Month: Feb 2020

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LEOPOLDSTADT by Tom Stoppard (directed Patrick Marber)

I grew up as a theatregoer with Tom Stoppard. Arriving in London in 1975 I gorged myself on plays. In that golden age of theatre, he still stood out for his verbal felicity, ingenious plot and literary reference. After Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, came The Real Inspector Hound, After Magritte, Jumpers, Travesties. More recently there has been Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia, Rock ‘n’ Roll and The Hard Problem.

Stoppard’s homage to turn of the century Vienna celebrates its national diversity. An extended family in Leopoldstadt, the Viennese destination of pogrom-fleeing Jews, meets in 1899, 1900, 1924 and 1938 (on the night of Kristallnacht); their survivors gather in 1955. Stoppard assumes a literate, historically aware audience. Why not in your ninth decade? After overhearing the conversation of two young people in neighbouring seats, I was less sure. The play largely assumes this knowledge except for the 1938 scene.

In a key 1899 exchange two patriarchs juxtapose the merits of Herzl’s proposed homeland to the promise of the alternative: full acceptance of Jews at the highest cultural and political levels of the empire. After this the action slowly reveals the increasingly ghastly reality; 1938 shows us the post-Anschluss version of Herzl as strutting Nazis strip the family of all their goods. The 1955 scene powerfully evokes memory and the lost identity of the diaspora now submerged in Englishness and Americana. Structurally these shifts are not satisfying but how else can one produce the sheer sweep of historical explanation?

It has been argued that art cannot comprehend the Holocaust, that the language does not exist to express its scale and horror. Stoppard gives us something else: the early stirrings of the racist beast in Europe’s most sophisticated capital; the destruction of Old Austria; Nazi triumphalism – ‘that is all over now’, a Nazi gloats at a woman concert pianist to whom an assumed name has allowed success.  Europe has eviscerated itself in one war; now, thanks to the Nazis and their global fellow-travellers, it will repeat the experience.  It is like watching Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday dramatized on stage.

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Mr Jones (2020)

Leaving out the politics?

Image result for agnieszka holland
Agnieszka Holland

The new Agnieszka Holland film Mr Jones is oddly dissatisfying. On the face of it this story of a brave spad exposing the Holodomor (the appalling 1930s famine in the Ukraine, then part of the USSR) ought to have instant grip. The acting cannot be faulted. James Norton makes a credibly naive Jones, blundering impulsively and insensitively through Stalin’s USSR. In Moscow and in the Ukraine he disregards his own life and the risk he poses to the lives of others. From Peter Sarsgaard comes a devastating portrait of the odious Walter Duranty, New York Times reporter who suppressed the truth about the famine and (later) the Moscow Trials.  Jones crashes into 1930s Moscow, giving the impression he is making enquiries for former boss David Lloyd George, a fish Stalin’s admirers would certainly love to have netted. (The ever-reliable Kenneth Cranham convinces entirely as the Welsh Wizard.) Jones follows the path of a friend murdered by one of Stalin’s thugs to reach the Ukraine and there observes the famine, fortunately escaping to report the truth via the violently anti-communist Hearst Press. Joseph Mawle is persuasive, if minimal, as a pre-war George Orwell, feeling his political way through the snake-pit of the 1930s.  The film suggests Jones’s experiences inspired Animal Farm.  It may be so.

The chronology stumbles. Lloyd George certainly remained a potent force in British politics through the 1930s. He was gulled by Hitler and might easily have been by Stalin. But neither his international prestige (‘the man who won the war’) nor the fear he inspired among Conservative politicians is explained in the film. No dates are offered until the postscript.  The drama is concentrated on the life (and early death, surely on Stalin’s orders) of Jones.

We also yearn for more about Soviet politics and the global context. Why did the vile Duranty matter?  Why did Lloyd George’s name unlock doors? What was happening in Moscow on the eve of the Kirov assassination?  The famine is persuasively – horribly – presented but as a personal odyssey. 

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VOTE BAILEY, GET STARMER

The battle lines seem to be clearing in Labour’s dispiriting leadership contest. Jess Phillips, an open Right-wing candidate, has withdrawn. Emily Thornberry’s path to the required number of nominations is obscure. As the smoke of the early skirmishes clears, we seem to face a choice between three candidates.  This is written ahead of the first televised leadership debates.

Lisa Nandy ( as of 11 February, 57 nominations (+ NUM, GMB, Chinese for Labour)

Lisa Nandy is promising to ‘give power and resources back to people in every town, city, region and nation in the UK’. That’s a start and it’s a good one: this specific point was a clear omission from Labour’s 2019 general election campaign. Her only substantial policy pronouncement thus far was on anti-Semitism. Here she promises zero tolerance, culture change, membership education & training, transparency, staff training, and an independent procedure. The Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) whose disgraceful role should be punished, not rewarded, will have a place in the procedure. Nothing is said about the calculated confection of anti-Semitic charges against Corbyn himself.  Nandy’s problem is not her campaign commitments but her persistently disloyal approach to the Corbyn leadership and incredulity about key planks in its platform.  Fairly clearly a vote for her is a vote to drop public ownership.

Keir Starmer (295 nominations (+ UNISON, USDAW, SERA, Community, Labour Movement for Europe, Labour Business, Socialist Health Association, Labour Campaign for International Development)

Starmer has the lion’s share of nominations so far which makes the hacking charges against his campaign implausible.  Last weekend my constituency Labour Party (easily the largest in the country) preferred Starmer to Long-Bailey by 250 to 155. His pledges include: higher income tax for the top 5%; abolition of universal credit; a green new deal; a Prevention of Military Intervention Act; common ownership of rail, mail, energy & water; voting rights for EU nationals & freedom of movement; Trade Union Act repeal; a federal system and Lords abolition; removal of obstacles to equal opportunities; “forensic” opposition to the government and ‘robust action’ against antisemitism.

Rebecca Long-Bailey (136 nominations (+ Unite, BFAWU, FBU, CWU, Socialist Educational Association, Disability Labour, ASLEF)

It is hard to summarise the themes of the Long-Bailey campaign because there don’t seem to be any. Her most distinctive contribution is the ‘green industrial revolution’, reflecting her time as frontbench Business speaker. But this seems derivative. Her Winter 2020 Tribune interview is thin gruel: we learn that she’s a unionist (‘I’ll always fight for the union’); that 2019 was ‘a Brexit election’ where people ‘didn’t trust us’; that she seeks better messaging and ‘professionalism’ for Labour campaigns;  that there should be a ‘democratic reset’.  As so often with the present generation of Labour leaders, Long-Bailey is more able to explain what she is against than what she is for. Clichés and slogans are fine but Labour needs someone who can articulate how socialism in practice will benefit people. Her colleague and (I’m told) flatmate Angela Rayner is a far more fluent and persuasive advocate whose failure to put herself forward has baffled many.

It’s harder and harder to talk sensibly to Long-Bailey or Starmer advocates. The former retreat into purity tests; the latter scorn anyone associated with Corbyn (though their man proposes policy continuity). Perhaps televised hustings will provide much-needed clarity.

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A NEW HAND ON THE TILLER?

On 14 August 2019 I wrote this article in some despair at Labour’s prospects for the coming general election. As this was the moment for a renewed series of personal attacks on Jeremy Corbyn from within the Labour Party as well as outside I thought it best not to publish.

I now wish I had.

Here it is with nothing altered.

I drifted out of the Labour Party in the 1990s. It was not New Labour, but the membership endorsing dropping Clause IV which was the last straw. I had spent 25 years trying to keep the party on track, even losing a job (with a union) by believing in public ownership. Why should I give time (and money) to a rootless party?

The next years upheld this view. The 1997-2010 Labour government was more decent than the tainted Tories but never intended to establish a new political and social settlement.  It was a feeble echo of 1945-51.  So when Jeremy Corbyn declared himself in the 2015 leadership contest, I now seemed wrong.  Here was a lifelong socialist, uncowed by New Labour, whom I knew had never stopped believing in radical change. I could not stand aside and, like other grizzled veterans plus thousands of the young, I threw myself back into campaigning. In the years that followed, spanning the 2016 European Union referendum and London mayoral campaigns, the 2017 general election, the 2018 council elections and the 2019 European elections I worked my socks off along with hundreds of others in the country’s largest Constituency Labour Party.

Now the Labour Party and the UK face a mortal threat. Boris Johnson as prime minister has cheered and energised the Tories. But when I look at our side, my comrades on the Left, I see not enthusiasm but dread. Jeremy no longer seems to embody change: radicalism now dwells with the Johnson/Farage axis. The voters who swelled our vote by one-third are now bewildered, even hostile. We cannot speak clearly on the central issue, and this cuts us off from the rejuvenating springs of our support.  Yes, a bitter establishment campaign has vastly exaggerated the numbers and influence of Labour’s anti-Semites; there should be none. Yes, we have faced a hostile press; who expected anything else? We are victims of our own errors and it threatens to cost us dear.

At this moment of maximum peril, we need urgent change before the looming general election that could return the most reactionary Conservative government since Lord Salisbury.  But we are not helpless: there is still time to change.  We must begin by honestly examining our own mistakes.

  1. We haven’t offered a narrative nor shown any appreciation we need one. I’m tired of hearing from BBC and Channel 4 newscasters that they ‘asked the Labour Party for comment, but no-one was available’. What else have our leaders got to do? Yes, the media – especially the BBC – are organically hostile to socialism. That won’t change. And it’s no excuse for not developing a counter-narrative to Johnsonism, one which tirelessly, repetitively, puts the case for a radical shift, giving context to our key demands for renationalisation and redistribution. Our spokespeople should be popping up all the time in all media to insist there’s another way. The Tory leader contest was a gift we flunked. Why wasn’t Alexei Sayle given a budget to make a daily commentary of appalling rudeness on its horrors? Nature abhors a vacuum: our voice must be heard and heard all the time.
  2. Where is our second line leadership? I’ve yet to meet a Labour member who doubts our next leader must be a woman.  As it happens there are up to five women to whom we might turn to replace Jeremy.  But here’s the thing: we never see them. Tonight (14 August) I saw an extended interview with one. But why isn’t the public bored rigid with the sight of Diane Abbott trouncing the odious Patel, Rebecca Long-Bailey deploring the crucifying of British industry by Brexit, Angela Rayner defending state education, Emily Thornberry deploring Raab grovelling to Trump, and Laura Pidcock on just about anything?  Where are they? If they are to be leaders the public needs to get to know them and their foibles. Even without a change at the top we need to show strength in depth: they will all be Cabinet ministers after all. That’s how democratic politics works.
  3. Tactics are elevated above strategy. I’m tired of having to defend stupid things. Which political genius thought it a good idea for Jeremy to appeal to Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill as arbiter of the British constitution last week?  The Cabinet Secretary – the entire civil service – exists to serve the government of the day; like leopards they don’t change their spots.  Why help them? The person we should be looking to as constitutional arbiter is the Speaker. John Bercow certainly has major faults but he is brave and on the side of change. We should be building him up not implying that supreme constitutional authority lies elsewhere.  This was no cunning plan. It just reveals we have no strategy for gaining power.
  4. Insufficient appreciation of English, Scots and Welsh identity. Scotland is a disaster area for Labour, despite a minor revival in 2017. There’ll be no revival there until Scots voters are convinced that Scottish Labour is truly independent. That means letting them go their own way, even if they come out for independence. This malign heritage of New Labour can’t be finessed any other way.  The SNP has demonstrated Scotland can be governed from Left of Centre which the devolution generation thought impossible; Labour cannot revive without demonstrating they are as Scottish as the Nats.  Richard Leonard’s furious denunciation of John McDonnell for stating the obvious at the Edinburgh Festival was a farce: being more unionist than the Tories is as daft as being more Catholic than the Pope. In Wales, for complex reasons, nationalism is weaker. But I detect a growing interest in independence. I also observe, as in 1990s Scotland, trade unionists – hitherto the most unionist of all – are beginning to change their minds.  And then there is England. The phoney British patriotism of Johnson (who, like Trump, privately believes in America First) is English patriotism. But how have we allowed him to make this his own?  England’s history is a history of struggle. An 1819Johnson would have ridden down women and children at Peterloo along with the militia. Why isn’t the Labour Party culturally engaged on this front? Where are our plans to redraw the county and city map of England?  Where are our plans to reinvigorate sclerotic British democracy?
  5. Social media is not enough. Please don’t tell me we can bypass the mainstream media. We can’t. Every day the agenda is being set by the Sun and the Mail and their faithful echo-chamber the BBC. Then it radiates outwards. This essentially defensive approach will not set the tone of public discourse. We need clear ideas, simply expressed in Blairite soundbites, expounded by articulate people who don’t speak in clichés.
  6. When problems arise, we must fix them fast. Anti-Semitism was allowed to fester, to the dismay of all members.  Other issues that have damaged us have not been finessed. We have been marking time since 2017.

2017 showed moving Left builds the Labour vote. Now, entering my fifth year of resumed activity, I can’t avoid the difficult question. I’m back in Labour only because of Jeremy Corbyn – or rather because Labour was willing to choose him. But now we must ask: is Jeremy the right person to lead us into this climactic battle?  He took us from the bitterness of the 2015 defeat to the point where people believe a Labour victory is possible. He faced non-co-operation and outright sabotage within the PLP on an unprecedented scale, but this has had an impact. He should now openly and honestly acknowledge that the British people do not see him as a potential prime minister and offer to stand down.  It is a personal sacrifice quite beyond the unelectable Neil Kinnock, but we on the Left are playing for higher stakes. We need a new face and a new story. 

For me this will be a wrench. I don’t know his likely successors or their commitment to socialist change.  The general election may be close but no one (even Boris Johnson) knows when it will be: it may yet be in the Spring. Whenever it is we need a new face for Labour. We should hold, now, an open competition that interests people across the land, as even the Tory contest did. Candidates will have to convince our huge membership (thank you Jeremy!) of their socialism as well as their personal gifts.  It would be fought out in public – and billed – as a contest to be the next prime minister. And let the best woman win.