The government couldn’t move him. In the end only cancer could. A symbol of peace and freedom, an icon of the anti-war movement and a picture of stalwart self-sacrifice for the cause of right.

Regardless of what anyone on the left thought of his tactics, I don’t think anyone could argue that he gave anything less than all of himself to ideals so many of us share. For all of us who struggle to find time to give a Saturday afternoon to protest, Brian Haw, who spent ten years camped outside the seat of power of a bankrupt ex-empire still bent on playing policeman to the world showing them the visceral evidence in bloody still-frames of all they were doing wrong, should stand as an inspiration.

While the evangelical Christian beliefs of some turned them into neo-conservative warmongers, Haw’s told him to stand up for peace and human life.

He fought a good fight, he finished his course, he kept the faith.

With recent news of the U.S. deploying predator drones in Libya to “degrade Gaddafi’s forces”, and Europe’s involvement teetering on the brink of all out invasion, we have to think carefully about what kind of message this sends out to the various protest movements which are on-going in the region. This is important not only because there is a certain arbitrary factor attached to Europe’s involvement specifically in Libya considering the widespread violence enveloping most of the region, but the self-interested attitude which Western states are projecting yet again to the people of these countries in turmoil.

Much care has been taken by Western governments to sidestep this potential accusation with their obvious hesitation to deploy any meaningful force – ground, air or naval – to properly and quickly depose Gaddafi. However, whatever involvement Britain plays will be under the microscope. A war of attrition, akin to the economic warfare exemplified by the “Oil for Food” sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 90’s, looks likely. Yet, overt action in Libya with inaction everywhere else will again smear British foreign policy. Precedents may be irrelevant in the dark, cloak and dagger corridors of Westminster, but the public, here and elsewhere, will always remember and vote/act accordingly. We are still keen to lead on a global stage, but where do we find this authority? Simply put, emanating from the mouths of our political establishment and ultimately for economic reasons.

The ruling Ba’ath party in Syria routinely suppresses any dissidence in the country with military force. Assad and his Ba’ath party have the support of the current Iraqi regime too in what represents a worrying hypocrisy. Despite this foreign policy, the Iraqi state has banned the remnants of its own Ba’ath party from public office and outlawed any Ba’ath sympathisers from assuming public service positions. The awful situation in Baghdad’s politics extends to the Kurdish north of the country. Billed as the freest, most stable, democratic and prosperous part of Iraq, there have nevertheless been daily protests since February, at first modestly calling for better services and democratic freedoms, but are now demanding the resignation of President of the Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, and the President of Iraq, Jalal Talabani – the two dynastic rulers who head the two fractious ruling Kurdish parties; the KDP and the PUK respectively.

This is important because Britain has forged strong ties with the leadership of the Kurdish region. As relationships like this are fostered between our political elites, it becomes incredibly difficult to approach the inevitable outrage of oppressed populations with any thoughtful and principled response to their concerns. It has become something of a last resort to abandon our tyrannical puppets, and this is shameful for all of us because its often too late.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once said in a speech in Cairo in 2005:

"For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither,"

"Throughout the Middle East the fear of free choices can no longer justify the denial of liberty,"

"It is time to abandon the excuses that are made to avoid the hard work of democracy."

This policy has most definitely not been abandoned. In fact, it has become popularised. The ousting of Mubarak was a prolonged and embarrassing sham for the U.S. and the U.K. It is only when the will of the people was demonstrated in impressive and immovable fashion, our governments conceded to inevitable democratic reform. Its almost as if they sighed afterwards at the inconvenience. The Egyptian army, the biggest recipient of U.S. aid ($1.5bn a year) is still very much in charge to preserve stability in the region. The Kurdish leadership is praised to preserve stability and contribute to the “Iraqi experiment” as a success, despite growing evidence of the opposite. And of course, Saudi involvement in Bahrain’s protests is largely ignored for political and economic reasons.

It is one thing to put the new (old) Libyan flag as an avatar on Facebook and Twitter to show your support, but spare a thought for all the movements in the region. In fact, spare more than a thought. They are certainly not helped by the succession of unprincipled and snivelling leadership figures we have now in this country and other Western states who depend on autocracies to preserve favourable and convenient trade and political arrangements. A democracy which is reliant on autocratic rulers and despots is a crumbling democracy. This is an emerging truth in our globalised economy and political landscape. Irresponsibility here means peoples lives. The civil war in Libya would be fought regardless of what we think or believe as British citizens, and any action or inaction by Britain will result in our embarrassment. Lets at least stop laying the foundations for these future crises by properly and seriously addressing our involvement and relationships elsewhere.

Ok, false alarm, it’s not quite breaking news. People have known this for years. But I think, following today’s little outburst in The Independent, it’s worth reiterating. Julie Burchill is an idiot. Quite why a paper which is, by and large, aimed at intelligent, liberal minded progressives, chooses to print the journalistic equivalent of an explosive wet fart after a dodgy vindaloo from the mind (or lack thereof) of an idiotic Iraq war apologist who once declared Israel the only country she would “fucking die for”, is beyond me. So what brainless, sputum-laced drivel did she have to offer us today? Three short pieces, each wetter and fartier than the last. Thusly summarised, they go like this:

1) People who oppose the war in Afghanistan are Taliban appeasers and there’s absolutely no chance they could have any genuine moral or political objections to the war, like the deaths of Afghan civilians, or a principled opposition to imperialism. People who criticise the war without ever having fought in it are cowards, don’t deserve to have an opinion and should just shut up. Anti-war activists would be cheering Chamberlain if he were around today because it’s absolutely impossible that two completely different wars could be fought for two completely different reasons and that one might be slightly more defensible than the other. It’s much better to be an armchair warmonger than an armchair peacenik.

2) Julie belittles the plight of millions of Pakistanis whose lives have been ruined by the floods. She then admits she doesn’t know much about Islam (does she know much about anything?) before bringing up the fact that a Saudi billionaire was profligate enough so spend millions on a number plate as evidence that Muslims are probably hypocrites if they’re not sending aid to Pakistan. I’d suggest that Ms. Burchill is rather tenuously conflating two separate issues – one of extreme importance, the other of large irrelevance – because she’s running out of things to write about. This, I think, is evidenced by wet fart number three.

3) Naomi Campbell is pretty, but miserable. Kate Moss is pretty, clever and full of the joys of life. Well, Julie, if either of them had had their brain extracted and replaced by a monkey’s anus, they could have come up with a more interesting piece than this. You cretin.

A few highly representative (quite honestly) comments on Burchill’s article from the Independent’s website:

Tony: The Indy’s bosses could save themselves a few bob by just getting a random cabbie to rant incoherently about the problems of the day, and transcribing the results thereof. At least that might be entertaining.

Giordano Bruno: Islamophobia infiltrating the Independent! Funny how one can feel Burchill’s contempt if not hatred towards Islamic “umma”. Usual suspects like JB always come back with same rusty and dusty arguments. I’ve just wasted 5 minutes of my precious time.

Christopher: Being a columnist is just a little more than your IQ can manage. I suggest you switch to covering horse shows, which I expect you could do well.

Meles: Wow! Three items, all poorly-judged, offensive and ill-informed. I have learned to treat JB’s writing with… well, let’s call it scepticism… but this has to be an all time low.

Ian1: I was doing a spot of gardening this morning when I accidentally put my hand in a turd left in one of my borders by a neighbour’s cat. Unpleasant as that experience was, it pales into insignificance alongside the trauma associated with reading yet another ill-considered, poorly-constructed column by the worthless sack of crap that is Julie Burchill.

R. Broxted: Julie, couldn’t Lebedev afford Rod Liddle?

There’s an excellent piece by Andy Newman on Socialist Unity about why Afghanistan could prove to be a bigger defeat for America than Vietnam.

The key point is his identification of Iraq and Afghanistan as being part of the same conflict. It’s easy to forget about Iraq with the media’s eye so focussed on Afghanistan. Remember five years ago when Afghanistan was barely mentioned and violence in Iraq was in the news every day? Now the focus has shifted, it’s not hard to buy into the idea that Iraq has been an eventual success (if you can call over a million civillians dead a success) and Afghanistan is a failure. But part of the reason Afghanistan is failing now is because of the Iraq war. Any successes in the latter have to be weighed against the failings in the former.

No one should cheer the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But these failures are a necessary lesson for America. The Afghan insurgents may not be about to topple their second superpower. But they may have given the US pause for thought about its role in the world. And America has long been due a good period of reflection.

Confirmation bias – the tendency for people to be more receptive to evidence that favours their pre-existing beliefs – is a well-known problem in evidence-based argument. But I think there’s a converse difficulty which is far less discussed. Call it ‘confirmation blindness’ – the tendency not to pay attention to evidence that confirms our deeply-held beliefs because we feel like we knew it anyway and don’t need more evidence to convince us.

That might sound counter-intuitive, but think about a couple of examples. Yesterday the former head of MI5 told the Chilcot Inquiry that she thinks the invasion of Iraq was unjustified and served only to exacerbate hostility to the US and UK. As far as I can see the left blogosphere hasn’t made much of this, presumably because for most of us the views expressed by Eliza Manningham-Buller are nothing more than a statement of the bleeding obvious. Or, perhaps more worryingly, consider how little attention the truly awesome Richard Murphy’s Great Tax Parachute report has received, in which he sets out how much extra money the government could bring in just by properly enforcing and tightening up our tax laws, and making them a bit more redistributive, in effect making Osborne’s eye-watering cuts redundant. Opposition to the cuts agenda is pretty much a given on the left, but Murphy is the only person I’m aware of who’s set out a detailed alternative.

I know political blogs have a tendency to be echo chambers, but assuming that we want to try and win the debates about the direction of public policy in the world at large, rather than just talk about our political views with people who we agree with, we need to have the evidence at hand to persuade those who aren’t yet convinced. The inevitability of cuts has become a mantra in the mainstream media; it’s a narrative that’s crying out for a rigorous evidence-based rebuttal. And, bizarre though it might seem, there are still a significant number of people ready to defend the Iraq war (quite a few can be found here), and a much larger number who just don’t think it’s an important political issue any more. Anything that reminds us of the war’s true nature – a foreign policy blunder of epic proportions whose effects are going to be felt for decades to come – deserves attention.

There’s no disputing that being open to arguments and evidence that challenges your beliefs is an important quality. But openness to evidence that supports your point of view matters too. If you ever want to change anyone else’s mind, it’s essential.

Ok, perhaps he’s not wrong about everything, but Reuben wrote an article yesterday with which I have several significant disagreements. My main problem with his assertions stem from this cringe-worthy little paragraph:

In places like Cambridge – where they grabbed a seat last time – they seemed to get the vote of those who treated voting as an exercize [sic] in political self expression, or a parade of their moral conscience, rather than a practical attempt to determine the future. You know, those self indulgent tossers opine, with great moral gravity, “I couldn’t possible vote labour”. With a change of government on the cards – and at a time when politics will really save people of [sic] fuck people – I expect people to really, actually vote for who might form the next government – i.e. Labour or the Tories.

Whilst Reuben is right to say that the Lib Dems, perhaps unfairly, capitalised on an anti-war vote which will be far less pronounced in this election, I believe he is gravely wrong to characterise people who refuse to vote Labour for moral reasons as “self indulgent tossers”. Aside from being patronising, he is missing out on the bigger picture. Firstly, if we ever want the political system to change, and for long-term progressive reform to take place, we cannot afford to blindly follow a system which forces us to choose between the lesser of two evils. Politics should not be about who we don’t want to run the country, but about who we do. It is not, in my view, wrong to vote Labour in all cases. There are some very good Labour MPs and candidates out there who, despite the transgressions of their party, despite the wars, the privatisations and the systematic crackdown on civil liberties, deserve the support of left-wing activists. Nor, in all cases, is tactical voting a bad move. However, by telling people that they must vote Labour simply to keep the Tories out, we blunt a powerful tool for reforming the political system. Moreover, we reinforce the sense of disenfranchisement that is precisely the problem with politics at the moment – a sense of alientation in which people perceive they have very little choice in who runs the country and that their views are not being represented in a so-called representative democracy – a disenchantment which, far more than immigration figures and tabloid scare stories about asylum seekers eating our hamsters, has led to the rise of the BNP. As George Monbiot told me in an interview with The Third Estate last year: “As much as I dislike and am disgusted with the Tories, I think you have to vote for what you think is right. And if you cling onto something bad for fear of something worse, no one will end up with the government they want.”

Secondly, Reuben’s thinking relies on a similar faith to Tony Benn’s, that New Labour is a transient thorn that can be plucked if socialists re-join the party and work for change from within. I respect this view, but in translating this to a call to back Labour in an election regardless of circumstance, I think it only exacerbates the problem. New Labour is not a transient thorn. Its intelligent, educated and very middle class architects made a calculated, and very correct, decision that they can afford a sharp swing to the middle ground because whatever they do, their core support of left-wing voters will back them come what may. As long as they believe they can get away with that, New Labour will remain entrenched and the British working class will find nothing more than a few empty platitudes, whilst internationally it will continue to follow a line that is dangerously neo-conservative confident that as long as they remain moderately better than the Tories domestically, their left-wing supporters, who turned up on every demonstration opposing invasions and ID cards, will continue to put their cross in the right box come election time. Yes, you heard it here first folks, the Iraq war was Reuben’s fault! This is precisely why moral decisions must play a part in deciding who to vote for. This is why cold pragmatism gives everything we have struggled to resist in the last decade an easy ride. It’s not self-righteous to say I can’t, in good conscience, vote Labour. It’s just self-aware. Nor is it a matter of placing my own morality above the good of the many. There are a great many Iraqi orphans who would agree with me. By voting for who I want to run the country, rather than who is most likely to run the country, I am thinking of the bigger picture.

So you see, this is why Reuben is wrong about everything. Also, and this is perhaps the most fundamental point of all, whilst kids up and down the country were running round the playground playing ‘It’, Reuben was playing a game called ‘Had.’ I rest my case…

“You’ll never guess who I had in the back of my cab the other day…”

It was revealed today in The Daily Mail that the claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes came from an Iraqi cab driver. So now we know why they call it ‘the knowledge’…

The man had apparently overheard two senior Iraqi army officers discussing Saddam’s munitions capability (note: munitions, not weapons) in the back of his cab. He reported it to the British agent he was working for, who reported it to his runner at MI6, who reported it to someone else in MI6 who wrote a report, which was then looked at in detail by the Joint Intelligence Committee members and given to Downing Street (who took it at face value because it suited them to). If this sounds like a case of international Chinese whispers that’s because it was. The fact that this kind of third party hearsay formed the cornerstone of the September dossier, which informed the decision for this country to go to war with Iraq, is deeply troubling.

What is startling is that this cab driver – and we don’t know whether he was in fact a real cab driver turned informant or a ‘moonlighting’ spy – appears to have been not just the best evidence the intelligence services had, but one of the few lines of intelligence they had. In today’s Iraq Inquiry hearing, Sir John Scarlett, the man with ultimate responsibility for preparing the September dossier, admitted that intelligence from Iraq was limited and difficult to get hold of. I don’t doubt this. However, the danger of relying on only a handful of sources for intelligence is that if one of them is compromised, unreliable or a cab driver with dodgy hearing, a large proportion of your intelligence could be wrong.

I once rented a flat in a part of North East London (if this seems like a facetious and offensive comparison, that’s because it is). I went to view it on a nice sunny day when the neighbours were out and it seemed just perfect. A week after I moved in with my flatmate we discovered that the neighbourhood at night resembled the fall of Saigon, teenage prostitutes roamed the street, people liked to set fire to cars outside and I once came home to find two 13-year-old boys unlocking next door with a crow bar. In hindsight, I needed better intelligence and I certainly wouldn’t have made that move if I’d had it. However, my decision only had ramifications for myself and my flatmate, it didn’t lead to wanton destruction and considerable loss of life. I suppose if you extend the metaphor one could view the letting agency as defence contractors – making money from the misery of others – they certainly had better intelligence than we did.

There is always a question hanging over government intelligence when mistakes are made: was it malice or incompetence? One very interesting thing that came out of today’s Inquiry hearing was the definition given by Sir John Scarlett of the role of the intelligence agencies – he made the distinction that intelligence agencies present information but they don’t lay down how to interpret it. That is left to ministers (which is of course a wonderful excuse for the intelligence agencies). During the course of the hearing it transpired that there is and was no system of daily intelligence briefing for the PM, and not even any kind of induction process for ministers. So not only are they left to interpret intelligence, they are often left to interpret it with no training in interpreting intelligence (and sometimes with no intelligence of their own).

However, it turns out the government was not the only member of the Estates to have been left to their own devices. The Daily Mail also said in it’s article today that when the September dossier was published, “some British papers interpreted the dossier as meaning that British troops based in Cyprus would be vulnerable to an Iraqi attack. At the time the government did not do anything to correct this error.”

Sometimes I think I would almost prefer malice over incompetence in Westminster – if only for a change.

Marking 30 years of the London Review of Books, The Third Estate talks to Senior Editor Paul Myerscough and attempts to condense three decades into three thousand words

On Friday the London Review of Books will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a bumper length edition and the launch of the magazine’s online archive comprising no less than 30 million words in 12,000 essays by more than 2,000 contributors.

I started reading the LRB the year after I left university, while working in Hong Kong as a secondary school teacher. With no marking to do, few lessons to teach and no extra-curricula activities to oversee, my timetable might have been gratifyingly blank but for the school’s draconian (at least as it seemed to me at the time) working culture. Teachers, when not in the classroom, were forbidden from leaving their desks in the staffroom, much less the school, during working hours. It was bad form to turn off your computer or to use it to play videos or computer games (though such programmes were far beyond the capabilities of my laptop which wheezed whenever asked to load so much as a picture or the bright, gurning dragon school logo on the screensaver). ‘You have to appear to work at all times’ an experienced TEFL teacher had counselled me, ‘which is why I choose a desk at the back of the room. They can’t see the screen that way.’

But I couldn’t get my desk moved and with the Head of English seated behind me I had to be careful what I looked at. Too long surfing the BBC Sport’s website inevitably led to the questions like, ‘Hey what you doing?’ or ‘Hey, Lazy, you want do some marking?’

Mercifully at some point I stumbled upon the LRB’s website. It remains one of the best presented and easy to use sites on the net and, wondrously, it had no slow to load, easy to condemn, pictures. Reading the LRB I looked like I was working. Sometimes I even felt like I was, but not too often. Plus I learned stuff, stopped reading my father’s Spectator, made ill advised friendships with people like Salman and took my first steps towards apparently continuous, unemployability…

To mark 30 years of LRB, I spoke to Senior Editor, Paul Myerscough, about where the magazine stands politically, how significant political essays can be, whether he’d noticed any changes to government policy following articles written in the magazine, the sensitive issue of ‘snark’ and whatever happened to Christopher Hitchens.

The Third Estate: So how are you marking the 30th Anniversary?

Paul Myerscough: It’s an occasion when you roll out the people who are seen as your key contributors. We have pieces by Hilary Mantel, Andrew O’Hagan, John Lanchester, a huge piece by Jacqueline Rose on honour killing, Jeremy Harding and so on. It’s an occasion to show the kind of writing resources we have available.

Early next year there will be a series of lectures at the British Museum by Neil McGregor, Frank Kermode and Rory Stewart. We are about to launch the archive, the whole 30 years online. Next year we’ll have the anniversary of our independence from the New York Review Books. We started out as an insert and became independent after six months.

The Third Estate: The archive must have been very time consuming and expensive to organise so why have you chosen to put it up now?

Paul Myerscough: In a way all magazines of any status seem to be doing this, and quite right too. Technology and culture have brought us to a point where I’m not sure that any magazine or periodical can be excused for not doing it. I think you need to be able to trace the history of a publication―not least as a matter of pleasure: it’s such a lovely thing to go back through the history of a magazine to see how it’s contributors have changed, how its thinking might have changed―if a magazine can be said to have a consistent line of thought―and to build a cross reference, in so many ways: across personalities, across historical periods, across places to tease out a paper’s identity. If you can do this with the Economist, or the TLS or the Guardian, or the London Review of Books, then an archive seems to be indispensible. Magazines no longer live in the present moment. They live in the past too. We want them to do that, especially during an age in which information is processed incredibly quickly. Magazines now seem to be engaged in curation.

The Third Estate: That idea reminds slightly of Jonathan Franzen’s essay on the social novel, where he suggested the novel was incapable of keeping up with the contemporary world. There’s seems to be more reportage in the LRB nowadays and I wondered whether it sees itself as filling a gap which novels about contemporary events might have covered but aren’t able to any longer―or whether it may be facing the same problem as the social novel, that it can’t keep up with the 24 hour news cycle?

Paul Myerscough: It’s certainly true we have more reportage than we used to. We have more long essays on political and cultural subjects. We do think of ourselves as responding to an absence elsewhere―but the absence is not of coverage so much as simply of depth. It’s the length of the LRB articles that make things possible. Some of the broadsheets do a very good job of commentary alongside news, but they always have to compress it into spaces of no more than a thousand words. And that necessarily forces them into certain modes of speaking, certain ways of presenting an argument. What the LRB and some other magazines do is give their writers space to breathe. This makes certain kinds of argument possible. To take one example it makes historical argument possible, so when Ross McKibbin writes for us on politics he’ll very often set Labour thinking in the context of Labour thinking over the past ten, twenty, thirty years― sometimes fifty or a hundred years. It’s very difficult to do that except in a gestural way at a shorter length. What I think we’re doing is making available an old journalistic mode; the long 19th century essay. So your reference to the social novel may not be a coincidence. There’s something about the length that makes it possible to examine the social in a way that we tend to identify with the 19th century essay or novel, and that doesn’t fit very well into the other sources from which we get our news.

The Third Estate: It seems to be having more of an impact―I noticed Rory Stewart’s article got picked up recently and I wonder how much you consciously try to influence the news agenda.

Paul Myerscough: OK, where did you see it picked up?

The Third Estate: BBC Newsnight, and I’m fairly sure the Daily Mail ran a long extract.

Paul Myerscough: Possibly, possibly. I have thought about this… getting picked up: where you can expect to get picked up? I don’t think any of us imagine, do we, that Barack Obama after an eighteen hour day at work goes to the West Wing and reads the New York Review of Books? We don’t imagine either that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown do, even though both have written for the LRB in the past. Are their advisors reading magazines? I’m not sure how far down the chain you have to go before you get people, young people probably, in lower levels of government, who are reading everything. But that process of filtration begins at that lower level and gets honed and honed until at a senior level you really can’t expect to be having an impact in that sense. So you have to rely, as you say, on other media sources. It’s in those places you hope to make an impact. Even then it’s initially disappointing. When you’ve being doing this for a while, you just have to be sanguine about it. It just doesn’t happen very often. It happens with Rory. Rory is a prospective Tory MP, already a very significant figure in his own right, one of the few authoritative voices on Afganistan we have in this country and so it’s not surprising when he makes a statement in the LRB that it will get picked up by other sources. It would get picked up wherever it was. But what happens when Gareth Peirce writes about the al-Megrahi case for us? She publishes her essay and you think my God, this surely has to be answered at some level―and nothing happens . The Independent reprinted it in entirety, but it just doesn’t make the same sort of impact. You want to cry that it doesn’t, because in a sense the case she’s presenting is so extraordinary that it can’t be addressed in a culture in which there’s consensus: every time al-Megrahi is referred to he is the Lockerbie Bomber―and that’s in news sources. So what happens when you have piece that says he didn’t do it, actually it was someone else? You can’t really expect that to be picked up at―except that it’s Gareth Piece, the most respected defence solicitor on miscarriages of justice this country has. So I think you have grounds to influence whoever by publishing it. All you can really do is put these things into the public sphere and hope that they get picked up. Very often it doesn’t happen.

The Third Estate: It seems to fall on one side of the mass civilization, minority culture side of the debate. Does it consciously pitch itself there or is that an inevitable consequence of the way it’s written?

Paul Myerscough: No, it’s not done consciously. You have a magazine which if you set out to publish long reviews and essays on a full variety of subjects you do so hoping to bring―not a seriousness, though often that―but a depth, an angle, an originality and a style―and you’re doing that with 70,000 words per issue―then you really can’t expect very many people to engage with that. It’s a real demand, a demand which we don’t expect a lot of people, younger people in particular, to meet any more. Which, again, is why the archive has been made available online, why, also the blog. You have to find new ways of presenting the mode of thinking in technologically more accessible forms. The paper will always be there for people who want to read. We’ve always made quite a lot content available for free and that’s helped our traffic and helped us put our major intervention pieces up there in a way that helps them circulate

The Third Estate: Perry Anderson wrote in the introduction to one of the LRB’s anthologies that ‘the style of the writer comes before the importance of a subject or the affinity of a position’ is that true?

Paul Myerscough: Did he say that so concisely? That’s interesting. I’m glad we got Perry to do that knowing that Perry will not bend himself… It’s an accusation that’s been made of us. But it’s not true of course. Yes, we try to publish writers who are as stylish as possible in the field they write about. But the point of the style is not as some sort of decorative accessory and if the style is obfuscatory, that is a disaster. The point of being a stylish writer, of being a good writer is to bring alive the subject you’re writing about, the idea you’re trying to convey, in such a way that the reader is carried along with them. When you’ve got an essay of three or four thousand words, you’re hoping the reader will find their way to the end of a piece. Most people are going to give up on a piece that long unless it is well written. Style is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Style has to be in service of content. Maybe we used to publish articles like that, not anymore.

The Third Estate: Has that changed since 2001, since 9/11?

Paul Myerscough: In a way you’re speaking to the wrong person. I joined the paper the week after and was interviewed here the day after 9/11. You can imagine what the interview was like, essentially an editorial meeting on how the event was going to be covered… I don’t think it was a watershed for the paper in terms of its political thinking, because you’re able to go back to the beginning of the paper, certainly back to the Falklands and the Miners strike, and see very engaged political coverage of the news events of the day. Of course it had already been involved with Israel, Palestine so in terms of its thinking, coverage and way of doing things―no 9/11 was not a watershed. But it was in the kind of attention given to the paper, turning people’s eyes towards it, both in terms of people newly admiring and also newly suspicious.

The Third Estate: I think at this point I’m going to ask about Christopher Hitchens. He hasn’t written for the LRB since 9/11 and his last two books weren’t reviewed particularly favourably.

Paul Myerscough: At the level of reviews that’s not by design, we almost go in the other direction. I’ll come back to Hitchens I don’t want to avoid that. The Believer, a magazine in the States, launched a good few years ago with a manifesto against ‘snark’, which said they would avoid ‘snark’ and as one of their examples of ‘snark’, they chose a particular review published in this magazine by James Wood, of a Zadie Smith novel. Now we just don’t commission people to write that kind of review. That kind of review very rarely appears. Of course occasionally someone will write a piece that is deeply negative because, when they get the book, they feel that way about it. But we really don’t set people up. So if Hitchens has had negative reviews from our contributors it’s absolutely not because we’ve decided to give Hitchens a kicking. And we absolutely don’t want to because there’s actually quite a lot of love for Hitchens here. He wrote many wonderful pieces for this magazine. On certain subjects we wish we could still have him but over the question of 9/11 and American foreign policy, in relations to Iraq and attitudes towards Islam, I think at that time, it became more difficult for us to carry his articles. They wouldn’t have sat very well in the London Review’s pages.

The Third Estate: With the editors or the readers?

Paul Myerscough: Well, I suppose people will always want to ask about the relationship between the magazine and its editors. Contrary to what many people think this is not the kind of office where it’s understood what kind of line the magazine will take before we do anything, there is no consensus on many things. None the less, in the way that any magazine has a more or less defined political identity, the LRB is not the Spectator. Clearly it is left-of-centre. Clearly it is more interested in talking about certain issues in one way rather than another. We actually crave finding people who disagree with us, who present their arguments cogently and coolly, in the same kind of prose we hope our writers consider political issues. We often don’t find that our opponents do that. It’s quite hard to find rightwing thinkers who write in a way we feel we can publish, when we do we will publish them; Edward Luttwack for example and Ian Gilmour. A lot of our writers simply wouldn’t identify themselves as coming from the left. I’m not even sure some of our writers on British Politics would identify themselves as being from the left. But, Hitchens, it wasn’t so much his position (although I doubt it was one anyone here would have agreed with) but it was also the case his writing seemed to us rhetorically enflamed in a way that offered―more heat than light.

The Third Estate: Are there any personal favourites coming out in the archive?

Paul Myerscough: Quite a lot of pleasure will just be clicking on a name and seeing what they did. One of the pleasures for me will be going back to particular events. So, go to 1984 and see what the LRB had to say about the Miners Strike, go to 1982 and look at the Falklands War, go to important moments in the recent history of Israel and Palestine and see what Edward Said had to say about them. Or to take an example that leaps to mind, look at an article that by someone few people have heard of, Norman Dombey, about the state of the Iraqi arsenal before the Iraq war and find out just how many things he said came to be true in the light of events. But there’s so much it would be quite an obsessive job to get a grip on the whole 30 years.

The Third Estate: I have a not entirely formulated question on how the LRB sees itself as promoting more sophisticated literary fiction. Do you worry that its message is getting trampled out by things like the Tesco Top 40 or Richard and Judy’s book club?

Paul Myerscough: No, I think we’d always sit on one side of that. Part of the point of opening a bookshop was to give a spatial possibility for people to curate their reading in a different way. What the supermarkets and Richard and Judy do in terms of selecting and producing a kind of hierarchy of books has little to do with what we do. These days we don’t publish negative long reviews. We publish at most two novel reviews an issue, fifty in a year. We get sent fifty novels in a week sometimes. So there isn’t much point reviewing novels which you don’t think deserve the reader’s attention. You try to pick the ones that have a chance of being good and send those out to get reviews. It’s hard, you’d actually like to be reviewing literature in translation more, you’d hopefully be making your novel coverage more abstruse, not less. Making it less tailored to the British publishing market. It is still interesting to have reviews of the latest novels of major figures writing. Even so we aren’t going to review every novel by AS Byatt or Martin Amis. You go back to these writers every so often, to see whether there’s a good revisionary account to be made. In the end you hope to be able to say you have given some attention to most of the writers who people might want to read. But it’s hard finding as much space as you would like, never mind finding the writers you want to write about them.

The Third Estate: Was it a good year for the Booker Prize? Does the prize have too much influence?

Paul Myerscough: It was a good year for us in the sense that Hilary Mantel won. Hilary has been writing for us for a long time. Just because of that prejudice it was easy to think they’d made the right choice. There are all sorts of prizes which are given disproportionate amounts of attention in different fields. The Turner Prize would be one for example. But again it’s a similar situation to supermarkets. The Booker Prize is a matter of the logic of publicity and sales. Its impact is massive in that area. Look at the statistics about the sort of difference it makes to be on the shortlist on the one hand and to win on the other. It makes thousands of percent difference. We used to carry ‘Shortcuts’ in my early time here. James Francken would read all the Booker Prize shortlist novels and write a short article going through them. We haven’t done that in recent years. We’ll pay attention to the individual works but we don’t prioritize. You have to exist on one side of the prize culture and the mainstream. You either have to give an original take on the things everyone else is paying attention to or you have to pay attention to texts no one else is paying attention to. We try to do both.

JW Arble’s pick of the LRB archive

Walking through security at Portcullis House, the fabulously expensive building standing adjacent to the Houses of Parliament, is a bit like going through any airport anywhere in the world. But making your way through the spacious courtyard, past green trees and sun-dappled water features under the enormous sparkling glass dome towering overhead, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is still the seat of power of a great empire. The man I’m here to see, however, is one of the country’s most vocal critics of imperialism. George Galloway rises from his computer to shake my hand as I enter his office. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he says. I remind him we met once before when he came to destroy a pro-war American politician at the Cambridge Union many years ago. “You’re far too young to say that,” he laughs.

Born in 1954, Galloway joined the Labour Party at the tender age of thirteen and has been a Member of Parliament since 1987. His strident opposition to the Iraq war, describing Bush and Blair as wolves and calling on British troops to disobey orders, led to his expulsion from the party in 2003. “His comments were disgraceful and wrong,” Tony Blair said. But Galloway has never been one to lie down in the face of his enemies. The following year he formed a new left-wing anti-war party, Respect, and in a stunning victory overturned a Labour majority of over 10,000 to oust Blairite Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow. Since then, however, Respect has suffered a disastrous split, whilst Galloway has found himself having to fend off a barrage of media criticism for his famous decision to appear on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006. With a general election just months away, I ask George Galloway what he thinks his chances are of holding his seat.

“Well I’m not standing again in Bethnal Green and Bow,” he tells me. “Because I promised last time that I’d stand only once and if the people elected me, the next MP for the constituency would be a Bengali.” It’s a straight fight between Labour and Respect in Bethnal Green and Bow, Galloway explains, and with both parties selecting a Bengali candidate, his promise looks set to be kept. “For the first time, the Bengali community will have a member in the House of Commons and that’s something I’m particularly proud of.” Galloway has instead chosen to stand in the neighbouring Tower Hamlets constituency of Poplar and Limehouse. “We have a fighting chance of winning both seats,” he says. Galloway also believes Respect has a chance of breaking through in Birmingham – where the party came a close second in 2005 – and of Salma Yaqoob becoming the first ever Muslim woman MP. “If we could pull those three off, I could retire a happy man four years later.” Respect was founded in 2004 as a coalition seeking to bring together the disparate strands of perhaps the greatest mass movement in modern political history. In practice, what emerged was an alliance between George Galloway, a few prominent anti-war activists and the Socialist Workers Party. In 2007, for absolutely no reason that seems at all relevant, the party split in half and the SWP walked out. I ask Galloway if the split has harmed Respect’s chances of achieving the breakthrough he hopes for. “I don’t know if it’s damaged our electability. Certainly not if we do win three seats. Even having one seat in 2005 was almost unprecedented. It had been 60 years since a left of Labour party last won a seat in Parliament in 1945. And in the same constituency by the way.” Galloway has to admit, however, that the split has definitely affected the party’s power outside of Parliament. “The departure of key activists and leaders has weakened us. About half the members left.” I ask Galloway how many members Respect still has. “I don’t have the exact figure,” he says. “It’s a small number of thousands.”

In an interview with The Third Estate in June, Mark Steel told me that the feud in Respect was about nothing that anyone can work out. It has often seemed to me that whilst the left sits on the steps of the amphitheatre shouting splitters at each other and arguing about what society should look like after the revolution, it is failing to speak to ordinary people about the everyday issues that affect their lives. I ask Galloway how he would explain the split to voters who care about social justice and jobs and housing, but have little interest in sectarian squabbling. “With respect to you, and I don’t mean at all to be offensive, I wouldn’t care to explain it to anyone,” Galloway says. “I think that the arcane disputatious nature of the far-left in Britain is of interest only to the cognoscente and the cognoscente already know the reasons.” Galloway pauses as his phone rings. Sorting out a quick bit of business in ten seconds, he apologises before continuing. “For the rest of the public, Respect was always me, Salma Yaqoob, Ken Loach and so on, and it still is. So we’d rather go forward than look back.”

Respect, of course, will not be standing in every constituency at the next general election. “There are 649 seats, that’s beyond any small party of the left. We will be standing in more seats than just those three, but they’re the target seats.” In the constituencies where Respect is not standing, Galloway explains that they will back other progressive candidates. “Brighton, for example, where Caroline Lucas is standing for the Green Party and has a real chance of winning. I expect that we would support her, we haven’t made final decisions on these constituencies yet. Similarly Peter Tatchell is standing in Oxford, we would probably support him. There may be one or two other places where we would support a left, anti-war candidate.” I ask Galloway – who has branded the three main parties as “Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee and a half” – whether he would call for a vote for Labour to keep the Conservatives out, and am genuinely surprised by the firebrand MP’s response. “We definitely want the Tories to be defeated, so for the most part that would mean that we ask people to vote Labour.” It was understandable that Respect backed Ken Livingstone against Boris Johnson in last year’s election for London Mayor. But would Respect really ask people to vote for an arch New Labourite who voted for the war? “Most of them are arch New Labourites who backed the war, so we wouldn’t be able to have that as a hard and fast rule. It’s unlikely that the worst of the war criminals would attract our support, but we wouldn’t be able to use who voted for the war entirely as a yardstick.”

It’s surprising to hear Galloway say this – not least because he is Vice President of Stop the War Coalition and perhaps the most outspoken critic of New Labour’s neo-conservative foreign policy in the country – but because in June he called for an immediate election, arguing that the current Parliament is “utterly bereft of credibility.” I ask him if it’s possible that a Labour defeat at the next election could help bring back the party he once called home. “No, I don’t,” he says. “In any case, it would be too high a price to pay. The Tories will be a catastrophe for ordinary people in Britain, for the working people, the poor, the old, the sick, the disabled. So I want to see them defeated.” Galloway has to concede, however, that that’s not very likely. “Looking at the opinion polls, reading the runes, it would appear that the Tories are on course for a big victory. And if that happens, then we’ll have to see what happens to the Labour Party that I spent almost forty years in.”

Labour’s abandonment of the left goes part of the way towards explaining the success of Respect. But it is Blair’s utter betrayal of British Muslims, incensed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which explains why so many Labour voters in East London and Birmingham have turned to Respect. Not least because of Galloway’s standing amongst Muslims. When housemates on Celebrity Big Brother were asked to rank themselves in order of fame, he mused: “If we’re talking worldwide fame, I’m most famous. Virtually every Muslim in the world knows who I am.” Whether or not that’s true, George Galloway has done perhaps more than anyone else in the country to help politicise marginalised Muslim communities, introducing to them left-wing politics as an answer to racism, Islamophobia, imperialism and neo-conservatism. But there’s another, more reactionary, current amongst Muslim communities that seeks to present itself as the sole representative of Islamic identity. I ask Galloway if Respect could do more to challenge religious fundamentalism and social conservativism amongst the communities it represents? “No,” he says, “I think the first part of our agenda is big enough. The question of social conservatism within Muslim communities is a matter for them largely.”

It’s a contentious point, and one that many on the liberal left will disagree with, but Galloway has never been afraid of courting controversy. In 1994, he flew to Iraq to meet Saddam Hussein in an effort to prevent war and end the sanctions which were bringing further immiseration to the Iraqi people, saluting their courage, their strength and their indefatigability. More recently he has spoken out in support of Ahmedinejad in Iran following the disputed elections, attacking the protesters as class enemies and drawing a comparison with opposition to Chavez’s reforms in Venezuela. But despite the similarity in their anti-imperialist rhetoric, is it really fair to compare the ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Ahmedinejad with the democratic socialist Chavez? “I’m not sure that Chavez would describe himself as a democratic socialist,” Galloway says. “But I do think the comparisons between them are stark. Not just in their international rhetoric, though that is a very significant thing for me, but in terms of their social base. The social base of Ahmedinejad is the poor masses; the enemies of Ahmedinejad are the English speaking, highly-educated, well-off elite. I’ve been several times to Venezuela, and that’s exactly the polarisation that exists there.”

Galloway concedes that Ahmedinejad is not a socialist, whilst Chavez is. But both, he argues, are populists. “I do think you can measure a man by his enemies, and both have the same enemies. My main interest in Iran is that is should remain an independent country and not a puppet of the West like virtually all of the Muslim countries already are, and to that extent I’m glad that Ahmedinejad won over Moussavi who, whether he liked it or not, was riding a wave of people who wished to see the return of the Pahlavi dynasty and who wished to see Iran as an outcrop of the United States. And I’m sure that he did win.”

It’s an uncomfortable prospect, that the left must lend its tacit support to tyrants opposed to Western imperialism, and even though Galloway has described Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust as “a disgrace”, I ask him, if the enemy of my enemy must always be my friend? “No,” he says. “That’s why I could never line up behind the dictatorship in Burma. It’s anti-American, but I could never say that that enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Nevertheless, Galloway tells me that Ahmedinejad is the president of an important country and we’ll just have to accept it. “Iran is much more important than the sort of knuckle-dragging ignoramuses in the British media have realised. Its geo-political position is strategically significant, it has a very young population, it has an ocean of oil and gas and soon will have a nuclear power industry, famously as we know.” It is for these reasons that Galloway argues Iran must be treated with more respect. “Ahmedinejad is the president, that’s why he was speaking at the United Nations a fortnight ago, there’s no point in second guessing other people’s choice of their leaders. I believe strongly that every people have the right to choose their own leaders and not have them chosen by their adversaries.”

It’s a position to which Galloway has remained consistent throughout his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But with violence surging in Afghanistan, what is the answer to the country’s problems now? “The opposite of what we’re currently doing,” he says. “The war is doomed, it cannot be won. No one has successfully occupied Afghanistan, not even Alexander the Great, and Bob Ainsworth definitely isn’t Alexander the Great. No matter how many soldiers they pour in there, they’ll never pour as many in as the former Soviet Union did. That occupation failed as this one is bound to.” Galloway believes that a negotiated withdrawal is inevitable. “It’s better that that starts now rather than later. Many more people will be alive, the radicalisation of the Muslim world, which is a real danger, will be lessened, we’ll be able to spend the money we’re burning in Afghanistan on our own people at home, and we’ll begin to defuse the tensions that exist in our own country between Muslims and non-Muslims.”

But withdrawal brings with it its own dangers, not least the possibility of the Taliban returning to power. I ask Galloway what he thinks will happen to Afghanistan? “The first thing I need to say, and it’s a contentious point, is that it’s none of our business what happens. British people, after several hundred years of empire, have become used to the idea that we have some right, maybe even some duty, to determine what happens in other people’s countries. I never believed that and I certainly don’t believe it now when we’re an almost bankrupt set of islands off the coast of mainland Europe. The days when the building you’re currently in ruled a quarter of all the world’s population are gone. Hallelujah!”

That’s not to say that Galloway is unconcerned with the future of Afghanistan. “I have interests in that country as a British citizen and they are this: that it must not be a base for those who wish to harm me, us, our country and our legitimate interests.” However, he believes that it is important to separate the pan-Islamist al Qaeda from “Johnny Afghan who just wants foreigners out of his country.” These, he argues, were never the same thing. “Insofar as there’s an al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, it was we who sent it there, paid for it, armed it, glorified it, paraded it at the Tory conference and at Ronald Reagan’s Republican national convention, called them Mujahedeen and all that you know. To punish the Afghans for al Qaeda when we sent it there, is double jeopardy.” Instead Galloway wants to see a negotiated outcome with the Afghan forces to ensure that the country is not used as a base to harm Britain and its legitimate interests. “I can’t guarantee that Afghanistan will be a lovely place if the foreign armies withdraw, but I can guarantee it will never be a lovely place if they don’t.”

There are many far-from-lovely places in the world that Galloway is concerned about, but perhaps none more so than Palestine. He recently returned from a convoy to break the Israeli siege of Gaza, the occupied territory which would form part of any future Palestinian state. But, I ask him, is a two-state solution really the best way to achieve justice for the Palestinian people? “I’m pleased that Hamas and Fatah have signed a unity agreement,” he says. “I hope it works. The division within the Palestinian ranks has been catastrophic for them and for those of us who support them from the outside, as I have been doing now for almost 35 years of my life. As to what the final outcome is, this is really a matter for them.” Galloway says that if the Palestinians decide on a two-state solution then he, as a supporter of their cause, must accept that. “My own personal view, however, is that Palestine is too small, the issue of the refugees too great, the topographic and demographic cleansing that has occurred has been too extensive. The building of the wall, the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, the building of the settlements, which are really cities, have all been too extensive to make the separation of this small piece of land into two viable states realistic.”

Galloway is keen to point out that he does not support sectarian countries. “When Mandela was asked by the Boers at the end of Apartheid if they could have the Orange Free State as a white state, he said that he didn’t believe in white states or black states, only democratic states. One man, one woman, one vote, one government and everyone equal under the law. And if I believe that in South Africa, why should I change it for Palestine?” Instead he would like to see a democratic state, where everyone is equal, where all the existing inhabitants have the right to live, and all the people who were driven from the land have the right to return. “One state between the river and the sea is by far the best solution.”

In the meantime, Galloway believes that the convoys he is leading to Gaza to bring aid to the Palestinian people are crucial acts of defiance and solidarity. “I’m leading another one on the 6th of December to arrive on the 27th, which is the anniversary of the war. I think that these attempts to break the blockade are the most urgent priority for solidarity organisations around the world. We can march here, and protest here, and hold public meetings, but they make little difference.”

Somehow I didn’t expect George Galloway – the firebrand activist and unremitting radical who has always spoken his mind even when his opponents don’t like what’s on it – to say any different. His has always been one of the loudest voices for change and he has never lacked the courage of his convictions. I thank him for his time and make my way back through the courtyard and the green trees and sun-dappled water features under the enormous sparkling glass dome: the seat of power of an almost bankrupt set of islands off the coast of mainland Europe. On my way home, I pass Brian Haw, whose protest, like Galloway’s, will continue unabated till the people in power take notice.

http://www.georgegalloway.com/

Yesterday’s Iraq war memorial service can’t have been much fun for Tony Blair. Not only did he get called a war criminal by the father of a soldier who was killed in the conflict, he also had to sit quietly through the Rowan Williams’ polite denouncing of those who ‘look for short cuts in the search for justice – letting ends justify means, letting others rather than oneself carry the cost, denying the difficulties or the failures so as to present a good public face’ and ‘policy makers… who were able to talk about it [the war] without really measuring the price, the cost of justice.’ The biblical reading before the good archbishop’s sermon can’t have been too comfortable either, with its pronouncement that ‘we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places’.

Image: Steve Punter/flickr

Now, I’m firmly of the belief that a little awkward squirming at a memorial service is some way short of the bare minimum that Blair should have to endure for the invasion of Iraq, so my first instinct is to be very pleased that the Archbishop of Canterbury is making statements like this (though since he opposed the war from the start it’s hardly a surprise), and I’m more than happy that he should get plenty of press coverage when he does. But am I being hypocritical here? When the Catholic Church pokes its nose into issues like the creation of hybrid embryos, my first instinct is to quietly despair that an opinion spouted from just above a dog collar is not dismissed as uninformed rubbish but rather treated by the media as if it magically has the same worth as that from an expert in the relevant field. So what’s the difference? Am I just cherry-picking, supporting the right to media attention and a public platform for religious leaders only when they’re making moral pronouncements I happen to agree with, and demanding that they be ignored the rest of the time? Well, maybe. At least, that might explain my instinctive reaction to the two different cases. But there’s an important difference between the two. I don’t think there’s anything in Rowan Williams’ sermon that even the most hardline supporter of the war in Iraq would claim was factually inaccurate, regardless of how much they might disagree with the moral arguments. In the debate over the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill last year, by contrast, (which permitted the creation of hybrid embryos) various members of the Catholic clergy, whether intentionally or not, said things that were actively misleading. They repeatedly made us of words like ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘horror’, conjuring up lurid images that bore no relation to what was actually being proposed. If the debate had been honest the priests would have focused solely on the ethical status of embryos, since that was fairly obviously the issue that really bothered them. And if they’d done that, I don’t think I’d have a problem with it.

Unlike some of my fellow devout secularists, then, I don’t see a problem with giving over airtime and column inches to the views of senior religious figures on ethical questions, provided that if they make misleading or factually dubious claims, journalists will actually call them on it. Most of the time it’s pretty likely that the holy man or woman in question represents a point of view shared by a significant proportion of the population, and if that’s the case it’s entirely legitimate that that point of view be heard. I don’t really care that Rowan Williams doesn’t share my view about the plausibility of The Feeding of the Five Thousand – I’m still happy to support him when he lays into Blair about Iraq. It’s true that religious figures don’t have any special insight into moral questions simply in virtue of their vocation and shouldn’t be treated as if they do, but nor do politicians (including unelected ones like peers) or journalists, and we’re still expected to take their views seriously. That’s not really a good enough reason to shut them out of the debate.