society the party that tends to be in power most often in the UK wants to try to foster. Given that I would argue that we need another Attleean revolution now (i.e. a Liberal one) to deal with the financial crisis and its human consequences, it is important to blow away the false divide that authors like Cosgrave have put up and see in fact that we have experienced first the Conservatives then Labour be shorn of their social conscience so dumping us into a situation where greed dominated. As to rising bigotry, well that fills the headlines today and needs to be challenged by us all. Given that Cosgrave has irritated me so quickly I can imagine I am going to be stimulated to write more about this doyen of Thatcherism.
Sunday, 20 July 2008
What is the Problem with an Elected House of Lords?
Back in 1997 before the Labour Party was elected to power for the first time in the UK in 18 years there was much in their policy documents about their policies for constitutional reform. For a country that has had some form of democracy for a quite a long time, though only universal suffrage since 1948, the UK actually is not a very democratic country. Putting aside the fact that so much policy is made by the ultra-rich in UK society, in fact even at a base level it does not really count as a democracy. Like so many other countries in the World we have a bicameral system of parliament but the upper house, the House of Lords, is totally unelected and is made up of people, predominantly men, who have inherited their position in parliament, alongside 24 bishops from the Church of England, no other church, and then people who have been appointed for life by some politician in the past few decades. You could argue that this all frees them from political influence and that their age means that they can bring experience to the job, but the key problem for me, and for the Labour Party of 1997 is that they are all unelected.
Eleven years on, nothing has changed. There were attempts to reduce the number of inherited peers (as the lords and ladies are termed generically) or reduce their voting rights, but even that has not really come about. In 1999 the number of hereditary peers was reduced from 700 to 92, which is an improvement, but the house is still full of appointed rather than elected people. As you probably know, it is suspected that Labour, for some reason will lose the 2009/10 election, primarily because with the departure of Tony Blair they have stopped pandering to the ultra-rich as much as they used to, and money and influence turned all the media against the Brown government, even though their rivals, the Conservatives, lack any policies and seem content to simply have power handed to them. We actually might be moving into an era of policy-free politics. However much I loath Margaret Thatcher and how she totally wrecked the UK (to give her the state funeral she is now requesting would be a travesty) no-one could say she lack policies. So, in this environment, the slowly grinding steps to try to reform the House of Lords are now facing opposition from within Labour itself, because they think it may upset the electorate even further. Given that most Labour MPs think they will lose anyway, why are they bothered? I can tell you why, it is because the House of Lords is the most exclusive club in the World and even the majority of Socialists of the past were happy to become lords or ladies. Partly, I imagine, because it meant they could keep sticking their noses into politics for the rest of their lives. Full credit to Tony Benn for giving up the peerage he inherited in the mid-1960s and refusing one in his own right, though he is the one man I think this country still needs in parliament.
What angers me most is the feeble excuses which are being put forward to delay reform of the House of Lords and they show a stunningly patronising attitude to our friends and allies not only in the EU but also North America. The team supposedly leading the reform headed by Jack Straw and Lady Corston, argue reform now would be 'a knee-jerk reaction', how slow are your responses if it takes 11 years to react? In fact it is more than that as Labour was thinking along these lines back as early as 1994 and even before that. I met in the 1990s who had researched Labour's attempts in the 1970s to reform the House of Lords, so 30 years is a very slow 'jerk'. The really feeble response is that there might be split legitimacy in parliament if there was an elected upper house. I could understand this fear if nowhere else in the World had a bicameral system with both houses elected, but since Japan abolished its House of Peers at the end of the Second World War, not democratic country has an unelected second house. The Americans have had one now for over 200 years. In neighbouring countries notably France, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, have elected upper houses. The Norway, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Greece, all the Balkan states except Bosnia, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine have unicameral systems, so are entirely elected. Of course we could go unicameral, but if we insist on bicameral there are scores of successful examples across Europe and the English-speaking world: Canada, South Africa, India, Australia, only New Zealand is unicameral.
Straw whines that if proportional representation was used for the upper house then members there could claim greater legitimacy to hold their seat than many of those in the lower house, the House of Commons. Well, whose fault is that? Labour was very eager to have proportional representation when it was losing during the 1980s and 1990s and then when they came to power they forgot all about it. If they had introduced it when they said, we would not now be in that situation. The other issue is that there are loads of models of an elected upper house. The nearest, i.e. the Republic of Ireland, the only state to share a land border with the UK, has an indirectly elected upper house, Seanad Éireann is chosen by electoral colleges. The trouble is a lack of imagination on the part of the reformers. The UK could move first to an indirect model before a directly elected model, if they wanted, but even those charged with looking at reform seem stunningly ignorant of the different models available. I suppose it is the typical British thing, that as the 'mother of democracy' we have nothing to learn from ignorant foreigners who have instability leading to dictatorship. Of course this neglects how for over 60 years so many European models have worked well in securing political stability in times of upheaval. The British feel they must find a uniquely British model and given how many varieties are already in existence this leaves little to choose from. Straw's whining is pathetic. They should ask him to pay back any salary he has received from doing this work as clearly he has done less research than you and I can achieve through a Google search or a visit to Wikipedia.
The other problem is that many upper houses are based on a territorial pattern, examples include the states of the USA represented in the Senate and Germany with the Bundesrat. Belgium, Canada, India, Russia, Switzerland are other examples. Of course this would seem a good way forward now that Scotland, Wales and to some extent Northern Ireland are gaining more autonomy. However, again, despite their promises in 1997, regional assemblies for England where 83% of the UK population live, have been stillborn. Partly this is because regional identity is weak and in some areas it is on historic lines, in others on modern things like unitary authorities and these all come in different shapes and sizes. However, the other issue is that the British public do not like 'government' and feel they have no ability to shape it so they simply resist it as an extra level of bureaucracy. Thus, the parallel policy of having large geographical areas from which English senators could be elected itself has failed. A lot of this stems from the fact that so many British people are ignorant of their political system, they love historic models and would probably prefer simply the Queen in power advised by her housecarls, they have felt powerless for so many decades now too and so when reform comes about there is no engagement. Consequently the UK will struggle on with its truncated democracy, which clearly favours, rather than challenges, those who have power. Our upper house will remain an exclusive club rather than a strong tool of democracy.
Eleven years on, nothing has changed. There were attempts to reduce the number of inherited peers (as the lords and ladies are termed generically) or reduce their voting rights, but even that has not really come about. In 1999 the number of hereditary peers was reduced from 700 to 92, which is an improvement, but the house is still full of appointed rather than elected people. As you probably know, it is suspected that Labour, for some reason will lose the 2009/10 election, primarily because with the departure of Tony Blair they have stopped pandering to the ultra-rich as much as they used to, and money and influence turned all the media against the Brown government, even though their rivals, the Conservatives, lack any policies and seem content to simply have power handed to them. We actually might be moving into an era of policy-free politics. However much I loath Margaret Thatcher and how she totally wrecked the UK (to give her the state funeral she is now requesting would be a travesty) no-one could say she lack policies. So, in this environment, the slowly grinding steps to try to reform the House of Lords are now facing opposition from within Labour itself, because they think it may upset the electorate even further. Given that most Labour MPs think they will lose anyway, why are they bothered? I can tell you why, it is because the House of Lords is the most exclusive club in the World and even the majority of Socialists of the past were happy to become lords or ladies. Partly, I imagine, because it meant they could keep sticking their noses into politics for the rest of their lives. Full credit to Tony Benn for giving up the peerage he inherited in the mid-1960s and refusing one in his own right, though he is the one man I think this country still needs in parliament.
What angers me most is the feeble excuses which are being put forward to delay reform of the House of Lords and they show a stunningly patronising attitude to our friends and allies not only in the EU but also North America. The team supposedly leading the reform headed by Jack Straw and Lady Corston, argue reform now would be 'a knee-jerk reaction', how slow are your responses if it takes 11 years to react? In fact it is more than that as Labour was thinking along these lines back as early as 1994 and even before that. I met in the 1990s who had researched Labour's attempts in the 1970s to reform the House of Lords, so 30 years is a very slow 'jerk'. The really feeble response is that there might be split legitimacy in parliament if there was an elected upper house. I could understand this fear if nowhere else in the World had a bicameral system with both houses elected, but since Japan abolished its House of Peers at the end of the Second World War, not democratic country has an unelected second house. The Americans have had one now for over 200 years. In neighbouring countries notably France, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, have elected upper houses. The Norway, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Greece, all the Balkan states except Bosnia, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine have unicameral systems, so are entirely elected. Of course we could go unicameral, but if we insist on bicameral there are scores of successful examples across Europe and the English-speaking world: Canada, South Africa, India, Australia, only New Zealand is unicameral.
Straw whines that if proportional representation was used for the upper house then members there could claim greater legitimacy to hold their seat than many of those in the lower house, the House of Commons. Well, whose fault is that? Labour was very eager to have proportional representation when it was losing during the 1980s and 1990s and then when they came to power they forgot all about it. If they had introduced it when they said, we would not now be in that situation. The other issue is that there are loads of models of an elected upper house. The nearest, i.e. the Republic of Ireland, the only state to share a land border with the UK, has an indirectly elected upper house, Seanad Éireann is chosen by electoral colleges. The trouble is a lack of imagination on the part of the reformers. The UK could move first to an indirect model before a directly elected model, if they wanted, but even those charged with looking at reform seem stunningly ignorant of the different models available. I suppose it is the typical British thing, that as the 'mother of democracy' we have nothing to learn from ignorant foreigners who have instability leading to dictatorship. Of course this neglects how for over 60 years so many European models have worked well in securing political stability in times of upheaval. The British feel they must find a uniquely British model and given how many varieties are already in existence this leaves little to choose from. Straw's whining is pathetic. They should ask him to pay back any salary he has received from doing this work as clearly he has done less research than you and I can achieve through a Google search or a visit to Wikipedia.
The other problem is that many upper houses are based on a territorial pattern, examples include the states of the USA represented in the Senate and Germany with the Bundesrat. Belgium, Canada, India, Russia, Switzerland are other examples. Of course this would seem a good way forward now that Scotland, Wales and to some extent Northern Ireland are gaining more autonomy. However, again, despite their promises in 1997, regional assemblies for England where 83% of the UK population live, have been stillborn. Partly this is because regional identity is weak and in some areas it is on historic lines, in others on modern things like unitary authorities and these all come in different shapes and sizes. However, the other issue is that the British public do not like 'government' and feel they have no ability to shape it so they simply resist it as an extra level of bureaucracy. Thus, the parallel policy of having large geographical areas from which English senators could be elected itself has failed. A lot of this stems from the fact that so many British people are ignorant of their political system, they love historic models and would probably prefer simply the Queen in power advised by her housecarls, they have felt powerless for so many decades now too and so when reform comes about there is no engagement. Consequently the UK will struggle on with its truncated democracy, which clearly favours, rather than challenges, those who have power. Our upper house will remain an exclusive club rather than a strong tool of democracy.
Friday, 4 May 2007
Is this a model of democracy?
Talking with some young Americans at the time of the war with Iraq I put forward the following suggestion for the political system that might be introduced to the country after Saddam Hussain was deposed and asked whether they thought it was a good model. This was my suggestion:
The head of state should also be head of the most established sect of religion in the country, but one which most people do not actually subscribe to. The head of state should be from a foreign family and be unelected, holding their position for as long as they live with the position passing to their children on their death. All laws would be enacted in the name of this head of state and people would swear loyalty to them.
Half of the parliament would be unelected too. It would be made up of mainly elderly people who either are given their posts by political leaders or simply inherit them from their parents with often the same family having held a position in parliament for centuries. There is no obligation for them to attend parliament but they get paid a small fee if they bother to turn up. Twenty-four members of this part of parliament are rotating batch of religious leaders but all of them are from the same sect as the head of state.
The rest of parliament would be elected, however on a system that means if a candidate gets one more vote than his opponent s/he wins and almost 50% of the votes cast in a constituency are effectively 'wasted'. Different parties effectively have to get a different number of votes to win a member of parliament, so a centre party winning 18% of the votes gets 7% of the seats and another party winning 41% of the votes gets 62% of the seats in parliament. There are no left-wing, extreme right-wing or ecological parties in the parliament. Though ethnic minorities make up 8% of a country's population they have only 2% of the representatives in parliament. Women make up more than half the population and more than half the working population of the country but only 20% of representatives are female. More votes are needed to get a representative in from the South of the country than from the North. About 50% of the eligible population vote in national elections; 25-30% in local elections.
Legislation in the parliament can be extended in scope or duration by the use of the 'prerogative' of the unelected head of state, wielded by the head of government. It is often 'guillotined' to rush it through without debate. The head of government only appears before the parliament for 15 minutes once per week and parliament is closed for large portions of the year. Much legislation comes from a supra-national regional body, located outside the country, especially covering things like food and work issues.
Anyway, it is not much of a trick because people soon work out that it is the UK government system I am talking about. We have the Queen as the head of state and she is also head of the Church of England. The House of Lords is entirely unelected, still, after 10 years of reform being promised and it contains bishops. The electoral system does lead to huge distortions and it is a waste of effort for small parties to even bother trying to get in. Even the Liberal Democrats who in one form or another have been around for two centuries have found it difficult to get a credible number of members of parliament. Ethnic minorities and women are seriously under-represented in parliament. The Blair government has made more use of the royal prerogative and guillotining than any of its predecessors to get legislation, these days often poorly drafted, through, despite having huge majorities in parliament.
The head of state should also be head of the most established sect of religion in the country, but one which most people do not actually subscribe to. The head of state should be from a foreign family and be unelected, holding their position for as long as they live with the position passing to their children on their death. All laws would be enacted in the name of this head of state and people would swear loyalty to them.
Half of the parliament would be unelected too. It would be made up of mainly elderly people who either are given their posts by political leaders or simply inherit them from their parents with often the same family having held a position in parliament for centuries. There is no obligation for them to attend parliament but they get paid a small fee if they bother to turn up. Twenty-four members of this part of parliament are rotating batch of religious leaders but all of them are from the same sect as the head of state.
The rest of parliament would be elected, however on a system that means if a candidate gets one more vote than his opponent s/he wins and almost 50% of the votes cast in a constituency are effectively 'wasted'. Different parties effectively have to get a different number of votes to win a member of parliament, so a centre party winning 18% of the votes gets 7% of the seats and another party winning 41% of the votes gets 62% of the seats in parliament. There are no left-wing, extreme right-wing or ecological parties in the parliament. Though ethnic minorities make up 8% of a country's population they have only 2% of the representatives in parliament. Women make up more than half the population and more than half the working population of the country but only 20% of representatives are female. More votes are needed to get a representative in from the South of the country than from the North. About 50% of the eligible population vote in national elections; 25-30% in local elections.
Legislation in the parliament can be extended in scope or duration by the use of the 'prerogative' of the unelected head of state, wielded by the head of government. It is often 'guillotined' to rush it through without debate. The head of government only appears before the parliament for 15 minutes once per week and parliament is closed for large portions of the year. Much legislation comes from a supra-national regional body, located outside the country, especially covering things like food and work issues.
Anyway, it is not much of a trick because people soon work out that it is the UK government system I am talking about. We have the Queen as the head of state and she is also head of the Church of England. The House of Lords is entirely unelected, still, after 10 years of reform being promised and it contains bishops. The electoral system does lead to huge distortions and it is a waste of effort for small parties to even bother trying to get in. Even the Liberal Democrats who in one form or another have been around for two centuries have found it difficult to get a credible number of members of parliament. Ethnic minorities and women are seriously under-represented in parliament. The Blair government has made more use of the royal prerogative and guillotining than any of its predecessors to get legislation, these days often poorly drafted, through, despite having huge majorities in parliament.
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