The Daily Novel

The political landscape can change in twenty-four hours. So it has been today.

Yesterday the Tory press was talking about devious plots by Labour contenders to get rid of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. That was yesterday.

Today, one of the people who was supposed to be plotting, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, declared that he was unhappy with Labour’s recent record and that the leadership needed to have a new platform if it was going to avoid a devastating defeat in the next election.

Miliband did this, not by a devious plot, but by writing an article in The Guardian, which is the only serious left of centre national newspaper in Britain. This is not a plot. It is a statement to the electorate.

And that statement is that one of the three top people in the present government is not happy with the present direction of the government of which he is a part. In the British tradition foreign secrectaries usually resign before they make statements of this kind.

Most of the media comment this morning focusses on the delight of the Conservatives that Labour is ripping itself apart. But a full reading of the article Miliband wrote in The Guardian shows that Miliband is only saying what most Labour ministers, MPs and activists believe.

The crux of the article is this sentence.

Every member of the Labour party carries with them a simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few.

Miliband’s message has been privately welcomed by many. And despite what many of the pundits are saying there is no reason why Labour should not conduct an orderly election in the autumn. Miliband may, or may not, win it. There will be other challengers, probably including Jack Straw and Harriet Harman.

That will be good for the party and good for democracy. My picture is from the Daily Mail. Not the most flattering portrait of the challenger. But not a surprising choice. The Mail would prefer a much less left wing prime minister.

It is the greyest of grey dawns. Black cloud hangs over Stoneborrow Hill. Chesil Beach and Portland Bill are invisible. Two blackish birds are pecking on the terrace. Nothing on the bird table but they are pecking hopefully. Probably magpies. At least they are not crows or albatrosses or other birds of ill omen.

The weather mirrors my mood. My nephew Jim and his two sons have managed to find a patch of reasonably level ground in the back garden for their tent, but it is flapping in the wind and I fear it will blow down before they wake up. And the storm, forecast for Thursday, could easily begin in a few minutes.

Although I currently have no work obligations I have totally failed to maintain my intention of a blog a day. I have still not published that review of the moving diary of the manic depressive young woman or the new David Lodge novel. The Durham Miners’ Gala remains un-reported as does my impressions of the first UK WordCamp.

The only blog I have managed in the last few days was a rant about Gordon Brown. I am not alone in thinking he is making a mess of running the country but who am I to say so, when I cannot even write a blog a day. Worse than that I am not even sure I know anything worth writing about and I don’t even know what I believe.

Yesterday, Kate and James came over from Totnes to show us their new baby. The women were taking turns to cradle it. I insisted in demonstrating that a mere man was capable of learning this skill. She was asleep. She looked Chinese. Inscrutable. And looking as if she knew already far more than I did.

Meanwhile Lucas, who is not quite two, showed none of the murderous tendencies the great Sigmund led us to expect. He entained us all with a rattling good story, triggered by the digger he had seen in our drive as he came in. He told us in vivid detail how he drove his digger, what he picked up in the shovel, and where he put it. He held his audience and carried them on and on. He is already a better story teller than me. When I last saw him a month or so ago he said only two or three words. He seems to have learnt the whole language in a few weeks. And boys are supposed to learn to communicate much more slowly than boys.

No scientist that I have read has come anywhere near explaining just how that happens. And just why learning the first language is so different from learning a second langage. Maybe Darwin and Richard Dawkins have got it wrong and that we could all speak in many tongues if only we had faith.

But so far the only children we have found brought up by wolves had only learnt to howl.

The Sunday newspapers are full of stories about plots, including cabinet ministers, to get rid of Prime Minister Gordon Brown following Friday’s poll result at Glasgow East. Although Labour had an excellent and popular candidate, voters of all parties united to deliver a 22 per cent swing against the government. The winner was the Scottish Nationalist Party, the only party with any hope of toppling Labour in what was in 2005 their 25th safest seat.

Alex Salmand, the SNP leader, led a high profile campaign to get his own supperters to the polling booths. But the trendy new young leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties played it softly softly. In consequence most of their supporters either stayed at home or delivered a tactical anti-Labour vote.

Of course this would not happen in a General Election. And of course Scotland is different from the rest of the country. But this result coming on top of Labour’s defeat at Crewe shows unmistakedly that Labour has lost the confidence of its industrial heartlands. And the saddest fact Brown has to face as he goes off for his annual holiday in Conservative territory in Southwold in Suffolk is that this final blow has been delivered by his fellow Scots.

The reality of the situation in the Labour Party could not be further away from plotting by fiercely ambitious men or women eager to knife their leader in the back. Because, of course, any potential contender knows that the chances of Labour winning another term of office in 2210, when it will have been in office for thirteen years, are very slight indeed.

Neither is the party plagued by the huge gulf in ideology and policies that plagued the Labour Party in 1950s and 1960s, when the Party leaders included Hugh Gaitskill and Roy Jenkins on the right and Nye Bevan and Tony Benn on the left. The differences between Brownites and the Blairites are minute by comparison, both in domestic policies and on foreign affairs.

New Labour is currently failing because of the economic cycle. New Labour came to power on an economic upturn. So that Blair and Brown won back the support of the professional leftish classes, who torpedoed Labour when they deserted to form the Social Democratic Party, now merged with the old Liberal Party.

In fact, New Labour has been in everything except name, a social democratic party, whose policies are broadly similar to those of the social democratic parties in Europe and to the Democratic Party in the US.

Although Gordon Brown, unlike Tony Blair, has been committed Labour throughout his life, he has totally lost touch with his roots. His worst mistake was the abolition of the 10 per cent tax rate, which hit those who could least afford to be hit when the economy is going into the most serious recession in the lives of any first time voters.

Almost everyone in the party sees that, except Gordon Brown himself. But as he walks around the Suffolk marshes during his summer break he may well come to see the impossility of rebuilding the Labour Party in a swamp.

He can still rescue his dignity, and perhaps his place in history, by iniatating a leadership election in the autumn. That is the best way of avoiding plots and back stabbing.

And that is what democracy is all about. Let the party and the people decide in an open contest.

Meanwhile it is business as usual. And Brown had no trouble in putting on a big smile when he met with Barack Obama in the garden behind his Downing Street office. Maybe he was hoping that some of the Obamania, which was raging through Europe all last week, would stick to him. (The photo is from Getty.)

Went back to my computer after dinner. Never a good idea. This evening discovered that Holly has labelled me the oldest participant at the first UK Word Camp 2008 held in Birmingham last weekend. I think she is probably right. But how does she know? Participants were not required to state their date of birth when they booked their tickets. And how old people look is very different from their actual age. It is not only me who gets it wrong in guessing people’s ages.

This fact was brought home to me very vividly recently when on Saturday, 12 July, I had a front stand at the Durham Miners’ Gala. I got to my position, struggling breathless through the crowds, directly opposite the Royal County Hotel, where various dignitaries with gold chains were waving to the marchers in the early afternoon.

Just after I arrived one section of the Miners came by, with a banner showing a picture of that hero of the British working classes, Tony Benn. To my amazement, there leading the march with the zest of a fifteen year old was the man himself. No doubt about it, because I met him several times during my journalistic life. Sadly the crowd was so dense that I could not get out my mobile phone soon enough to take his picture.

Benn is now 83, which is seven years older than me, looks young in limb and young at heart. Much younger than the chaps in their mobility carts, who plague the pavements of Charmouth and Camden Town. Who probably took early retirement from their highly paid management jobs at around fifty. And are still not old enough to get their Senior Railcard.

So how come he looks so young? Is it because he has been addicted to tea all his life (he needs at least 25 cups a day to keep going)? Contrast me who is seriously addicted to cigarettes and drinks far more than the recommended glass of the doctors.

Or is it because that this workers’ champion had an extremely priviledged upbringing amongst the English upper middle classes. He inhaled the fresh country air whereas I inhaled the stink of the Black Country.

Or is it because he always stood up for what he believed in? Even though he was labelled as the leader of the loony left by the media. Today he does not seem so loony. Even moderate British Conservatives are not all sure that the Iraq war was a good idea.

This is just a short taster. I hope to be around to write Benn’s obituary. But I would not bet on it.

Below are the most recent pic I can find of Tony Benn, date unknown, and the other pic of me taken by Holly last weekend.

Who looks the oldest? You decide.

Barack Obama got it just right tonight talking to Larry King on CNN. He told him that the New Yorker cartoon did not bother him. He had developed a thick skin in fighting this Presidential campaign. But he said it was an insult to Muslim Americans.

Quite right too.

The cartoon, see below, depicts his wife as a gun-toting Black Power terrorist of an earlier age, when her only offence has been to admit that she had difficulty in being proud to be American. In voicing these honest sentiments she reflects the reality of America’s black, coloured and Latino community. They are mostly the poor struggling to survive in George Bush’s America, even more difficult than it was in Jack Kennedy’s America.

Barack Obama himself is portrayed in what is presumably meant to be Muslim dress. In fact, he looks more like Pandit Nehru, the Hindu leader of the India that emerged from the British Raj. Much more like him than Jinnah, who emorged as the leader of the first Muslim state, created in 1948 when the British folded up their Indian Empire. Jinnah, like the present leader of Pakistan, was more devoted to the western way of life, than he was to the Pakistan poor.

Which is why Bangladesh, which was part of the original Pakistan, is now an independent state, and one of the poorest in the world.

Nehru, by contrast, was a respected international statesman, who strove to establish an independent India, which was not the slave of the west, so he maintained relations with the then Soviet Union, during the Cold War, when Stalin was regarded as far more dangerous to the American dream, than Sadaam Hussein and Osama bin Laden combined.

People younger than me may not have got this message.

But people younger and older than me will I hope see the thrust of Obama’s response. The insult is to America’s Muslims, not to Barack Obama. After all, we know he is a Christian, not a Muslim. And we also know that he has spent most of his life as a law lecturer at Harvard.

Not downloading stuff from the internet about how to make plastic explosives.

The fears of America’s Latinos and many Clinton supporters is that America’s first black President may in power become an Uncle Tom, cowtowing to the white rulers.

The hope for Western liberals like myself is that if achieves office he will behave more like Pandit Nehru. And help to heal the internal splits in America and the even larger schisms in the world at large.

Meanwhile, even George W Bush has had enough of sabre rattling. According to a Guardian exclusive he is considering sending American diplomats back to Iran, instead of starting yet another war.

But the real insult is to those many Americans, who, unlike Obama, are devout Muslims, but who do not espouse the doctrines of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

The storm continued through the night, over-filling my huge Bohemian ashtray on the terrace. It is not a 90 mph gale but it sounds and feels like one. My small bungalow is creaking and complaining like an old boat in a typhoon and it sounds as if it wants to take off any moment. But so far I have survived despite the soaking I got on the prom yesterday.

So I decided that if I can survive this I can take up camping again. Went straight online to book my ticket for the first UK

WordCamp

in Birmingham on the weekend of 19 July. Actually this event is not taking place under canvas. It is in a posh new conference centre, The Studio, in the heart of the City. Or rather what’s left of the heart of the City, which has been vandalised since my youth by the new architecture. More Clockwork Orange than getting back to nature. But at least you now have a choice on the restaurant menus that goes beyond roast beef and two veg. And most of the many pubs now serve food and some even have carpets on the floor. The younger generation just don’t realise that Brummies have never had it so good. Back in the 1950s I had to go out to the transport café at Northfield to get a bite to eat on a Sunday night after putting the university newspaper to bed.

But is imbued with the spirit of camping as I knew it. The work gets done not by orders from the boss but when the spirit moves the group of organisers, who are doing it not primarily to earn their bread, but because they are committed to this new world of blogging. And because it’s fun grappling with computers who throw spanners in the works whenever mere human beings seek to create global villages.

I was reminded of this just now when I tried to buy my ticket on the new online booking system. I only got as far as this message:

Ticket purchasing temporarily off-line

If you are new to this site do not give up. Put it in your diary. I have been watching the efforts made to get this event going by email. And several times I have feared that they would never get it together in time. But they have. Sponsors have appeared. The programme has been drawn up. The T-shirts are ready. The venue has been booked, backed by personal cheques from some of the organisers.

Although there is no authority hierarchy this is not government by committee. It is a management method based on individuals learning to work together as a group. A method well-suited to the twenty-first century and the new realities of the blogosphere. Because it is new, this method is distrusted by the majority, and dismissed daily by articles in the mass media suggesting that anyone who tries to create new ways of organising people is either hopelessly idealistic, mad or a Californian New Age junkie.

For any sceptics who happen upon this blog, I will end with a couple of anecdotes about the real world of the organisations who govern all our lives.

For the past week I have been trying to get my motor scooter back on the road with an up-to-date tax disc. I had to abandon my attempt to do it online via the DLVA site, because I have changed my address. So I resorted to the telephone, a piece of technology that was invented in the nineteenth century. For the last four days I have been ringing up and going through the hierarchy of options, but still ending up with the same frustrating message, something like this:

‘Your details have changed so it will be twenty-four hours before you can use this service’

DLVA, of course, was run by civil servants, and’ as we all know from the Daily Mail civil servants cannot manage anything efficiently.

So on to my second anecdote, BT, which Margaret Thatcher created out of half of the corpse of the old Post Office. They have sent me yet another bill for my phone in my London flat, despite the fact they have totally failed to connect the line. I cancelled the order last September but they still keep sending me bills, adding £12.75 each month for a service they have not provided.

Now, can you get more inefficient than that?

Sir Charles Wheeler, who died yesterday aged 85, was frequently described as ‘the journalists’ journalist. Understandedly because, although he made his reputation and spent most of his working life with the BBC, he learnt his journalism, not on the BBC training scheme, but on the job. He joined the Daily Sketch as a copy boy in 1940, and like James Cameron, with whom he shared many characteristics, spent part of the second world war doing a desk job in Fleet Street.

But above all he was one of those journalists who was a human being first, and within the heavy constraints of BBC journalism strove to report honestly what he saw and how it made him feel, not in an emotional way, but coolly and without fear of the consequences when he tackled people in power. In his reporting he drew on his experience of life as much as from what he learnt in Fleet Street and the BBC.

As a youth he experienced at first hand the realities of how Nazism took power in Germany, living in Hamburg where his father was working. In 1942 he joined the Royal Marines. He was a combat engineer in the Normandy landings. He made his mark in the intelligence unit run by Ian Fleming, thanks in part to his fluent German. Like many journalists I have known, his work for the intelligence services provided an excellent training for the work of serious journalism.

But Wheeler, again like James Cameron, was a late developer. When he joined the BBC World Service in 1947 it was as a sub-editor, correcting the copy of other journalists doing the reporting. He did not begin his reporting career until 1950 when he was already 27. He was posted to Germany in the dying years of the Adenhauer government, which did not give him many opportunities for exciting news. It was not until he was posted to New Delhi in 1958 that he began to cover major stories, like
the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet. He first made the headlines on a trip from there to Ceylon, as noted by Harold Jackson in his Guardian obituary:

‘The greatest furore came after a trip to Ceylon (which became Sri Lanka in 1972), where the government threatened to leave the Commonwealth after Wheeler had called its prime minister “an inexperienced eccentric at the head of a cabinet of mediocrities”. The British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was forced to issue a public apology to defuse the crisis.’

I first became aware of him when he moved to the BBC’s Washington bureau in 1965, and turned himself in to the most perceptive British reporter covering US politics. He arrived there when Lyndon Johnson was President in the aftermath of the assassination of John F Kennedy. He covered the hectic years of the Civil Rights movement and the Watergate scandal. He listened to everyone, Presidents, congressmen and the people he met out and about in America. But he made up his own mind about how to angle the story, never trying to curry favour with whose who held the most power.

John Tusa, a former head of the World Service, in his tribute in The Guardian summed up his qualities thus:

‘I think he was the audience’s journalist, because he put them at the head of his priorities……Why should any journalist try to follow Charles’s example? Because he put fact before effect, thought before impact, intelligence before emotion; because he put us, his audience, before himself, the intermediary. His reward: to be admired, listened to, trusted and loved.’
He went on working regularly long after retirement age, particularly for Newsnight. He was still working a few weeks ago on a television programme while suffering from lung cancer. He was born the year before the BBC was founded. He earned his spurs in radio but he was equally successful on television and was one of the band of BBC people, who fought to bring serious journalism, rather than sound bites, to the television screen.
From his UK base in London he lived through the rise of the LCC to the much bigger GLC and noted the consequences of its abolition. He witnessed the first rise and fall of Ken Livingstone when Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC. And he lived just long enough to see the second fall of Livingstone, when his son-in-law, Boris Johnson, beat him to become the new Mayor of London.

Only the day after hundreds of young people marched through North London in protest at the knife murder of Ben Kinsinella in a favourite partying area between King’s Cross and Camden Town, there has been an even more horrific murder of two French students at New Cross in South London. Laurent Bonomo had 194 stab wounds and his colleague, Gabriel Ferez, had 47 injuries. Both students were here on an exchange programme to do post-graduate research at Imperial College.

As yet the police have no idea who killed the two French students. Kinsinella was the 17th teenager to be killed by a knife attack in London this year. His murder resulted in a spate of articles about the propensity of today’s youth’s to carry knives for their nights out. The murder of the two French students is particularly poignant, because they were both the kind of people which gives oldies like me hope for the rising generation. Both were aged 23, not using their considerable intelligence to make a fortune in the city. But, at aged 23, they were not mesmerised by the chase for wealth to buy the many seductive products of our generation. Bonomo was studying a parasite which can spread from cats to human foetuses, the kind of thing that is a danger to us all in this era of mass travel where such things can travel around the world in weeks. Ferez was working on using bacteria to create ethanol for use as fuel, doing his bit to stave off global warming.

There is clearly a problem that needs to be addressed by the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the rest of us. But just how serious it is, and how much worse it is today, than it was when I first came to London in 1955, is not yet clear. The rest of this blog seeks to put it in perspective.

The scene of the Kinsinella killing is a few hundred yards from Gospel Oak where I lived for over forty years. Both of my daughters partied there, and at Camden Lock, and managed to survive, despite the presence of the drug dealers and the gangs. I also know the New Cross area, another tough inner London area where the gangs of the 1950s ruled the territory. But where Goldsmiths University, flourished and made a notable contribution in providing a very good education for thousands of students, including a large number of blacks. I have had many friends amongst the teachers and the students and some of my white middle class neighbours sent their children there without them coming to any harm.

I also taught daily for 27 years at City University, London, near the Angel. This, like King’s Cross and New Cross, was a tough inner city area, where gangs were extremely powerful. It had several pubs ruled by skin heads whose idea of a good time was beating up blacks. They mostly used their fists and boots. But what is truly remarkable is that only a tiny minority of City students came to any harm. Although City had a huge percentage of coloured students, from overseas and from the immigrant populations of the UK.

The punch-ups were not widely reported in the press. It was certainly not news in the 1980s, let alone the 1960s, that people got beaten up in pubs is such areas. Which have always attracted a criminal element, seeking to enlist newcomers to the area into prostitution or thieving. Just as it was in the time of Charles Dickens.

What is truly amazing is that all three of these areas have hosted thousands of students in the last thirty years and that mostly those students have not been mugged, or knifed. They have even managed to find the tranquillity to study. And, of course, combining that with many opportunities to let off steam by partying.

These inner city areas have been reclaimed for their law-abiding inhabitants. There are no such powerful gangs as the Kray Brothers, whose nastiness was quite equal to whoever killed the two French students. And, who despite their obvious wickedness, managed to mix socially with British ministers and friends of Winston S. Churchill, like Bob Boothby.

These areas of London are SAFER than they used to be.

David Davis’s attempt to provoke a national debate about the erosion of Britain’s civil liberties using the way Prime Minister Gordon Brown steered his controversial 42-day-detension bill through the House of Commons, turned to farce today. Downing Street has been telling journalists that Labour will follow the Liberal Democrats, who have already announced that they will not fight the by-election, which Davis has provoked by his resignation.

But Rupert Murdoch, the Australian, turned American citizen, has decided that the interests of British democracy are best served if Davis does get the fight he is looking forward. He is encouraging his own champion to stand and put the case for the 42-day-detension bill.

He is sending into battle one of his most trusted men, Kelvin MacKenzie, who was editor of The Sun, when in the days when it established a new high in British daily newspaper circulations and a new low in British popular journalism standards. MacKenzie later went on to adapt his popular journalism to television, introducing the much-ridiculed news bunny.

It is a quite astonishing development which demonstrates the old saw, ‘you couldn’t make it up. Since MacKenzie has declared his intentions on the BBC Radio Four Today programme there is no doubt that the story is not journalistic invention. Sun journalists have been known to invent quotes, when they could not find real people to voice the opinions they were seeking.

But MacKenzie in this instance was the news.

I still doubt, however, whether Rupert Murdoch will follow this one through. For Britain’s most powerful media tycoon to fund a parliamentary candidate in this way is gift to all those who question whether the free press in Britain is served by so much media control in the hands of one family.

And think how this will play in the US, which is gearing up for the Presidential election. This week Fox News, Murdoch’s US television channel, was forced to suspend one of their lead presenters because of offensive racist jokes about Barack Obama. Murdoch now also owns the Wall Street Journalism, which is traditionally Republican. But the New York Post, the leading popular newspaper in New York City, now owned by Murdoch, is traditionally Democrat.

Recently, as reported here, Murdoch lavished praise on Obama, though stopping short of endorsing him. His daughter, Elisabeth, hosted a fund-raising dinner in London last month for Obama.

But now that the Presidential battle is a straight fight between Obama and McCain, Murdoch must be seriously worried about his left-wing sympathies. McCain’s personal views are much closer to Murdoch’s. But, temperamentally, Murdoch, although he is now an old man, tends to prefer the young thrusters.

My view remains that if Murdoch thinks Obama is going to win, he will offer his support, as he did so often with Blair, in the hope that he can influence him in the direction of his own business interests and political preferences.

And I think, that he may well have second thoughts about funding his former editor as a candidate in a British election. That is not going to do his credibility in the US any good at all.

Indeed it might cause Americans to start crusading against media barons with ‘power without responsibisty’

It is now four days since Barack Obama met with Hillary Clinton, but the thousands of journalists in the world have still not told you, and me, what took place in this very private conservsation.

Because they do not know, although they are doing their job to the best of their considerable abilities.

That is because Barack Obama is running this campaign in a quite different way from all previous contenders for the US presidency. He is using the internet.

So he delivered his response to Hillary Clinton’s Saturday night speech, you will find it not on the television channels, not in the world’s newspapers, but
on his own blog
on the internet.

Obama has not yet made up his mind of who he wants for Vice President. But today he has launched his campaign for President in a speech in North Caroline. Which addresses the issues which newspapers are also highlighting, what to do about the crippled US economy.

So to find out what he is thinking today look

at that.

Obama is a complex person. He is very much in tune with the internet era and with the youth of America.

But he is also following a deep American tradition of the whistle stop tours which past presidential candidates undertook to speak to Americans on their doorsteps.

That is why he is in North Caroline today.

That is why he is talking about the economy. Not who he is he is going to choose for his Vice President.