Lost up the Kilburn High Road

Last week I received an invitation to a showing of the new film about Stuart Hall (not that one – this one) – you can watch a trailer here - which has prompted me to dust off a half-written post that I started earlier this year.

Stuart Hall was one of my heroes. I discovered him in the early 1980s via his classic articles about Thatcherism in Marxism Today and, as I wrote in my last post, went on from there to explore his work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. I also have him to thank for introducing me to the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Back then Hall carved out an original and sophisticated political position, clearly critical of Thatcherism and its ‘authoritarian populism’, but attempting to understand its popularity (in Gramscian terms, the ‘good sense’ in its ‘common sense’) and to develop a contemporary progressive response that embraced ‘New Times’. It was a world away from the shrill sloganeering of the old revolutionary left, whether Trotskyite or ‘tankie’, and showed a much clearer understanding of how Britain, and its working class, had changed, than the ‘one-more-push’ oppositionalism of the Bennites. At a personal level, too, I found it easy to identify with Stuart. Like him, I had begun as a student of literature, had worked in adult education, and my politics were also grounded in an attempt to understand the intersection of class and culture. Hall soon joined William Morris, Raymond Williams and E P Thompson in the pantheon of my political and cultural heroes.

Some time later, I found myself on a postgraduate adult education course at Nottingham, supposedly run along ‘dialogic’ Freirean lines, but in fact an induction into a distinctly old-school Marxism, from which dissent was difficult. The tutors were particularly hostile to Hall and to ‘New Times’ analysis, regarding it as a betrayal of the true Marxist gospel, and I found myself regularly forced into defending him – which only strengthened my attachment to his ideas. It wasn’t long after this that I came to work at The Open University, where Hall himself had migrated from Birmingham. In fact, my first piece of course writing – on ‘culture’, as it happened - was sent to him for critical reading. Stuart was characteristically generous and helpful in his response to this piece of callow apprentice work. It was a few years before I actually plucked up the courage to speak to him – or rather, before a mutual colleague introduced us. I shyly muttered a few words about how his Marxism Today articles had kept me going through the Thatcher years, and Hall said something self-effacing about how ‘a few of us’ were hoping to get a similar venture going again soon. That venture turned out to be Soundings, the journal of culture and politics that has now produced its own political programme – the Kilburn Manifesto – which prompted the writing of this post.

I think my unadulterated admiration of Stuart Hall’s work began to diminish some time in the late 1990s, for both political and academic reasons. Marxism Today, which had collapsed along with its Communist Party sponsors after the events of 1989, revived itself for a special edition to mark Labour’s landslide victory of 1997. As someone who had rejoined the Labour Party shortly after Tony Blair was elected leader, in part because the New Labour project seemed to embody much of what Hall’s ‘New Times’ thinking was pointing towards (modernisation of the progressive message, new kinds of alliances, an understanding of the changing identities and aspirations of post-Thatcher Britain), I was deeply disappointed by the analysis that Hall and his fellow contributors now offered. Not that I was completely uncritical of Blair, but the simple negativity of that response seemed indistinguishable from the knee-jerk oppositionalism of the ‘old’ left, whether parliamentary or otherwise, from which Hall’s writings had once offered such a refreshing change.

Academically, too, but over a much longer period, I had gradually became disillusioned with the direction that cultural studies, the discipline that Stuart Hall had founded virtually singlehandedly, and of which he was still the key theoretical luminary, had begun to take. In my view it had become increasingly obsessed with high-theoretical hairsplitting, riddled with obfuscating jargon, and divorced from any engagement with practical politics. Theoretically, cultural studies seemed lost in a post-structuralist fog that I came to see not just as aloof from politics but dangerously apolitical and morally relativist, exemplified (to cite two of the most egregious examples) by Michel Foucault’s endorsement of the ayatollahs and Judith Butler’s claim that the racist, misogynist Hamas was part of the ‘global left’.

Of course, I should acknowledge that I too had changed in the interim. No longer describing myself as any kind of Marxist, like many others in the aftermath of 1989 I had come to accept that any form of progressive change worth having must be rooted in individual liberty, representative democracy and – yes, free markets.  As I explained in my last post, I had moved away from both the Bennite Labourism of my youth and the Gramscian Eurocommunism of later years and was now an unashamed social democrat. Then, in the wake of 9/11 and the rise of the new global threat of militant fundamentalism, I began to find myself in sympathy with the anti-totalitarian democratic leftism of the Euston Manifesto.

There’s a definite nod to that document, of course, in the name of the Soundings team’s latest intervention, which I suppose Eustonites should take as some kind of compliment. Given my earlier engagement with Stuart Hall’s work, it was with mixed feelings that I read his introduction to the Kilburn Manifesto in The Guardian back in April, and then the first instalment of the programme itself that has been published online (more instalments have since been published, but I have to confess that I haven't read them thoroughly yet). There’s much in the document and the article that resonates, particularly the delineation of our current ills. Who on the Left could take issue with this description of where we are currently:

The breakdown of old forms of social solidarity is accompanied by the dramatic growth of inequality and a widening gap between those who run the system or are well paid as its agents, and the working poor, unemployed, under-employed or unwell. 

But while the diagnosis may be (partly) sound, the prognosis often feels like a blast from the past, as if nothing has really changed since those heady days of the late Seventies and early Eighties. The language and style of argument used, the forms of address, all seem to be resonant of that earlier era in our political history – and in my personal political journey.

I say ‘partly’ sound because I think the Kilburnites also get some things wrong about the current state of things. Of Margaret Thatcher, who died shortly before his article was written, Hall writes that her funeral ‘was designed to install her as the emblem of a unified nation, and set the seal on three decades of work by three political regimes – Thatcherism, New Labour and the coalition – to fundamentally reshape Britain.’ Leaving aside the way this skates over very real differences between three democratically elected governments, the model of political change assumed here is of a unified exercise of power by a dominant elite. We’re back in the mechanistic, top-down world of Louis Althusser, and a world away from the multiple sites of power identified by Foucault, one of Hall’s key influences, never mind the unending struggle for hegemony described by Gramsci. It’s not far removed, in fact, from conspiratorial thinking about a hidden hand pulling the strings behind the scenes, with democratic ‘choice’ being little more than an illusion.

A similar one-way model of the exercise of power is evidenced in these words about popular culture:

Market forces have begun to model institutional life and press deeply into our private lives, as well as dominating political discourse. They have shaped a popular culture that extols celebrity and success and promotes values of private gain and possessive individualism. 

There’s a grain of truth in this, of course, as there is in much of what Hall and the Kilburnites have to say – the good sense in their common sense, one might cheekily say. But one gets the feeling that, in this political worldview, it’s only external forces – of which market forces are one example – that have any agency and are able to ‘shape…extol…promote’. Reading this, you’d think that people never voluntarily watched a television programme or freely voted for measures that encouraged individualism. The same forces are said to have ‘thoroughly undermined the redistributive egalitarian consensus that underpinned the welfare state’. But what if that consensus failed because it lost credibility and popular support? Where now the complex ‘New Times’ understanding of Thatcherism, the past failures of the Left, and new class formations?

Moreover, Hall’s use here of the word ‘regime’ for the elected British government, as if this were the Soviet Union or some tin-pot dictatorship, rather grates. It’s the sign of a worrying inability to distinguish between western democracies, however fallible, and truly oppressive systems. In fact, you’ll search in vain in this article, or in the online extract from the Kilburn Manifesto, for any acknowledgement that every radical social experiment of the kind advocated here has ended in some form of tyranny.

I found it telling, too, that the only footnote in the first online extract is a reference to Althusser, the anti-humanist Marxist theorist whom E P Thompson so memorably excoriated in The Poverty of Theory, and whose mechanistic, top-down systematizing of culture and society were robustly criticised in Hall’s earlier writings. And then, while it’s only a footnote, there’s surely something awry when your sole secondary reference is to a theorist whose name will mean nothing beyond the social scientific academy.

The writers of the manifesto still seem, after all this time, to be seeking new social movements to unite with the traditional working class (whatever that might be, these days), to form a majority for their progressive project. This leads to an unwarranted excitement about entirely marginal, unrepresentative and sometimes worryingly illiberal insurgencies like the Occupy movement. Behind this chimeric search for an extra-parliamentary alliance is a tacit admission that the existing electoral system has, time and again, failed to provide a majority in favour of radical socialist change. This comes across as fundamentally elitist, as if the British public were wrong to vote repeatedly for New Labour, and more recently to reject all forms of Labourism and elect a coalition of Conservatives and the Liberals. To quote Brecht, it sounds like a call to dissolve the people and elect another.

Where do the Kilburnites look for templates for their political programme? Two get a mention in Hall’s piece: ‘the short era of Ken Livingstone's GLC and the radical experiments under way in Latin America’, and indeed our Ken’s image adorns the head of the article. But you’ll find no reference here to critiques of Livingstone’s communalism or to his more dubious alliances in the interests of civic multiculturalism. And which Latin American ‘radical experiments’ are signified here, or is it left deliberately vague? One hopes it doesn’t mean Hugo Chavez’ dictatorial regime: now there’s ‘authoritarian populism’ for you. Once again, there’s little sense of the failures and shortcomings in these socialist experiments, whether at the local or national level, nor of the risks of history repeating itself if the same formula is followed.

So while I shall watch the new film about Stuart Hall with interest (not least for its cool jazz soundtrack), and continue to value his huge contribution to our understanding of the intersection of politics and culture, and of course to my own intellectual development, I shan’t be signing the Kilburn Manifesto. My politics will remain firmly rooted in NW1, rather than NW6.

My ancestors in the age of revolution

Last week I wrote about the way that one’s historical sympathies can be swayed by one’s ancestors’ political affiliations, and I mentioned my discovery that my Robb forebears had supported the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 as a case in point.

For the family historian with an interest in political history, discovering an intersection between your ancestors’ lives and wider historical events is always thrilling. However, until recently, I believed that my family had always been on the 'wrong' side of history. Besides their support for the romantic but reactionary Jacobites, there was also the case of Reverend William Robb (1763 - 1830), the brother of my great-great-great-grandfather Charles Edward Stuart Robb. He was an Episcopal clergyman in St Andrews, chaplain to Lord Elibank, and a poet: in fact, the only member of our family until the current generation to make it into print. In addition to a number of verses ‘illustrative of the genius and influence of Christianity’, William Robb wrote a long poem entitled ‘The Patriotic Wolves’ in December 1792 ‘when [as he says in the introduction] the agents of France, and those seditious societies, falsely styling themselves “The Friends of the People”, threatened the subversion of our happy constitution’. The poem,  a ‘fable’ characterising reformers as ravenous wolves threatening the sheep-like British people, was published in the arch-conservative ‘Anti-Jacobin Review’.

Handbill produced by London Corresponding Society, 1793

I’ve had a longstanding fascination with the late eighteenth / early nineteenth centuries, the age of revolution and reform, the period covered by E. P. Thompson’s seminal The Making of the English Working Class: an era when radical politics was still untainted by bureaucratism, when Enlightenment rationalism had yet to give way to pious Victorian sentimentalism, and when the cause of liberty had a romantic sheen and boasted literary luminaries such as Hazlitt, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Byron and Shelley: bliss was it in that dawn indeed. So while it was intriguing to find that one of my ancestors had contributed to contemporary political debates, it was disappointing to discover that he had been an implacable opponent of progress.

Francis Place

The only marginal corrective to this ancestral conservatism was the fact that, when my 3 x great grandfather Charles brought his family down to London some time in the 1820s or 1830s, they found lodgings at 29 Charing Cross – the very house that had once been occupied by the radical tailor Francis Place. This provided a rather tangential link with radical history - I’m fairly sure my ancestor Charles would have had little sympathy with the politics of the previous occupant of his house - but it was better than nothing.

So much for my father’s family: mind you, in the next generation they would switch from Episcopalianism to Wesleyanism, slip in class terms from distressed gentry to respectable working class, and move from the West End to the East End, their line culminating in my late grandfather, a teetotalling Methodist, council lamplighter and NUPE shop steward in East Ham.

Westminster election campaign, 1784

However, I’ve recently found out that my ancestors on my mother’s side were of a more radical cast, and in precisely the historical period that interests me. Thanks to the excellent London Lives website, it’s now possible to find out who voted in elections in the Westminster constitutency during this period: the poll books contain details not only of their addresses, occupations and property values, but also the way they voted (no secret ballot in those days). And since Westminster had a wider franchise than some other boroughs, it included some of the craftsmen and tradesmen who populate the upper branches of my maternal family tree.

Among them was James Blanch (1755 – 1840), one of my great-great-great-great-grandfathers. Born in Tewkesbury the son of a Quaker heel and patten maker (pattens were the metal over-shoes worn to protect against the mud of the eighteenth-century streets), he grew up in Bristol and came to London as a young man, an apprentice in the same trade as his father. Living in Compton Street, Soho, James married for the first time in 1779, to a young woman who was probably the daughter of his apprentice master. The Westminster poll books record the votes of James Blanch, patten maker, in three elections: 1780, 1784 and 1790.

Charles James Fox

I was delighted to discover that James voted for the most radical candidate in two out of three of these elections. In the election of 1780, he cast his vote for the radical Whig politician Charles James Fox. The latter was a supporter of the American and French revolutions and a campaigner against slavery and in favour of religious tolerance and individual liberty. Victorious in the 1780 election, he was lauded with the title ‘Man of the People’.

However, my ancestor was obviously not a party man, since in 1784 he hedged his bets and voted for both the Tory Samuel Hood (perhaps because he was something of a national naval hero) and the Whig Sir Cecil Wray – even though Fox was standing in the same election. This was the controversial ballot in which Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, toured the streets offering kisses in return for votes on behalf of Fox, who won narrowly.

John Horne Tooke

By the time of the 1790 election, James Blanch was living in Cross Lane in the parish of St Martin-in-the- Fields: on this occasion he voted for the radical John Horne Tooke. A prominent member of the Bill of Rights Society and the Society for Constitutional Reform, Horne Tooke was strongly influenced by the writings of Tom Paine and was a supporter of the working-class London Corresponding Society. His involvement in organizing an abortive constitutional convention led to his arrest and imprisonment in the Tower, along with leadings lights of the LCS, on a charge of treason. To great popular acclaim, the jury returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’.

I find it nicely ironic that John Horne Tooke, the favoured candidate in 1790 of my mother’s ancestor James Blanch, was exactly the kind of person that my father’s ancestor, Rev. William Robb, would satirise and condemn in verse two years later.

Joseph Priestley

James Blanch’s votes for Fox and Horne Tooke are the only definite evidence I’ve found of radicalism among my direct ancestors. However, I remain intrigued by the fact that, two generations later, my great-great-grandfather Daniel Roe, another shoemaker (he married Mary Ann Blanch, the daughter of James Blanch’s son John), named his youngest son (my great-grandfather) Joseph Priestley Roe. This was almost certainly a tribute to the great 18^th century dissenting minister, inventor and radical reformer. Joseph Roe was born, in 1862, in Great Windmill Street, Soho, just a few doors away from the Red Lion pub, where Marx and Engels had hammered out the first draft of the Communist Manifesto, fourteen years earlier.

Guy Aldred

Finally: I can claim a much more distant family connection with a more recent radical. Also on my mother's side of the family, it seems that the anarcho-communist writer and activist Guy Alfred Aldred, who died in 1963, was my fourth cousin twice removed. To put it another way: my great-great-great-grandfather was his great-great-great uncle...well, you get the general idea.

Roundhead or Cavalier (or a bit of both)?

I imagine serious historians must tear their hair out at programmes like Roundhead or Cavalier: Which One Are You? which was on BBC 4 last night (though I noticed quite a few of them among the contributors: they must have been reading this). Me, I gave up a couple of minutes in, when the presenter described Cromwell as an ‘egalitarian’. From the little I saw, the programme committed the cardinal sin of history documentaries: reading modern debates and divisions back into an era utterly unlike our own.

Nevertheless, the parlour-game format around which the programme was built – where can we see the ‘two tribes’ of Roundhead and Cavalier in contemporary Britain, and which one do you belong to? – is a bit of harmless fun. The trouble is, speaking for myself, it’s not a question I find easy to answer – not any more, anyway. Once, in my far-off youth, it was all so much simpler. Brought up a Methodist, with early stirrings of socialist sympathies, I was an instinctive Roundhead. As a child, ‘Oliver Cromwell’ was probably my favourite in the Ladbybird history series: I felt a natural sympathy for the spiritual simplicity, the political reformism, even the clean, proto-modern lines of the uniforms, clothes, hairstyles. As for the Cavaliers, they were so obviously everything we aspiring-working-class Nonconformists were against: hierarchy, pomp, ritualism, tradition.

But then, as I grew older, it became more complicated. In my early twenties, I had a short-lived flirtation with Catholicism. That’s to say, I converted, but lapsed soon afterwards, though I retained strong residual sympathies in that direction, and if I were ever to become a practising Christian again, I can’t imagine belonging to any other denomination. I was inspired by the Catholic Worker movement and the liberation theologians of Latin America, and my conversion fractured the connection within me between Protestantism and political radicalism. (It helped that evangelical protestants, the modern-day heirs of seventeenth-century Puritanism, tended to align themselves with the political right). Left-wing Catholicism offered me a way of being traditionalist and sacramentalist in religion, while supporting social justice on the political level.

Complicating things still further, my researches in family history led to the discovery that my father’s forebears had been Aberdeenshire Episcopalians who (so family tradition had it) fought for the Bonnie Prince in the ’45: indeed, my great-great-great-grandfather bore the name Charles Edward Stuart Robb in his memory. As a result, I became fascinated by the Jacobites and by extension the Stuarts: their cause seemed far more glamorous than that of their dour Presbyterian opponents, with their grim sabbatarianism and censorious kirk sessions (before which some of my ancestors were apparently hauled for various offences against purity and sobriety).

My theological and genealogical sympathies have also inspired some recent revisionist historical reading, from which I’ve learned, inter alia, that it was the Catholic Mary Stuart who tried to introduce a degree of religious tolerance to Scotland, only to be thwarted by the fanatically Calvinist and misogynist John Knox, just as it was her great grandson James II, who, for all his autocratic ways, wanted to extend religious rights to both Catholics and Dissenters, a policy that in part prompted the so-called Glorious Revolution – supposedly the foundational moment of modern liberal democracy, but from another perspective a coup by the Protestant elite. As for Charles II, he was just a lot more fun than his predecessor Cromwell: I enjoyed reading Jenny Uglow's biography, especially the unforgettable image of Charles and James rolling up their sleeves to help put out the Great Fire.

Then, last year, I read Michael Braddick’s superb revisionist account of the English Civil War, a period I’d never really studied properly before. Braddick sees the various internecine wars of the seventeenth century in these islands, not so much as the beginnings of English political radicalism, but as a continuation of the religious conflict sparked by Henry VIII’s rupture with Rome in the previous century. I found the book revealing about the religious as well as the political beliefs of those who rebelled against Charles I. I don’t think I’d realized before quite how important Calvinism was to the religious outlook of the Puritans: rather than simplicity of worship and equal access to the scriptures being their prime motivation, as the Whig version of history taught us to believe, it was their core belief in the doctrine of predestination - in the divine election for salvation of a chosen few (and therefore the uselessness of human ‘works’) - that galvanised their opposition to Church and King. Far from the Puritans being egalitarians or proto-democrats, this was about the most elitist worldview imaginable, not to mention one that tended towards a strident paternalism, a knowing-what’s-best for the unsaved and unwashed.

For all of Charles I’s many faults and missteps, Braddick’s book showed the battle for legitimacy between crown and parliament as much more finely balanced  than I remembered. And the victory of the parliamentary cause seemed, in the end, more like a military coup than a democratic revolution. In recent years, there has been a tendency to confer retrospective secular sainthood on groups like the Levellers and to throw an ahistorical social-democratic patina over the Roundheads generally. But reading Braddick’s history, Cromwell seemed more like Lenin or Mao than Attlee or Bevan. As for the New Model Army, seeking to impose their theocratic will by force of arms and (when in power) banning Christmas, closing down theatres and imposing strict dress codes, one was reminded less of the dear old Labour Party than of the Taliban or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

And if you want to see what happened when the Puritans got a chance to found their own God-bothering commonwealth, just think of New England later in the seventeenth century: the memory of what happened at Salem is a useful corrective to any notion that they foreshadowed modern egalitarian tolerance. Nearer to home, the three words ‘Cromwell in Ireland’ should be enough to undermine any simple notion of a great democratic liberator.

It goes to show that you shouldn’t try to interpret past conflicts in terms of modern categories. ‘Roundhead’ and ‘Cavalier’ aren’t timeless universals, but labels with very particular meanings in a very different historical context. The same goes for ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ in the next century, labels which are easily misconstrued in terms of today’s Conservative-Labour divisions, when in fact (for example) Tories began as supporters of the insurrectionist Jacobite Pretender, while the original Whigs were those dour and paternalist Presbyterians again.

Two more points. What if, rather than representing two persistent ‘tribes’ of Britons, the Cavaliers and Roundheads reflect two complementary aspects of the British spiritual and political psyche that were unnaturally split apart some time in the sixteenth century (the Reformation having a lot to do with it)? And what if, rather than representing a cleavage in society, these labels reflect a fault-line that runs through each of us? After all, it was said of Robbie Burns that he was both Jacobin and Jacobite, a paradoxical position that sounds impossible to sustain, but one with which I have an instinctive sympathy. What if there’s both a bit of the Roundhead and a bit of the Cavalier in anyone with any kind of sympathetic imagination, and the struggle isn’t to decide which one you are, or to defeat one or the other, but to reconcile the warring tendencies within oneself...?

By the dawn's early light

Ten years on, despite the grainy footage, I still find this early expression of transatlantic solidarity deeply moving. America, our thoughts and prayers are with you again today.

The week's links

A few things that may have passed you by in the last seven days or so:


As Labour ponders its leadership and its electoral prospects, Luke Akehurst calls for a greater sense of pride in what the party achieved in power:

Every time I walk through the ward where I am a councillor, one of the most deprived wards in England, I see what Labour did for the poorest people in society: refurbished social housing, a brand new city academy where a failing school stood, a primary school rebuilt with BSF money, another new secondary school being built under a contract Ed Balls signed off, safer neighbourhood coppers and PCSOs put there by Ken Livingstone. Lives of my constituents which are still tough and sometimes desperate but lived a little safer, a little warmer, a little more prosperous and a little more full of hope and opportunity because of Labour.

Balls and Livingstone are not my favourite Labour politicians, to say the least, but I'm in general agreement with what Luke says here. The other Ed should take note: putting distance between yourself and the achievements of New Labour is not necessarily a winning strategy. Elsewhere, this was the week that the Guardian published the speech that the Other Brother would have made had he been crowned leader, in which he echoed Luke's sentiments:

Last year Gordon read out a list of what had been achieved – by him, by Tony, by all of us. Two million new jobs. The ban on handguns. The Winter Fuel Allowance. 80 000 more nurses. Free museums. Rights of recognition for trade unions and the end of the union ban at GCHQ. And the small matter of peace in Northern Ireland. 

Just because we lost doesn't mean they are wrong. We clapped those changes in our country last year and we should clap them again, because if we don't defend our record no one will. 

Meanwhile, elements of the British left continue to make the wrong call when it comes to the Arab spring. Germaine Greer poured scorn on the suggestion that Gaddafi's soldiers were raping civilians, but thinks that British troops should not be deployed to Libya because there's no guarantee they won't become a 'rape squad' on the prowl. Hugo Schmidt is not impressed. I don't completely agree with his first sentence, but I think he's right about where the real fight for women's rights is happening today:

A single British soldier fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan or Al Qaeda does more for women’s rights than Greer has done in her entire life. That is worth bearing in mind, as is the fact that there is a small band of radicals who genuinely are fighting for the emancipation of women – women such as Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to name only some of the most prominent – who deserve our maximum support and solidarity, and yet do not receive anywhere near the fawning treatment that Greer does. 

Last week I quoted Mick Hulme's weaselly scepticism about the crimes of Ratko Mladic. This week's shameful apologia for repression comes from Alastair Crooke, who writes fawningly of Bashar al-Assad as 'a young leader...not ossified by time and convention' who 'really does believe in reform'. This fondness for the Syrian dictator seems to derive from the latter's endorsement of Crooke's own pet causes: 'Assad had opposed the war in Iraq and has supported the resistance in Palestine'. Nick Cohen is not won over:

Read the whole piece and you will recognise an astute work of propaganda that plays subtle tricks with considerable skill. The author seduces the reader by offering entrance to a privileged world of insider knowledge. He manipulates the belief, common among intelligent people, that events are more complicated than they appear. The simple-minded may hear of the troops of a dictatorship massacring civilians and think the dictator an evil man. We, by flattering contrast, know that the world is not black and white but coloured in shades of grey. Naïve westerners believe that Assad is just another vicious dictator, but he allows us to see that Assad is not a monster but a man who recognises the need for reform, who is admired around the region for his foreign policy and so on.

And Nick has his own explanation for Crooke's position:

He runs an organisation called Conflicts Forum, which aims to promote the Islamist cause. (His commitment to religious reactionaries, incidentally, probably explains his enthusiasm for the Syrian Baathists. Although they are nominally secular, they give logistical and financial support to Hamas and Hezbollah.)

This week, we discovered that the 'gay girl in Damascus', the supposed Syrian blogger who had apparently been kidnapped by the regime, was in fact a straight American man living in Edinburgh who created the persona as a mouthpiece for his own propaganda purposes. His confession was hardly apologetic: 'This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.' As Ethan Zuckerman comments: 'it’s hard to imagine a more orientalist project than a married, male American writer masquerading as a Syrian lesbian to tell a story about oppression and democratic protest.'

If you want to understand what's really going on in Syria, you could do worse than read the Henry Jackson Society's report on the country's nascent opposition movement, summarised here by Michael Weiss. He concludes: 'The evidence suggests that this revolution is the most liberal and Western-friendly of any of the Arab Spring uprisings. That it's also the least supported by the West is a tragedy.' Michael was also on BBC News this week, cutting through the regime propaganda to provide an excellent summary of the current situation.

Optimism about the prospects for a democratic revolution in Syria should be tempered by the realisation that demonstrations on a similar scale in Iran two years ago have done little to weaken the grip of the regime. In fact, the abuse of human rights has worsened, as these statistics from the British Embassy in Tehran attest. Last week, United4Iran and Move4Iran staged a quietly eloquent flashmob in a Paris metro station to mark the anniversary of the country's stolen election:

Comedy bore

This story (£) is so replete with opportunities for mockery that I would have dismissed it as a spoof, had it not appeared in the august pages of the Times. Apparently the 'godfathers of modern comedy', aka the team behind '80s television series The Comic Strip, are to get back together for a one-off production, scheduled for the autumn. The subject of this long-awaited comedy special? Why, it's 'Tony Blair and the aftermath of the Iraq war':

The Hunt for Tony Blair, a 1950s-style film noir spoof, sees the former prime minister charged with murder and on the run from the police.

According to Jay Hunt, chief creative officer at Channel 4, who commissioned the programme, 'it promises to be a very daring and utterly irreverent romp':

Comic Strip defined comedy for a generation and it's a real coup to have the team back tackling one of the most controversial subjects of our time in a way that only they can'.

'Daring'? 'Irreverent'? 'Controversial'? The 'Tony Blair war criminal' line has been the tired cliche of 'Comment is Free' columns and North London dinner table conversation for half a decade, as well as the stock-in-trade of the anti-Blair mandarins and Daily Mail writers who refuse to accept the conclusions of  a string of public inquiries. In other words, it's the establishment view: nothing 'controversial' about it. And nothing new about it either. The Iraq war was in 2003, for heaven's sake.

In other words, the subject is as dated and washed-up as the Comic Strip veterans themselves, who include Rik Mayall, Robbie Coltrane and Jennifer Saunders. By associating themselves with this project, the scourges of 'Thatch' now appear as outmoded as Les Dawson.

One might ask why they couldn't find a more 'controversial' focus for their comic rage in the contemporary political scene. Aren't there enough oppportunities for political satire in the u-turns and fallings-out of the Cameronians and Cleggites? And with everything that's happening in the Arab world, wouldn't it be more 'daring' and 'irreverent' to satirise Assad or Ahmadinejad, rather than the easy target of a prime minister who left office four years ago? Or is this comic targeting of Blair yet another example of the fashionable faux-left habit of responding to real abuses of power by looking in the other direction?

And what does it say about the once 'cutting-edge' Channel 4 that it's promoting this predictable project by a group of has-beens, which is designed to confirm rather than challenge the prejudices of its audience, as a major television event?

Moving the goalposts

This was the week that my union, the University and College Union, responded to criticisms that its obsession with Israel was effectively anti-Semitic - by trying to change the definition of anti-Semitism. As Eve Garrard writes in an excellent post over at Norm’s blog:

This Orwellian resolution of political disputes by way of linguistic fiat is particularly contemptible in an academics' union, since academics are supposed to have some knowledge of how argument works, and how intellectually empty it is to support an argument by distorting the meanings of the terms you use.  

Ben Gidley, in a long and thoughtful piece at the Dissent blog, agrees:

As an academic who studies racism, I find it bizarre that my union cannot accept that there is even the faintest possibility that institutional racism might exist in our own ranks, even after a series of clearly documented incidents and a shocking number of resignations by Jewish members who perceive it as such. This motion, if passed, will in fact legitimate racism in the union and stop any allegation of anti-Semitism—in debates or in the workplace—from being taken seriously.  

And Ben provides this pithy summary: ‘By alleging that Jews are merely crying anti-Semitism to stop people talking about Israel, the UCU leadership cries Israel to stop people talking about anti-Semitism.’ Over at LabourList, Rob Marchant adds: ‘the subtext is crystal clear: anti-Semitism is often not genuine and raised merely to win arguments as matter of bad faith.’ Rob sees the UCU motion as worrying evidence of a wider trend:

We spend a lot of time rightly criticising the white racists of the BNP and the EDL. But it’s high time we confronted those who condone those other kinds of racism around us. Before they really start to hurt the credibility, and the ethos, of the whole Labour movement.

Or before decent leftists, and union members, give up on the UCU completely, as some have already done - like Goldsmiths historian Ariel Hessayon who announced his resignation from the union today:

For my own part, I am an historian whose research interests and writings include studies of attitudes towards Jews and secret Jews in early modern England.  I have also looked at the ways in which modern histories of Jews and antisemitism reflect the present day concerns of their authors.  Based on my professional expertise, I have no doubt that the politically motivated rejection of the EUMC working definition has antisemitic implications.  

Accordingly, I cannot in good conscience remain a member of a union that countenances the antics of such extremists; fanatics who seem at best oblivious and at worst disdainful of the consequences of their single-minded obsession: Israel.

Meanwhile, from north of the border comes news that West Dunbartonshire Council has decided to ban books by Israeli authors from its libraries. Like the campaign against Ahava, this boycott has some pretty nasty historical overtones: after all, who were the last people to close down Jewish shops and ban books by Jewish authors?

And finally, on a similar note, I was angered and saddened by this report on the peddling of virulent anti-Israel propaganda by ‘progressive’ Christian groups such as Pax Christi (of which I was once, in a half-remembered life, a member). The one-sidedness of ‘liberal’ Christians in their response to the Israel-Palestine conflict is something I’ve written about before and plan to analyse more fully in a forthcoming post.

Politics on TV: US vs UK

Speaking of the Wedding…

A couple of days before the big event, my son and I happened to be in central London, and we made a special detour to Trafalgar Square, to take a peek at the temporary studio set up by the American cable channel MSNBC for their breakfast show ‘Morning Joe’, which was being broadcast from London all week. The photos I took on my iPhone (below) are rather disappointing, but if you squint you can just see the backs of Joe Scarborough’s and Mika Brzezinski's heads, and Willy Geist interviewing someone down in the square:

The actual programmes from London, which we watched in video extracts online, were less than riveting and Joe and Mika’s guests a cut below the quality usually found on their show when it's broadcast from New York or Washington. One exception was the superb Katty Kay of BBC America, who did her best to inject some realism about contemporary Britain into the discussion.

If this all sounds like the height of fandom, then you should understand that, when we visit America, we tend to leave the TV in our hotel room permanently tuned to MSNBC, and we usually wake up to ‘Morning Joe’. This was a love affair, or addiction, sealed during the 2008 presidential election. Watching the show, and others, on our recent visit to Miami, has prompted some reflections on what I would argue is the superiority of political coverage on US television, when compared to what’s served up to us in the UK.

That’s a counter-intuitive reflection of course, and it goes against everything Brits are supposed to 'know' about US television: that it’s ‘dumbed down’, superficial, dominated by airhead presenters and shockjocks. But allow me to make my case.

‘Morning Joe’ may not the best political show on US TV, and there’s a lot about it that can irritate: Joe’s egotism, Mika’s banalities, the preference for centrist commentators who don’t depart from the mainstream. But for visiting British political nerds like us, to have a whole three-hour daily breakfast show entirely devoted to politics is sheer luxury. One time on our recent visit, Carl Bernstein dropped by the studio and joined in an impromptu discussion with former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and Governor Ed Rendell on the roots of the current gridlock in Congress. The talk ranged back and forth from Watergate to Supreme Court confirmations in the '80s, dipping occasionally into the further recesses of US history, with a diversion to debate the relative merits of Jefferson and Adams - and all in a format that was relaxed, unstuffy and popular. And how can you not like a programme that plays Springsteen and the Clash over its Starbucks-sponsored credits?

And that’s just one show on one channel. Tune into MSNBC on any weekday evening, and it's wall-to-wall politics, from the likes of Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, and more recently Cenk Uygur, from my son’s favourite progressive channel, The Young Turks. And I haven't even mentioned the weekly institution that is 'Meet The Press'. Liberal bias? Of course, but if that’s your view, you can always switch over to Fox, where you’ll get uninterrupted commentary from a conservative perspective.

I find this honest partisanship healthier and more dynamic than the spurious ‘balance’ of most British political coverage. For example, on another day during our recent visit, we saw Uygur devote a whole show to arguing that the Republican Party was in the pocket of Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce, while Schultz spent a passionate half-hour standing up for union rights, in the light of recent events in Wisconsin. If they were in Britain, they would have been cut off after five minutes, while an arbitrating presenter sought to bring in a ‘balancing’ view.

Of course, America is a big country, which may account for there being just so much more – and more diverse - political coverage on TV. But I’d maintain that the quality is better too: there’s just no equivalent in Britain to those MSNBC shows where a presenter or politician or activist is allowed to develop an argument, or a debate allowed to go on for more than five minutes at a time.

And I like the refreshing absence in the US, for the most part, of the Paxman approach to political interviews, which assumes that elected representatives are all lying bastards and appears to be aimed at catching out the interviewee. Which is not to say that US interviewers give their guests an easy ride, but they usually assume that you’re likely to get more out of a politician if you actually give them space to talk (or, to look at it another way, allow them enough rope with which to hang themselves). I also like the way US political programmes take written commentary seriously, regularly inviting on historians and biographers, and giving space to discussion of the day’s newspaper op-eds. ‘Morning Joe’ does this every day, comparing so-and-so’s latest column in the Wall Street Journal with what someone else has said in Time magazine. What do we get? A couple of minutes of headlines on the 'Today' programme, and a ten-minute review of the Sundays by viewer-friendly 'celebrities' once a week on 'Marr', supposedly our flagship political programme ('Meet The Press' it is not). Which is not to say that US television coverage is without its faults: it can be terribly parochial, focused on what's going on in Washington, but not overly concerned with the rest of the world, except as it impacts on America (there's been some excellent analysis on MSNBC of the current state of affairs in Pakistan, for example, following that other recent big event).

So what accounts for these differences, apart from the relative sizes of our two countries? Well, as a European social democrat, it goes against the grain to say this, but it may have something to do with the commercial ownership of US television stations. That famous BBC balance derives from the corporation being taxpayer-funded, and having to show that you're giving equal (which often means anodyne) space to each side. Whereas the owners of NBC, Fox, CBS and the rest know there’s a range of liberal, conservative and centrist constituencies out there they can appeal to.

But I think the most important reason – and it balances out what I said in my last post about the value of monarchical symbolism – has a lot to do with the United States being a republic. Perhaps I’m a little bit naïve and starry eyed here, but I get the feeling that in America politics is just taken a whole lot more seriously. When you have government of the people by the people, politics becomes the people's business, it's what we do among ourselves, not something that is done to us (though I admit the current anti-Washington mood stirred up by the Tea Party rather undermines this theory). A lot of what's wrong with political coverage and media debate in Britain - the Paxman sneer, the 'Have I Got New For You' cynicism, the sheer paucity of serious political programming - can be traced back to weaknesses in our political culture: to a pervasive sense that 'that lot' are out to screw us over, that at the end of the day politics is not really 'our' business. All of which, I would argue, is part of the long, weary hangover from monarchy and empire, and the consequence of never having had a proper democratic revolution.

I’ll end with a clip from that 'Morning Joe' discussion I mentioned earlier.  In some ways it's untypical – no black or female guests, unusually. And I admit it's no high-powered academic seminar - but that's part of my point. This is a popular breakfast show, for goodness' sake. When was the last time you heard this kind of serious, informed but relaxed political debate on British television, let alone on something like 'BBC Breakfast'? It gets going a couple of minutes in:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In my end is my beginning: reflections on royalty

I’ve been thinking about the institution of monarchy quite a lot recently. And not just because of a certain event, though I’ll come back to that. It’s more that I’ve been reading John Guy’s gripping biography of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, a rare example of popular history being thoroughly grounded in original academic research.

What, you might ask, am I - a lifelong republican, whose historical reading normally focuses on the 18^th century age of Enlightenment and revolution – doing with a book about a 16^th century monarch and representative of the reactionary Stuart clan, who claimed to rule by ‘divine right’? Well, I've begun to stray a little from my usual historical territory recently, trying to make up some of the gaps in my knowledge. I should also confess to a longstanding, if rather guilty, romantic fascination with the Stuarts, rooted in my research into my family’s history (which I can discuss openly here, now that I’ve abandoned my semi-anonymity). My father's Aberdeenshire ancestors were Jacobites who (so family tradition has it) had a hand in the ’45, and indeed my 4 x great grandfather, who was responsible for relocating the family from Scotland to London, was christened Charles Edward Stuart Robb in honour of the Bonnie Prince. But I admit that my fascination with Mary is also a symptom of my ongoing love-hate relationship with Catholicism. I’ve been reading Eamon Duffy’s revisionist accounts of the Reformation period recently, and have become fascinated by the heroism, as well as the poetry, of the recusants.

Guy’s biography prompted a good deal of reflection on political and religious matters, and upset some of my easy assumptions about the period. Mary emerges more positively than in some other accounts, and comes across as an intelligent, dedicated ruler who made some poor choices under insupportable circumstances, but certainly wasn’t guilty of most of what her detractors claimed. The whole story has the feeling of a tragedy whose ending was determined from the outset: incidentally, I’d forgotten that ‘In my end is my beginning’, which Eliot used in ‘East Coker’, was Mary’s motto.

Mary’s story certainly illuminates the close link between the institution of monarchy and a certain kind of religious worldview. When Mary was under attack from her political enemies, she fell back on the defence that she was an ‘anointed queen’, first of France, then of Scotland. But this idea only ‘works’ within a sacramental Christian framework. After the Reformation split with Catholicism, and even more since the slowly-won separation of church and state in Britain, it became increasingly difficult to justify the ‘sacredness’ of the monarchy. Part of Mary's tragedy was to become queen of Scotland just as this process was getting going. A belief in royalty as symbolic of ‘continuity’ or ‘tradition’ isn’t quite the same thing: it prompts the questions, continuity with what exactly, and which tradition are we talking about? (Part of me feels sympathetic to Chesterton's defence of tradition as a 'democracy of the dead', while the other half believes with Jefferson that 'the earth belongs to the living generation' and the past cannot hold the present hostage.) The institution was so much easier to defend when you believed your ruler was put in place by an act of God. But does this mean, conversely, that a sacramental Christian worldview leads logically to a preference for monarchy, or at least quasi-monarchical political structures, over democracy? (Catholic readers, please feel free to comment.)

In other ways, reading about Mary made me re-assess my inherited Whig view of history, according to which the Protestant Reformation was a necessary step in the inevitable progress towards liberty, democracy, and equality – including gender equality. But it was Mary, the unelected Catholic monarch, who was schooled in literature and philosophy in line with the latest Italian Renaissance thinking about women’s education, and who provided an example of strong female leadership. This was in the teeth of ferocious opposition from architects of the Protestant Reformation such as William Cecil and John Knox, the latter notorious for his ‘monstrous regiment’, and both entertaining deeply misogynist notions about women rulers. There was a grimly masculinist strain in Calvinism, which characterised Catholicism as feminine and therefore wily and untrustworthy, and included a Manichean sexual revulsion which associated Catholic ritual with pagan perversity (echoes of all of this can still be heard in the sermons of Rev Paisley, and it’s not a million miles from the rantings of the Islamists).

Then again, it was the Catholic Mary who instituted a kind of religious tolerance in Scotland, at the same time as Knox and his cohorts were beating up Mass-goers and trying to prevent Catholic services being held, even in Mary’s private quarters, while further south Mary’s bête noire, Cecil, oversaw the Elizabethan persecution of recusants. Her religious policy may have been forced on Mary by circumstances, but she seems to have believed in it, and certainly provided a better model than her English Catholic namesake, Mary Tudor.

My growing sympathy for Mary Stuart certainly made me review my deeply-held opposition to the whole idea of monarchy – all of this as the royal wedding was approaching. Having read Guy’s book, I began to see the value of the monarch as a transcendent national symbol. Did that symbol really have to be elected to be recognised as valid? Is the reverence that Americans accord the institution of the presidency really all that different from monarchical symbolism? After all, despite the key difference that the US president is elected, it seems to operate in very similar ways: as a West Wing fan I'm always stirred by those moments when the whole room rises to its feet to welcome the commander-in-chief, or when a Republican swallows their political misgivings and declares 'I serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States'.

On the other hand, is it possible to have a monarchy that is purely symbolic, without all the trappings of hierarchy and hangers on that seem to follow in its train, at least in Britain? I enjoyed watching the wedding, and wished the couple well. I suppose my feelings were much like those of other spectators, whether royalist or republican: the music was splendid, the ceremonial beautifully done, the Bishop of London’s sermon surprisingly spirited and refreshingly free from the usual Anglican waffle, Pippa was stunning, the Middletons carried it off well, and it seems that they (like Diana) will provide some much-needed refreshment to the Windsor gene pool (not least, if one may say so, in the looks department).

But then, shortly afterwards, someone told me that William’s aristocratic mates refer to Kate and Pippa as 'the Wisteria sisters’, because they’re such good social climbers – geddit? (Laugh? I nearly swallowed my silver spoon, dear boy.) And all my feelings of annoyance, resentment and frustration at the whole clapped-out system came rushing back.  If it were possible to have a reduced, bicycling royal family that symbolised the nation, without all the attendant deference, knowing your place, and being judged by your birth and not your abilities or accomplishments, then I might almost be persuaded out of my republicanism.

Almost, but not quite. Because, of course, as we Jacobites know, these Germanic interlopers aren’t quite the real deal. Which is a good excuse for posting this version of 'Come ye o'er frae France' by the French Celtic ensemble Boann, fronted by the splendid Celine Archambeau. There's something oddly winning about hearing broad Scots rendered in a French accent: