On 27 June 2007, when Gordon Brown went to see the Queen, he had not won a general election campaign or seen off his Labour rivals in a leadership contest. Brown was not the leading candidate to become Prime Minister, but the only candidate, the uncontested crown prince, a suitably monarchial figure at the gates of Buckingham Palace.

We forget how dominant he seemed. Uncontaminated by the grubby business of struggling for votes, Brown could stand above party politics as the father of the nation. From the right, Margaret Thatcher came to tea at Downing Street and the editor of the Daily Telegraph became his new best friend. From the left, trade unions welcomed him as a refreshing change after Tony Blair. Editors still confined reports about finance companies with strange debt vehicles to the business pages in those days.

It’s easy to be all things to all men when the economy is booming. When it turns, you learn who your friends are and Brown has found he has precious few. ‘Tories for Labour’ was a short-lived political movement; Baroness Thatcher hasn’t been back and the editor of the Telegraph has drifted right. Meanwhile, the unions are stirring.

I don’t want to exaggerate the revival of militancy. Compared with the mass walkouts of the Seventies, today’s protests are more like a sickie than a strike. A contact at the TUC put it all into perspective when he rolled his eyeballs at last week’s ‘Summer of Discontent’ headlines. ‘That’s the one cliche the Murdoch press has never fired a sub for using,’ he muttered.

Yet the threat that the golden era of low inflation and high employment may soon be over is toughening up workers for the same reasons it is making the government look old and unable to cope with harder times.

Before the economic crisis began, a strike by the National Union of Teachers would have flopped. Not only politicians but also many in the trade union movement had learnt to look on it contemptuously. Their disdain would have been strengthened by the sight of a member of the executive crying at a rally in Bristol on Thursday that Brown was ‘dragging young teachers into poverty’ and Birmingham activists breaking into a chorus of: ‘I’d rather be a picket than a scab.’ These were yet further examples of the union succumbing to its persistent fantasy that tweedy teachers can replace muscle-bound factory workers and become the new vanguard of the proletariat.

Indeed, when the NUT called for a strike, the other teaching unions shrugged their shoulders. Far from forcing impoverished teachers to subsist on bread and dripping, they said, Labour had given them above inflation pay rises for years. Admittedly, the current settlement was low, but independent reviewers had approved it.

NUT members appeared equally unenthusiastic. Only one-third bothered to vote in the ballot. A fiasco seemed inevitable. In the event, thousands of teachers turned out and a happy NUT is certain that they did so because of inflation. According to the government’s measure, it stood at 2.4 per cent at the time of the pay offer and that, said the teachers, was a penny-pinching underestimate.

Journalists are talking great deal of tosh about the government’s inflation figure. They are presenting the consumer price index as a kind of con - when it is used across Europe - and claiming it discriminates against the middle classes because it doesn’t include school fees, when the overwhelming majority of the middle class don’t pay school fees.

If anything, it discriminates against the low paid because it is not adequately reflecting the rising costs of food, fuel, gas and electricity, which no one can do without however hard they scrimp.

Labour has no hard-won experience to help it cope, as it hasn’t confronted inflationary pressures since it came to power. Cheap goods from China kept prices down.

The boys in the City could keep spending their bonuses and the Treasury could pump hundreds of billions into the public sector without fear of a price explosion.

Now demand from China’s growing number of wealthy workers is pushing up food prices while the thirst of Chinese and Indian industry for oil is pushing up the cost of fuel. The rise of China is taking Labour, and us, into a new world and it is not only teachers who don’t like the look of it.

Lower down the social ladder, poorer workers have more reason to be worried. Last week, the GMB held a meeting of shop stewards to judge whether dustmen, hospital porters, ambulance drivers and cleaners were ready to walk out. As always, they were reluctant to strike. Even if the management backed down, they reasoned, the rise they won may not cover the loss of wages.

Despite the lack of enthusiasm for a confrontation, there were ominous growls. Brown’s decision to tax the working poor so he could give a meagre, barely noticed bribe to the middle class was as unpopular as you would expect. Even more so was the rescue of the banks. If there was money for them, why isn’t there money for us? delegates asked. If bankers are relying on welfare payments from the state, will the state insist that bankers’ pay rises are kept as low as ours?

These are good questions, which once again Labour has no experience of resolving. The party’s dominance of modern politics began when the pound crashed out of the ERM in 1992 and the long boom started. Labour became so used to profits from the City providing the money for its vast programmes of public spending and redistribution of wealth that it forgot that when the authorities let financial bubbles grow to bursting point, the public is forced to redistribute its wealth to bankers.

Although political writers have insisted for a decade that Labour had to decide which side it was on, it found it easy to be all things to all men when the economy was growing. Gordon Brown used to be able please the editor of the Telegraph and the general secretary of the TUC. He must now be wondering whether he can please either.

here

If you don’t know how to sing happy birthday to a London railway terminus, Alan Johson shows you how.

For years, campaigners against the Burmese military junta have also been campaigning against Lonely Planet. If you can get hold of a copy of the first and most debased edition of its guide to Burma, you will see why.

The travel publishers pretend the dictatorship is ’sensitive to criticism’. They tell tourists not to worry about the conscripted workers who built their hotels because forced labour is ‘on the wane’. The true nature of the regime creeps out in embarrassed sentences hidden in the small print. ‘Be conscious that the Burmese are not free to discuss politics with foreigners and may be punished or imprisoned if they are caught,’ reads one. ‘Don’t compromise local people by raising political questions in inappropriate situations,’ chides another.

Burmese democrats assumed that Lonely Planet was a cynical operator which knew the truth about their country but euphemised for the sake of sales. Thomas Kohnstamm, co-author of Lonely Planet guides to various South American countries, raises the plausible possibility that Lonely Planet employees were so stretched they barely grasped the nature of Burmese autocracy before moving on to the next country.

In his memoir, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, Kohnstamm shows a side of publishing which is at once decadent and mean. He explains a Lonely Planet recommendation for a Brazilian cafe by saying that the waitress suggested that he came back after closing time. ‘We end up having sex in a chair and then on one of the tables in the back corner. I later recount in the guidebook review that the restaurant “is a pleasant surprise… and the table service is friendly”.’

At least he was a gentleman about it and at least he went to Rio. Later, Kohnstamm cheerily admits to producing chunks of the Lonely Planet guide to Colombia from San Francisco. ‘I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian consulate.’ In his book, he says he filled the gaps in her knowledge by relying on other people’s research. He worked on the principle that ‘what I can’t plagiarise, I can always make up’.

He now says he was joking, but is adamant that he couldn’t do a proper job because Lonely Planet wouldn’t even cover the cost of his flight to Colombia.

Kohnstamm’s story went everywhere because it challenged the belief that reference books, reports in serious newspapers, magazines, academic papers and journals are the result of a reliable process which produces accurate results.

For all the talk of the net changing the world, it remains a parasitic medium which depends on old-fashioned sources, which readers could more or less trust. Most bloggers bounce off online articles written and edited by professionals. Wikipedia tries to limit its inaccuracies by insisting that although it is ‘the free encyclopaedia anyone can edit’, users must back up their often dubious assertions with links to published sources. Journals across the world help them do just that. In the past few years, nearly all of them have put their products online, free of charge, and hoped that web advertising will make up for the losses of print sales.

Even bloggers who have made their name by lambasting the mainstream media - Matt Drudge in the US, Tim Worstall here - believe newspapers and television companies are letting themselves down. ‘Don’t these people have editors!’ Worstall bellows as he dissects another howler. They do, but maybe not for long. Or if editors survive, they may not have the resources to ensure that what they print is intelligently researched.

An apocalyptic mood is gripping publishing. JK Rowling fought back tears as she told a New York court how an online site had ‘plundered’ her work. Tracey Chevalier, who wrote Girl With a Pearl Earring, warned at the end of March that piracy on the net will make writing uneconomic.

She worried about work that can be cut up and pasted easily on to websites: poems, recipes, travel guides, short stories. But in south Asia, China and Turkey, it is not simply recipe writers who are being hit. At last week’s London Book Fair, Simon Bell of the Publishers Association described factories in Turkey producing enormous numbers of pirated copies of complete books by combining the net with modern printing technology.

He was joined by Akash Chittranshi, chief investigator for the Indian publishing industry, who showed pictures of police raids on underground printers who run off near-perfect copies on ‘an unbelievable scale’ for street vendors.

Pirated books are rare in the rich world because bookshops will not take them. But the arrival of the Amazon Kindle and similar ‘e-book readers’ will allow books to be downloaded in under a minute. What can be digitalised can be copied, as the music industry knows to its cost. There’s no reason why novels won’t soon be as easy to steal as ballads.

People will always write for love. But love won’t give them the time to write any more than it will help provide an accurate account of the fighting in Basra or a reliable guide to Burma. Good research needs to be funded. The optimists say authors and publishers shouldn’t panic. Web advertising and new ways of marketing will make up any shortfall.

If they’re wrong, and a recession will quickly show if they are wrong, we will look back on our time with regret. Briefly, the net allowed the transmission of professionally produced and edited news, books, music and analysis to anyone anywhere in the world with a connection. But the golden age couldn’t last because the net users weren’t prepared to pay for decent content and the web degenerated into mediocrity.

‘It is necessary to piece together second-hand information about things you are not able to see yourself,’ said Kohnstamm. His cynical voice may be the voice of the future.

Actually, you don’t have to vote for Ken Livingstone

Democracy is a system where voters hold politicians to account. In London, we’ve turned it on its head and allowed politicians to hold voters to account.

Allow me to explain. Ken Livingstone has broken the left’s one worthwhile taboo and embraced the far right. He has ignored London’s liberal Muslims and supported assorted homophobes, misogynists and racists. For good measure, he has presided over an administration against which there are far too many allegations of corruption and megalomania.

Fine, sling the creep out. Not so fast, say virtually every Labour MP and journalist. Livingstone may be a creep, but Boris Johnson is a clown. In other words, you have no choice. You must vote for Livingstone, without receiving any commitment that he will change his ways.

Gordon Brown and David Miliband don’t announce that they have forced Livingstone to listen to Muslim democrats and socialists rather than Islamist reactionaries and conspiracy theorists. Instead, they tell us to vote for a man they justifiably despise, regardless of who he will associate with on his return to power. Similarly, leftish broadcasters never ask Livingstone if he will meet leftish concerns by promising to drop his opposition to government plans to make foreign billionaires pay a modest amount of tax, for instance, or abandoning his support for shady property developers.

The normal electoral process of politicians responding to voters’ concerns has been suspended.

I won’t distract readers outside London with a technical analysis of how Brian Paddick, the ex-copper running on the Liberal Democrat ticket, could come through the middle. My point is merely that in a democracy, free people pass judgment on their leaders - they don’t give their leaders free passes.

Global Politics After 9/11:
The Democratiya Interviews
Edited by Alan Johnson, Preface by Michael Walzer
published by Foreign Policy Centre / Democratiya

Monday 21 April, 6pm, Committee Room 3a, The Palace of Westminster
A discussion on the future of progressive foreign policy to launch Global
Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews.
Speakers
* Charlie Falconer (Chair)
* Alan Johnson (Democratiya.com, Editor of Global Politics After 9/11)

* Denis Macshane MP (Labour Foreign Office Minister 2001-2005)
* Michael Moore MP (Liberal Democrat Spokesman for International
Development, tbc)
* John Lloyd (Financial Times and Reuters Institute, Oxford )
* Andrew Mitchell MP (Shadow Secretary of State for International
Development)
* Ladan Boroumand (Research Director, The Abdorrahman Boroumand
Foundation for the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran).
There will be a question and answer period. Copies of Global Politics After
9/11: The Democratiya Interviews will be available at a specially reduced
price of 7.99.
RSVP is to Julie Utting _Julie.Utting@JohnSmithTrust.org_

Here

‘Magna Carta is such a Fellow he will have no sovereign,’ snapped the Jacobean jurist Sir Edward Coke as he fought the arbitrary power of the Stuart monarchy. Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Sullivan might have lacked Sir Edward’s succinctness, but last week they delivered a defence of the rule of law that was as stirring.

The Saudis’ successful attempt to bully the Serious Fraud Office was a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, they said, a conspiracy that, shamefully, the Blair government had joined. ‘No one suggested to those uttering the threat that it was futile, that the United Kingdom’s system of democracy forbade pressure being exerted on an independent prosecutor whether by the domestic executive or by anyone else. No one even hinted that the courts would strive to protect the rule of law and protect the independence of the prosecutor by striking down any decision he might be tempted to make in submission to the threat.’

Brave and undeniable, but Whitehall did have a cynical argument against the judges, though not one that would stand up in court. Saudi Arabia is a special case, it runs. Most despotisms are like Zimbabwe, nasty, corrupt and poor. Saudi Arabia is nasty, corrupt but fantastically rich because of its oil wealth. So when it threatens to cancel orders for Eurofighters or suspend co-operation in the war against al-Qaeda unless we obey orders, we can appease it, safe in the knowledge that the Saudi monarchy is a one-off. No one else has the strength to hurt our economy. No precedent is being set.

The judges noticed a knowing tone of voice behind the ministers’ attempts to explain away the nobbling of the police investigation. Government lawyers seemed to be saying that Saudi Arabia was a regrettable anomaly whose ‘threats were a part of life’.

But Saudi Arabia is no longer an anomaly and the way the world is moving, threats to the rule of law are going to become a far greater part of our lives.

Labour’s more intelligent leaders know it. This year, David Miliband announced that the forward march of democracy had halted. The Foreign Secretary didn’t just mean that countries such as Zimbabwe had sunk into thug-rule and penury. He meant the belief that societies could prosper only if they embraced representative government was vanishing. He could no longer reassure Aung San Suu Kyi and other dissidents that history was on their side.

Europe’s most blatant example is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. When its agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, the Russians were as astonished as the Saudis that Britain insisted on bringing alleged criminals to justice. ‘I don’t understand the position of the British government,’ a foreign ministry spokesman spluttered. ‘It is prepared to sacrifice our relations in trade and education for the sake of one man.’

From Leon Trotsky on, the Soviet regime has killed exiles. The difference between the old and the new Russia is that now Russia can buy the support of corporations and capitalists who will excuse their crimes.

In The New Cold War, his study of Putin’s impact on Europe, Edward Lucas of the Economist argues that the Russian elite has understood that money can be used to undermine freedom because there are many in the West who believe that ‘capitalism is a system in which money matters more than freedom’.

So it is proving. In Germany, Russian money now provides a lavish retirement job for Gerhard Schröder, who disgraced the honourable anti-autocratic tradition of German social democracy by taking the roubles of the Russian state energy giant. German conservatives are little better. So frightened is she of Russia’s control of Germany’s energy that Angela Merkel stops Georgia and other former colonies of the Soviet empire joining Nato and vetoes EU plans to free up the gas and oil markets. When the Foreign Office asked European allies for support after the Litvinenko assassination, Germany was the first to say Britain shouldn’t take murder so seriously.

I could go on because it is always enjoyable being beastly to the Germans. The sad truth, however, is that among the developed democracies, Britain is the most anxious to prostitute its laws by offering near immunity from prosecution to dictatorial financial interests.

For instance, there are 20 Russian conglomerates on the London Stock Exchange, compared with just five in New York. Ken Livingstone explained why the City was the favoured destination for money not only from Russia but from autocracies the world over when he visited China in 2006. He told the regime’s tycoons they wouldn’t face irksome legal inquiries if they sent their profits to London. ‘The Americans have overreacted to the Enron scandal and foreign executives are frightened of the new rules,’ he explained. ‘We want to tell Chinese businessmen that we will not put you in prison if someone down the management food-chain has forgotten to fill in a form correctly.’

So fraudsters enjoy a latitude in the City they don’t enjoy on Wall Street. Why credulous voters continued to think Livingstone was left wing after that performance is beyond me, but his description of how the wealthy can escape legal interference was undeniable. The Saudis were outraged by the attention of the SFO because its investigators hardly ever threaten to prosecute. Even when they do, the courts don’t back them up.

The ‘light touch’ regulation of the City Gordon Brown boasted about for so many years meant in effect that Britain profited from offering international finance a latitude it couldn’t find in New York. We can’t shake off our dependence on funny money, as Gordon Brown and David Cameron showed when they reacted to the judges’ ruling by moving to curb the power of the judiciary to expose corruption and intimidation.

Coke’s declarations are magnificent. So, too, are the brave sentiments of today’s judges. But a more realistic appraisal was given by Jonathan Swift, who witnessed the founding of the City’s money markets in the early 18th century and wrote: ‘Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies but let wasps and hornets break through.’

Axess magazine here (Swedish required, English version below)

FROM the 1880s to the 1980s, socialism defined what it meant to be left wing. European leftists aruged about what socialism meant. Russian, Chinese and the poor world socialists murdered each other in disputes about what socialism meant. But on the basic point there was agreement. To be left wing meant believing that the common ownership of the means of production offered the best way forward for humanity.
There was a hierarchy or pyramid. Socialism in one of its many forms was at the top. The next most desirable form of society was what left-wingers foolishly called capitalist democracies: countries like yours and mine with mixed economies, universal suffrage, bills of rights and welfare states. At the bottom of the heap were the most detestable regimes imaginable: fascist, communalist or confessional societies, which used insane conspiracy theories and pseudo-science to divide people by ethnicity or creed. Nazi Germany was the clearest example of what the left used to hate.
Move forward into the 21st century and the left has changed beyond recognition. Socialism is dead, destroyed by the terrible crimes of the communists and the success of market economies, most notably in Asia. There are still people who call themselves socialists but no serious political movement anywhere in the world believes it can improve society by nationalising the economy. This is a huge defeat because the case for socialism was economic as well as moral. Socialism was meant to bring a higher and more productive economy. According to Marx, its triumph was inevitable. Today it is its failure which seems predetermined.
People who say they are on the Left now favour higher rates of taxation and the provision of public services by state monopolies, and are justifiably wary of private corporations and financial markets. Yet when their politicians take power they often turn to the market for solutions to the practical problems of running modern societies. They bring in private businesses to run public services or create a market in education by giving school vouchers to parents.
They are not selling out merely reflecting the true state of parties of the Left in the democratic world, which are everywhere cautious and flexible. They can no longer inspire enthusiasm for vast schemes of state control because they no longer believe in them themselves – and nor do most of their supporters when they are honest with themselves.
Political writers have discussed the death of socialism at length, but few have noticed how the leftism that has emerged from the wreckage finds it easy to go along with right wing and extreme right wing ideas that the 20th century left at its best opposed.

I will explain what I mean with the help of a few scenarios that I hope a Swedish reader will recognise.

· You study the ideology of radical Islam and realise it is a liberal nightmare. It includes the subjugation of women, the murder of homosexuals and of any Muslim who of his or her own free will decides to change their religious belief, the imposition of a theocratic state, the denial of freedom of speech and conscience and the anti-semitic conspiracy theories of Adolf Hitler. You discover that from the Iranian revolution onwards, whenever radical Islamists have seized power they have murdered liberals and leftists. Having reached these rather obvious conclusions, you read the press from a random sample of European countries, and find that without exception its is liberal rather than conservative newspapers which excuse the radicalism of the reactionary right.

·A bomb explodes in Stockholm killing 100 people. Within minutes, the radio is filled with the voices of leftists who blame the Americans, the Israelis and the Swedish government for mass murder. Not one criticises the terrorists or the ideology that motivated them.

· Sudan revives its genocidal campaign against the peoples of Darfur. You want to protest, but notice there are no large demonstrations to join in Sweden or any other European country. You realise that people who call themselves liberals will not protest about crimes against humanity they cannot blame on the West. Such atrocities no longer stir their hearts.

·You pick up a copy of Ordfront and read that ‘The Israeli Goverment Runs the Swedish Media,’ You are not as surprised as you once would have been when a friend tells you that Ordfront is a left-wing newspaper. In the 20th century, those who said that a conspiracy of Jews controlled the media and governments were Nazis. Now they are leftists You point out the shift to a friend who works on Swedish television’s media monitoring programme. She can’t see the story.

·At a meeting in Stockholm, you hear a Dutch Muslim feminist, who has escaped from forced marriage and sexual abuse, call on Swedish liberals to fight against the oppression of women. A distinguished social democratic thinker stands up and accuses her of being ‘provocative’. When the leader of a small revolutionary party screams from the back of the hall that she is ‘a tool of the neo-cons, racists and Zionists,’ the audience applauds.

· You enrol in a cultural studies course at the nearest university and notice a strange phenomenon. In the past, conservatives defended reactionary religions in the poor world, while leftists believed in progress and enlightenment. In the lecture hall, you hear radical academics condemn challenges to tradition as ‘cultural imperialism’ and denigrate the ‘oppressive’ values of the Enlightenment.

A few of these examples may be exaggerated, but not I think by much. The hierarchy of the 20th century vanished with the collapse of socialism. Now the worst form of society is western democracy, particularly American democracy. In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of democratic right-wing ideas, while left-wingers condemned it without equivocation. Now in Europe and North America leftists excuse fascistic and reactionary movements and ignore their victims, even when the victims share left wing ideals.
Their native far-right parties are an exception. As long as racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognizable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.
If the worst side of the old left was its failure to confront communism, the best was its camaraderie. European socialists supported strangers who shared their values. Today an Iranian feminist, an Iraqi democrat or a Kurdish socialist is highly unlikely to receive solidarity from Europeans who call themselves left wing, particularly if the supposed leftists are middle class intellectuals. At best they will be ignored. At worst they will be denigrated.
If you think the phenomena I am describing are simply the result of the disastrous Bush administration, I would agree with you up to a point. But they were developing long before Bush came to power and show every sign of continuing after he has gone.
In any case, a left that still had life in it and a European liberal tradition that meant what it said would have had no difficulty in dealing with Bush in an honourable manner. It would have opposed the second Iraq war, deplored the errors and brutalities of the occupation while supporting those Iraqis who fought al-Qaeda and insisted that they wanted something after 35 years of the genocidal Baathist regime. Support was forthcoming from parts of the old and declining labour movements, but the dominant voices on the liberal-left in the media, universities and political parties stayed silent as al-Qaeda slaughtered Iraqis without compunction. ‘Internationalism’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘fraternity’ now feel like dead words from a lost age.
Even the one foreign cause that does inspire the European left, the Israeli confrontation with the Palestinians, is far less altruistic than it seems. Very few on the left are prepared to support Fatah, which for all its faults is a recognisable national liberation movement that may build a Palestine worth living in, while deploring Hamas, which wants impose intolerable burdens on Palestinian women, gays, trade unionist, secularists and Christians.
The inability to discriminate between democrat and theocrat is a sign of vacuity. Today’s left cannot tell its friends from its enemies because it has no programme for a better world. Blaming its decadence on Bush is as foolish as holding America responsible for every conflict in the world. Deeper historical trends explain the hypocrisy of our times.

1. The rise of consumer politics.
In the 1960s, those who longed for a radical transformation of the status quo, as many people do at some time in their lives, could draw comfort from revolutionary leftist movements that were sweeping the world from Cambodia to Chile, as well as the strength of the student radicals in their own countries. History was on their side. Millions were moved by their slogans.
Since the fall of socialism, revolutionary leftism has died everywhere except in Latin America, and even there it is sickly and shallow.
The main threat to the status quo comes from radical Islam and the corrupt nationalisms of China and Russia. Far Leftists are open in their support for jihadis. The apologias from some liberals are so comprehensive that they must also support radical Islam in their hearts. At some level these people understand that they have nowhere else to go now that the revolutionary guerrillas and communist regimes of the 20th century are history. A love of violence and hatred of their own societies – well merited or otherwise – leads them to conclude that any killer of Americans is better than none.
Noam Chomsky in his political writings and the cultural theorising of Michel Foucault and the postmodernists anticipated the 21st century left ideology. Read them and you find a leftism without a practical political programme has taken the place on socialism and anti-fascism. All they have is a criticism of the existing order. In this mental universe, no movement that challenges the existing order can be unambiguously condemned.
Say what you like about them, but a communist or social democrat in the 1940s had clear ideas about how to transform society. Today, there is no radical alternative that serious people believe they can use, just practical ways of adapting to changes in the economy and environment.
A paradoxical consequence of the death of the socialist idea is that leftism now suits the consumer society very well. Because there is no coherent left wing political programme, anyone can affect a leftish posture, just as anyone can walk into a shop. For example, if I were a socialist, you might agree with a proposal I was making. But because I believed in socialism I would have to add that I also wanted the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy, penal taxation, and workers’ control. If not you, then other readers might back away saying that my ideas would lead to disaster. Modern leftists do not have to risk alienating potential sympathisers with programmes that might make them uncomfortable. They rarely have proposals for a new ordering of society. They are merely against the West in general or America in particular, both of which, God knows, provide reasons aplenty for opposition. If someone points out that as leftists they have a duty to fight crimes committed by ultra-reactionary movements, the new left ideology instructs them to say that it is ‘hypocritical’ for westerners to criticise when they carry so much guilt. The correct course is to do and say nothing.
The collapse of socialism also explains the general inability of leftists in Europe and North America to work on behalf of feminists, democrats and leftists in the poor world. If you do not have a positive programme yourself, how can you see strangers as comrades who have the right to your support?
These perfidies may be scandalous but they chime with the psychology of modern consumerism. Shoppers don’t like altruistic commitments. They have no appetite for boring meetings to raise public consciousness and the lobbying of politicians to change policy.
When I go into the homes of the richest people I know, I see Naomi Klein and Michael Moore on their shelves and think, ‘Why am I surprised? The Left is no threat to the wealthy any longer. Being a leftist is a lifestyle choice. It carries no costs and no obligations.’

2 Liberal disillusion
So far I have been talking about the consequences of defeat. But the second half of the 20th century also saw enormous triumphs. European left-wing movements gave the masses better housing, full-time education, employment rights and comprehensive health cover. If you could travel back in time, and tell the reformers of the Sweden of 1908 what your country would look like today, they would be astonished and delighted.
You would then have to explain to them that the triumph of your shared ideals had the unexpected consequence of turning the liberal intelligentsia against the white working class. The workers let down the intellectuals. They did not lead the charge towards a socialist society as the intelligentsia told them to. They did not use relative affluence the welfare state to acquire a taste for avant-garde art and atonal music. On occasion, they voted in large numbers for politicians the middle class left despised – Reagan, Thatcher, Bush and Sarkozy. And all too clearly in the cities of Europe and North America, the utopian plans of the 20th century social reformers did not always create a better society but dependency, family breakdown and crime.
You can see the disappointment of the middle class in the attempts to prevent democratic votes and deny freedom of speech. The centralisation of decision making in the undemocratic bodies of the European Union, the fondness for asking unelected judges to take political decisions and politically correct speech codes all flow from a belief that the working class cannot not be trusted to think as the middle classes would like it to think.
Beyond a fear that they cannot win majorities in open elections, the liberal middle class across the developed world feels a deeper unease. History no longer seems to be going its way. Market economies undermine the status and comparative wealth of the public sector managers who dominated modern states at the high tide of social democracy in the mid-20th century. Financiers and industrialists have acquired fantastic wealth and political status, while the liberal middle classes lingered in jobs their rulers despised for their failure to be market-orientated.
Modern democracy is a system that no longer pleases them. They are less likely than they once would have been to oppose clerical fascist movements and stand up for the best values of their societies.

3. Multi-culturalism and its Discontents.
Our progressive intellectual of 1908 would be as astonished by the triumph of human rights as the growth of the welfare state. Women, homosexuals and blacks – groups which had been discriminated against for millennia – have won full legal equality. A measure of the transformation is that it is now impossible for a conservative politician who is against equal rights for homosexuals to become the leader a mainstream European centre-right party.
Again, there is an ambiguity, however. Although the extraordinary success of campaigns against sexism, racism and homophobia vastly improved the lives of millions of individuals, post-modern liberals did not see them as individuals but as categories. They developed an identity politics based on group definitions that was anti-individualist in its assumptions. They treated women, members of ethnic minorities, gays and others as of blocs with communal interests. Their simplifications weren’t always pernicious — a campaign to tighten the law on domestic violence, for example, is a campaign for women not this or that woman. But postmodern multiculturalists have taken the liberal idea of tolerance and pushed it into an extreme relativism which holds that it is wrong for liberals to attack previously disadvantaged groups – ‘the other’ – even when ‘the other’ espoused ideas which were anti-liberal.
In short, it has become racist to oppose sexists, homophobes and fascists from other cultures.
Such attitudes are a disaster for progressive forces in the poor world, most notably the Arab world, and in Europe’s immigrant communities. We are now in the extraordinary position where liberals consider it ‘left wing’ to argue that the emancipation of women is good for white-skinned women in Europe but not for brown-skinned women in Tehran. Post-modern multi-culturalists have picked up the reactionary anti-universalist philosophies of the counter-Enlightenment and dressed them in modern clothes.

4. Fear
From the 9/11 atrocities on, the stupidest citizens of the western democracies could be in no doubt that forces were swirling around the globe that would murder them on a vast scale. This is a short and simple point to make, but we are frightened and think it is better to say nothing about the treatment of women, the attacks on freedom of speech, the psychopathic ideologies, medieval hatreds and raging conspiracy theories in case we provoke the killers.

Fear is the most powerful of human motives. Add in the despairing and reactionary turn modern leftish thinking took after the collapse of socialism, the tolerance of the intolerable inculcated by post-modernism and the doubts about democracy in the liberal mainstream, and I hope you can see why so many can’t oppose totalitarian movements of the far Right or even call them by their real names.
However understandable the denial, it remains as pitiful a response to Islamism as climate change denial is to global warming. Both sets of deniers believe that we can carry on as before living our safe, consumerist lives as if nothing has changed.
We cannot in either case, and must face the threats of our time. Reasonable men and women can disagree about how we face them, but we will not be able to see them plainly until we have cleared away the mountains of junk that block our view. The 21st century will not have a left that is worth having until we do.

It is never easy to tell the difference between a double-glazing salesman and an artist with a new project to sell. Henry Naylor, chief writer of Headcases, is no exception. His successor to Spitting Image begins tonight and is, he unblushingly announces, a ‘very, very funny’ show with ‘real bite’. Politicians and celebs will be ’sent up in the most unforgiving manner,’ his commissioners at ITV add. This is the one programme they ‘are desperate not to appear on’.

If the previews are a guide, I’m sure Gordon Brown won’t mind in the slightest. ITV’s satirists show him as a dour miser, who cautiously guards the taxpayers’ pennies from his gloomy Downing Street office. Naylor has decided that our PM is ‘a very austere, Scrooge-like Victorian gentleman. I mean he uses words like “prudence”, which people haven’t used for a hundred years!’

He shouldn’t be so cocksure, because if not for 100 years then for a good two decades, British satire has had a dire record. Spitting Image’s writers presented Margaret Thatcher’s ministers as cowering eunuchs, and looked lost when the supposed sycophants overthrew her. They followed up by showing John Major as a grey but decent ditherer, when in truth he was an obstinate man tormented by resentments. Rory Bremner demonstrated his sophistication by mocking Tony Blair as a crowd-pleaser who would never risk upsetting a focus group, and had to perform a smart U-turn when Britain joined the second Iraq war.

The best you can say is that most past caricatures contained an element of authenticity - Thatcher was domineering, Blair did blow with the wind in his first years in office. However, when ITV’s new generation of satirists show Brown as a frugal son of the manse, they aren’t exaggerating or distorting but getting him wildly and demonstrably wrong.

David Craig, whose previous investigative work showed how Brown’s Treasury had let management consultants plunder the public sector, has a new book out this month: Squandered: How |New Labour are Wasting Over One Trillion Pounds of Our Money. To spell it out, New Labour has spent an extra £1,229,100,000,000 since 1997 and will have spent £1,700,000,000,000 by the 2010 election. Its most tangible monument is ‘a political and managerial culture where mistakes are never admitted, failings are always covered up and mind-boggling bungling is rewarded by promotion, honours and generous inflation-proof pensions’.

In other words Brown couldn’t be further from a Dickensian miser if he tried. For 10 years, he has thrown other people’s money around with the abandon of a Roman emperor or Renaissance pope.

I don’t believe the inability of ITV to see him as he is can be explained away by intellectual laziness or the lure of clichés about stingy Scotsmen. Rather its blindness flows from a crisis of confidence in British culture.

Satirists, like journalists, depend on a flattering illusion of superiority. ‘You and I can look down on the stupidity of politicians with justifiable contempt,’ we imply to readers or viewers. ‘For we are serious men and women who would never exhibit such folly or greed.’

But in the media and wider arts, writers are wondering whether there are enough serious men and women around to pay their wages and are dumbing down accordingly. Nervousness about public ignorance and the prime-time audience’s limited frame of reference undermines Headcases as it has undermined so much else. The show has more spoofs of celebrities than of politicians. The producers say they will not parody Ed Balls, David Davis, Vincent Cable and Jack Straw because they believe viewers don’t know who they are. They may be right, but the assumption that the public is so dumb it can’t recognise public figures produces feeble television that will never draw blood, let alone inflict a wound.

Try a thought experiment and suppose they had more confidence in themselves and their viewers and decided to deride Brown’s Britain intelligently. They might then have looked at the NHS, which Labour promised to save in 1997. In fairness, it has all but doubled the health budget in real terms to £97bn, brought down waiting lists and built new hospitals. But the waste has been out of all proportion to the gains. As Craig points out in his most depressing chapter, the number of managers has doubled to 40,000. They are paid lavish salaries, even though they are so incapable of doing their jobs they need to spend £600m a year on management consultants to hold their hands and tell them what to do. Further down the hierarchy, New Labour struck an incredible bargain with GPs: the taxpayer gave the doctors a 60 per cent pay rise in return for the doctors working fewer hours. What funds were left, the Department of Health then decided to pump into a grandiose computerisation programme that every independent expert on information technology says will never work.

As the money flowed to the professional classes, hospitals became death traps. Rates of MRSA and C diff rose far in excess of any other European country. The highest estimate of avoidable deaths in its hospitals NHS admitted to in 2006 was 34,000. To put that in perspective, the United Nations estimated that in 2006, 35,000 died in the civil war in Iraq.

None of the quangos New Labour has set up to regulate in the public interest, such as the Health Protection Agency (annual cost £252m) or the National Patient Safety Agency (average salary £55,200), pointed out that while spending an extra £269bn on the NHS since 1997, Labour has presided over a sharp cutback in the number of hospital beds. Inevitably the shortage led to the filthy process of ‘hotbedding’ - throwing one patient out and getting another one into the still-warm bed - and a neglect of basic aseptic techniques to prevent infection during surgery.

Truly ‘unforgiving’ writers wouldn’t show Brown as a reassuringly old-fashioned pillar of the kirk, but as a demented spendthrift who stuffed the pockets of bureaucrats, IT salesmen, management consultants and hospital consultants while the patients whose money he had taken lay in NHS beds slowly dying in pools of their own excrement.

But that would be satire with ‘real bite,’ and you are not going to see it on mainstream television.

AFTER taking a good look at London, that perennially inquisitive visitor from Mars might reasonably expect the contest for Mayor to be dominated by weighty and urgent debates.
The candidates would argue about the exorbitant cost of housing, he might imagine, or the crashes in the financial markets. Perhaps they would wonder how a city which can’t manage to operate a baggage-handling system will cope with the Olympic Games, but surely they wouldn’t waste their time bickering about a crime problem which appears under control.
The police certainly think it is. A few weeks ago, I chatted with the Met’s divisional commander for Islington who reeled off an impressive list of statistics which showed that burglaries, assaults and murders were down in my part of London.
Every other Met commander can tell the same story. Sadly for them, no one wants to listen, as Monday night’s Standard debate between the candidates for Mayor made plain.
Boris Johnson declared that he was running on an anti-crime ticket. Ever the opportunist, Ken Livingstone heard what his opponent had to say and announced “I’m stealing your policies”. The two are now in an arms race to see who can adopt the toughest stance before polling day, and to listen to them you would think that London Town was Gotham City.
It clearly isn’t, and sociologists throw out all kinds of explanations for why fear of crime is growing when crime rates are falling. Some blame the media for providing disproportionate coverage of murder and mayhem. Others blame politicians for stoking public fears with “eye-catching” initiatives and stunts.
I’m sure that the sight of Harriet Harman taking to the streets in a stab-proof vest will do nothing to calm fluttering nerves, but the big reason why crime is dominating this contest is that Londoners are becoming far less tolerant of threats to their quality of life. Increasingly they do not accept fights at chucking out time or the occasional burglary as inevitable. They don’t shrug their shoulders and mutter that they must be grateful that overall crime is falling. They want to know why it can’t fall further.
As someone who believes we have too many people in prison, I find the crammed jails and restrictions on civil liberties that the authoritarian climate produces depressing.
However, I and my fellow liberals are equally intolerant when it comes to our pet causes. It’s no good telling us to be grateful that London is no longer enveloped by smog, for instance, or that homophobia is not as vicious as it used to be. We want a green environment and minorities to be treated with respect, right now
This convergence between liberal and conservative thinking is a sign that London, for all its poverty, is becoming an ever-more middle class city. And like solid bourgeois everywhere, Londoners want good manners, cleanliness and order. In his lumbering way, Johnson half grasps the public mood, which is why he looks like winning.

I COULDN’T get agitated by Sunday’s revelation that Max Mosley played Nazi sex games with prostitutes. It’s not just that I believe what consenting adults do in private is their own business. It’s not merely that I expected a son of Sir Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford to be screwed up. He had a little of my sympathy for proving the truth of P J O’Rourke’s assertion that, “no one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal”.
Or so it seemed when the story broke. But within days a blushing Nick Clegg announced that he had had dozens of lovers. I’m now looking forward to next Sunday’s revelations about a Chelsea brothel where the clients demand that prostitutes talk dirty to them about the Lisbon Treaty before beating them black and blue with an Electoral Reform Society discussion paper.