After Forty Years, Why Not Debate Europe?
In 1964, I joined the Foreign Office and was assigned to Western Organisations and Co-ordination Department, the department responsible for our relations with Europe.
Eighteen months later, I was sent to Brussels on my first overseas posting. I was briefly involved in the arrangements for the Brown/Wilson tour of European capitals – an effort to circumvent the Gaullist veto that was frustrating our renewed attempt to join what was then the Common Market.
Throughout this period, I accepted the prevailing consensus that what was already described as “Europe” was Britain’s destiny. But by the time I returned to Britain and began to think of a political career, I had begun to think again.
I was not immune from the pervasive sense of idealism and internationalism that animated the enthusiasts for the Common Market. But, as I learned more of it, I realised that it was not “Europe” but a particular and practical economic and trading arrangement which could hardly have been less in our interests.
It required us to give up a powerful advantage in an increasingly competitive post-war world – our ability to set food prices according to the lowest world levels. We instead had to raise food prices to the levels required by inefficient European production, and pay a subsidy to boot to those inefficient producers.
In addition, we gave up our preferential access to Commonwealth markets for our manufactured goods and had to face up instead to direct competition from our most dangerous competitors in Europe.
And, as the Common Market became the EEC and then eventually the European Union, even these economic considerations were dwarfed by other issues. As the new Europe took new powers, admitted further members, developed its own institutions, and moved inexorably to become a nascent super-state, it became increasingly necessary to ask questions to which warm fuzzy feelings about the rightness of our European future did not provide adequate answers.
Was this “Europe” or just one version? Was it what the people of Britain and Europe really wanted? As power moved upwards to European institutions, what would happen to our democracy? What power to determine our own economic policy would be left to us in a single European economy? Above all, could the whole top-heavy arrangement possibly work?
We can now begin to see what the long-term answers to those questions might be. Yet, over the four decades of our membership, those who dared to ask these questions were decried as “anti-European”, drummed out of the ranks of the bien pensants – and, at times, treated as moral delinquents or intellectually deficient.
I vividly remember at the time of the 1975 referendum being interviewed by the BBC’s excellent political correspondent, Charles Wheeler. When I expressed concerns about some aspects of our membership, he accused me of being – like other “anti-Marketeers” – ignorant and prejudiced. When I mentioned that I had spent years in the Diplomatic Service on European issues, and had taught constitutional law at Oxford – also covering European aspects – he had the good grace to apologise immediately.
Things have not changed greatly since then. While there has been a sea change in public – and even business – opinion (and who could be surprised in view of recent developments), the political and media establishment remain determined to deny the need for any re-consideration.
The Observer, for example, opines that the case for review has no basis since opinion polls demonstrate that people are not concerned about Europe as such and are focused much more on issues of the economy, employment and public services. But people are not as silly as that.
They do not see Europe as a discrete issue that is separate from their other concerns. They rightly recognise that it impinges on all of the issues – the economy, our democracy, our international relationships, the environment – that they think are important. It is surely not surprising that, after 40 years’ experience of membership and understanding that the whole project is now in danger of foundering, we might wish to pause and consider whether a top-down, top-heavy Europe imposed by a political elite is what we want.
This is especially so when it is clear that Europe’s leaders have learned no lessons from the current difficulties. They insist that it is not their blueprint, but the people, that are at fault.
The issue is, as it has always been, not whether Europe but what sort of Europe. The often posed question as to whether or not we are “part of Europe” has always been a nonsense. We are of course in every sense – geographically, historically, culturally, economically, politically – part of Europe.
It is not anti-European to say, as part of that Europe, that our European partners are going wrong, and are in reality destroying the chances of effective European cooperation. It is not anti-European to insist that Europe should be democratic, not just in the formal sense that elections are held, but in the substantive sense that people should consent to be governed by the institutions to which they elect representatives.
It is no longer possible to keep a lid on this debate or to frustrate it by describing those who want to participate as knaves or fools. It is time to seek – and provide – the answers we should have had all along.
Bryan Gould
27 October 2011
Rupert and the Rioters
Rupert Murdoch and his News International have good reason to be grateful to the rioters. They were able to drop out of the headlines themselves, for a time at least, and to report on others making the news for a change.
But their respite was short-lived. The apparently incontrovertible and growing evidence of cover-up and dishonesty has compounded the outrage felt at the phone-hacking revelations. They now find themselves – with the publication of Clive Goodman’s letter – back in centre stage.
It is perhaps appropriate that they should share double billing at this point with the rioters. Perhaps the one issue is linked with the other? The search is on, after all, for an explanation of what may otherwise seem inexplicable – how could young people act with such an absence of any decent impulse? Without any thought for damage they were doing to the society in which they lived?
The Prime Minister, no less, opines that parts of English society are “broken” and has declared a social “fightback”; but fighting back will be ineffective if the enemy remains unidentified. Punishing individual rioters may be necessary and unavoidable, but that in itself will do little to drill down into the real causes of social breakdown.
At this point, step forward Rupert Murdoch and News international. Here, after all, are those who –through their power in the media – have arguably done more than any others to shape our society over recent decades.
We now have a fairly accurate idea of the values and principles they have brought to that task – the evidence provided by what we now know about their own disreputable business practices. We know that they have little regard for legality or honesty, that they feel contempt for those they report on, and that they will use their power to threaten or cajole when challenged.
They purport to hold up a mirror to society, to show people how they and others – their neighbours, their workmates – actually behave. But the mirror has been distorted. They have, in an effort to shock and titillate so as to sell more of their product, pushed back the boundaries of what is regarded as acceptable. They show, not what most people think or do, but what those at margins of society get up to – and the more outrageous the better.
Underpinning this distortion of what is normal and responsible is the cult of celebrity. The constantly repeated and largely subliminal message is that, however despicable the behaviour, it is to be excused and even celebrated if the perpetrator is featured in the headlines. Celebrity cures all. Fame and money are all that matter.
The result is that young people in particular are left without a moral compass. Sexuality is a commodity and selling agent. Money is the greatest desideratum, however it is acquired. Those who deserve to be admired and emulated are those whose success is measured by how much they have been able to grab, even – and especially – when it is at the expense of others. In all of this, the personal mantra of the News International proprietors is faithfully reflected.
The Murdoch media have been major influences in creating a debased popular culture. The old social virtues of mutual support, helping one’s neighbour, have been supplanted. Little wonder that young people, with little life experience and nothing much by way of role-models to emulate or moral guidance to follow, have been especially susceptible to the message delivered to them unremittingly by the Murdoch media.
There are of course other contenders to shoulder the major responsibility for social breakdown. Among the leading candidates would have to be the development in a recessionary climate of an economy in which unskilled labour no longer has a part to play.
Give or take the odd millionaire’s daughter who popped up like manna from heaven for the headline writers, the young people who took their chance in the riots (manipulated no doubt by social media-savvy fomenters of trouble) saw no future for themselves because they knew they had been dismissed as worthless by the rest of society. They reasoned that grabbing what they could when the moment arrived was just the kind of behaviour that would be rewarded not just with material gain but with a brief and local celebrity.
So, when David Cameron launches his fightback, why not look for starters at the role of Murdoch media which have been allowed – by exploiting their power with the benevolent connivance of successive governments – to exercise a disproportionate and malign influence on our young people?
Bryan Gould
18 August 2011
The Murdoch Monster
The worst moment of the Falklands War, from a British viewpoint, was the sinking in April 1982 of HMS Sheffield by an Argentinian Exocet missile. I was at the time working as presenter and reporter on ITV’s nationally networked current affairs programme TV Eye. I was immediately despatched by the programme’s editor to travel to Portsmouth, the Sheffield’s home base, to interview the young families who had learned overnight that their husbands and fathers had been killed.
I was required to walk up to their front doors at breakfast time, with a cameraman at my shoulder, and catch the newly grieving widows sobbing into the camera. I found that I could not do it. I returned to London without the requisite footage.
As we watch the phone-hacking scandal engulf the Murdoch media empire, it is worth registering that there has long been – at least in some parts of the media – a journalistic culture that says that “getting the story” is everything. Some hardened hacks glory in their willingness to break the rules, of both law and decent behaviour, if that is what it takes.
So the unpleasant truth about News International is in some senses nothing new. Yet there is a special significance to Murdoch’s travails. It is not just that his newspapers broke the rules (and we have yet to discover just how far-reaching those breaches were); it is the impunity with which News International thought it could be done, the power which it gave them, and the uses to which they thought it could be put that should worry us even more than the disregard shown for ordinary human decency.
I know, or knew, Rupert Murdoch slightly. We had, I suppose, a couple of things in common – both Antipodeans and both members of Worcester College at Oxford where he had been a student and I, some years later, a don.
But it was as a politician that I accepted a lunch invitation from him, and his then right-hand man, Andrew Neil, in the late 1980s. The three of us had a pleasant meal and an interesting conversation at News International’s Wapping headquarters, but – even to this day – I can only guess at what the purpose of the invitation might have been.
But that guess is a fairly informed one. We now know that Murdoch was intent on using the power that he wielded through his newspapers and other media to cajole, threaten, and suborn the leading politicians of the day. He presumably concluded over our lunchtime conversation that I was unlikely to be malleable enough to be worth pursuing. Others, however, seem to have reacted differently.
One of those who seem to have arrived quickly at a mutually advantageous modus vivendi with Rupert Murdoch was Tony Blair. Tony seems to have consulted Murdoch repeatedly about the policy stances he should take in order to win the support of the Sun newspaper, which was read by large numbers of working-class and potentially Labour voters.
Murdoch had never been shy about claiming the political and electoral influence which he said that the Sun gave him. Indeed, on the morning after the Tory general election victory in 1992, the Sun’s famous headline was “It Was the Sun Wot Won It!”
Blair went on to become one of Murdoch’s most faithful acolytes. It was Tony who was the guest speaker at the celebration of News Corp’s anniversary in California in 2006 and – standing shoulder to shoulder with Murdoch – who proclaimed that “we are all globalisers now.”
Blair’s example – his success in apparently riding to three election victories on the back of Murdoch’s support – brought most other politicians into line. It became the accepted wisdom that electoral victory depended on Murdoch’s endorsement, and this allowed him to demand more and more by way of special treatment from government in pursuit of his business interests. It was said of Blair’s government that Murdoch was the nineteenth member of the cabinet – and one of the most powerful – and Murdoch has been assiduously courted since by politicians of all parties.
Murdoch is of course also active and powerful in other countries, and particularly the United States, where his Fox News and ownership of the Wall Street Journal give him an influential platform. Only in Britain, however, has the cravenness of politicians allowed him to dictate to governments quite so blatantly.
Does any of this matter to us, in New Zealand? Yes, it does. The power that Murdoch has, whether real or perceived, means that one man, with extreme views that would be rejected by all but a tiny minority, is able to shape the international political debate behind the scenes, and dictate terms to elected governments, whatever the views of the voters themselves.
We have to live in the global economy that he has helped to shape. And, it is worth registering that no New Zealand government has dared to introduce the “anti-siphoning” legislation that would have prevented Sky Television from using their monopoly of sports broadcasting to develop a position of dominance that means the death knell of public service television.
The real threat of Rupert Murdoch, in other words, is not just to the decent standards we should expect from our media. It is to the very substance of our democracy.
Bryan Gould
16 July 2011
This article was published in the NZ Herald on 19 July.
The Centre Ground – Disappearing Stage Right
John Harris (The Guardian, 8 June) is no doubt right to say that the left is feeling frustrated and dispirited. But does that mean that we are bereft of ideas? I think not.
The frustration is born, I think, of the fact that ideas that seem so obvious and rational appear to have so little traction. The challenge for us, in other words, is not so much to come up with brilliant new insights, as to find ways of being better understood and commanding greater support.
On the face of it, the task should be an easy one. When events have conspired to demonstrate just how far the country has veered off course, there has never been a better time to argue that a change of direction is needed.
The unregulated market is self-correcting and infallible? Business leaders have all the answers? Government should step aside and allow business to get on with it?
None of this, surely, is credible in light of the disaster created by the greed, incompetence and irresponsibility of private sector operators and the intervention required of government that alone allowed us narrowly to avert full-scale depression.
Yet, these lessons have not been learned. The problems created by the wealthy, it seems, have to be shouldered by the poor and the unemployed. The rich need to be placated in the hope that their wealth, in an increasingly unequal society, will somehow “trickle down”. The economic power of government must be sidelined in the hope that contraction will, with the help of the confidence fairy’s ministrations, lead miraculously to recovery.
It is not that we are left at a loss, confounded by the superior expertise and arguments of our opponents. We do not need to cast around and dig deep for new ideas when there is no shortage of convincing and commonsense responses to these continued mistakes.
Markets – valuable servants but dangerous masters – function best when they are properly regulated. The greatest threat to our financial viability is that we fall deeper into recession. Government spending is essential in recession, both to protect the vulnerable and to stimulate recovery. Full employment is the most important goal of economic policy and the most valuable stepping stone to a full recovery. To widen inequality and to drive people further into poverty is to threaten the very fabric of our society.
There are powerful and widely endorsed arguments to support each of these propositions. The left should not, in other words, beat itself up for its supposed failure to come up with appropriate solutions to our problems. It should ask itself instead why a rival and implausible narrative has achieved wide acceptance, and why the obvious commonsense responses fail to carry conviction.
It is at this point that the real difficulty arises. The left, at least in the form of the Labour Party, has consistently undermined its own position by demonstrating in government that it prefers the case made by its opponents to its own. Indeed, New Labour – at a time when the Tories themselves had had enough of the Thatcherite revolution – insisted on regarding themselves as heirs to the Thatcherite legacy, and persuaded themselves that embracing it was the essential pre-condition for election victory.
So, both the Blair and Brown governments expressed confidence in unregulated markets and financial markets in particular. They looked to the private sector – in areas like health and education – as a preferable alternative to public provision. They uncritically supported the City as the flagship of prosperity for all. They were relaxed about widening inequality – and “intensely relaxed” about people becoming “filthy rich.” They presided over high levels of unemployment.
All this, we were told, in the interests of contesting for the “centre ground”. But the centre ground is a slippery concept. It is to be found where you choose to find it or where you allow it to be. It can – and did – move sharply to the right, when ground that was previously to its left was abandoned, and right-wing opponents took advantage of that surrender to keep moving right.
The left is at present damagingly incapacitated by its demonstrable failure, when it really mattered – in government – to show any confidence in left prescriptions. They found themselves, in pursuit of an ill-defined centre ground, constantly chasing it as it disappeared rightwards.
Politics in a democracy is largely a matter of who controls the agenda. The right begin with the huge advantage of overwhelming media support from right-wing media barons. They do not need additional help from acquiescent opponents.
There is little wrong, I believe, with much of the left analysis of the country’s current plight, particularly when that analysis is so strongly supported by experience. The deficiency lies in the confidence with which that analysis is advanced. We must draw a line under our recent unhappy experience and, with the force, eloquence and conviction of our arguments, define for ourselves the centre ground rather than let others do it for us.
Bryan Gould
9 June 2011.
Do You Want The Good News Or The Bad News?
The May election results delivered what was promised – only more so. The winners and losers were eminently predictable, but the voters’ judgments were unexpectedly savage.
The night’s big losers were, of course, the Liberal Democrats. They certainly expected a poor showing but they must be surveying the post-election wreckage with something approaching dismay.
The overwhelming rejection of electoral reform, and the slim prospect of its reappearance as a viable option, mean that the holy grail of Liberal politics – and the assumed pay-off for a risky coalition deal – has crumbled in their hands. They are now left as the fall guys for the disappointments of coalition government, not only with no compensation for bearing the brunt of unpopular measures dictated to them by their senior partners, but with that downside underlined by the demonstrated failure and unpopularity of their central selling proposition.
Sadly, the mishandling of the way the issue was put to the electorate means that the UK remains saddled with an electoral system that serves the interests of adversarial politics and puts a premium on posturing rather than serious policy-making. There is, I suppose, a kind of poetic justice in the Lib Dems now finding themselves – with no salvation in sight – hoist on the petard of extreme policies that their coalition arrangement commits them to supporting.
The Lib Dem plight is, in other words, bad news for the wider politics of the UK. A similar judgment can be made – at first sight – of the Scottish Nationalist triumph. Closer examination, however, reveals that the message may not be as depressing as it seems. Alex Salmond’s success can best be regarded as partly the result of his own merits as First Minister and partly a reflection of the poverty of the message that Labour chose to deliver to its traditional supporters.
There are two optimistic interpretations that can be made. First, (and perhaps a little fancifully), the severity of Labour’s reverse might just persuade a timid and moribund Scottish Labour Party – and the wider Labour leadership in the UK as a whole – of just how much they have to do (in the aftermath of Blair and Brown) if Labour is to re-establish itself as the natural and accepted defender of the less advantaged and as the most convincing deliverer of a more equal and therefore more efficient economy and society.
Secondly, it is one thing to vote SNP for the purposes of identifying an effective Scottish administration – particularly when the alternatives were so unprepossessing. It is quite another to vote for Scottish independence. There is nothing to suggest that voters are ready to take that further and momentous step. But those who want to maintain the United Kingdom have been put on notice of how little time they now have to persuade Scottish voters.
If the messages were stark for the Lib Dems and encouraging for the Scottish Nationalists, what of the two main parties? For the Conservatives, it was a successful exercise in damage limitation. They avoided major losses in their own strong areas. They maintained a reasonable party unity and escaped the internal recriminations that a Yes vote on electoral reform would have produced. They preserved an electoral system that maximises their chances of staying in power, even on a dwindling minority vote. They have been able to use the Lib Dems as a lightning conductor for voter disaffection at the damage inflicted by government policies.
For Labour, the message is – or should be – a sobering one. The Scottish result is a warning of the price to be paid for taking voters for granted over a long period and of wandering across the political spectrum so that voters feel they no longer know what they are asked to vote for. And, looking to the future – and a pretty immediate future at that – a consolidation of that Scottish result in future general elections would destroy any chance of a Labour government of the United Kingdom.
Even in England and Wales, Ed Miliband now knows how much Labour needs still to do before it can translate an anti-Tory majority into an effective and well-supported government of the centre-left. It needs to be clearer, braver, more confident and distinctive. It needs to stop the ceaseless preoccupation with short-term polling, triangulation and spinning. It needs to strike out with a clear statement of a genuinely alternative and attractive option. The British people yearn to hear that voice.
Bryan Gould
8 May 2011
This article was published on 9 May at http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/