By Michael
Faulkner – 21 March 2010
As the
general election looms the two main contenders for office, Labour and the
Tories, are in a state of disarray. Labour is lumbered with its leader, Gordon
Brown, whose unpopularity seems beyond redemption. For well over a year
electoral defeat has appeared certain. Until recently the Tories’ opinion poll
lead was in double figures despite the fact that there was no discernible
enthusiasm for a party which lacked any coherent idea about how to deal with
the economic crisis other than a determination to introduce swingeing public
spending cuts from the first day in office.
In place of policies the Tories have relied
on a PR exercise to promote the party leader, David Cameron. Led by their director
of communications, Andy Coulson, this has sought to project Cameron as a young,
energetic, enlightened liberal-minded reformer, keen to change the Tories’
image as the ‘nasty party’, rooted in the bigotry of the English shires.
Coulson, on a rumoured salary of £200,000 , is a former editor of the Murdoch-owned
News of the World, one of the most scurrilous of the press baron’s tabloid
titles. He resigned that post in 2009 following exposure of the paper’s use of
illegal hacking of celebrities’ mobile phones. Cameron is himself a former PR man. His only job outside Tory
politics was as director of corporate affairs at Carlton Communications. The
party’s strategy has been to capitalise on New Labour’s – and
particularly Brown’s – unpopularity. Inspired by Obama’s presidential
campaign in 2008, they have assumed that electoral victory can be won by
exploiting the public desire for ‘Change’. ‘Imagine another five years of
Gordon Brown.’ Thus politics is reduced to a contest between the tired and
sullen ‘bully’ Brown, and the smooth and youthful ‘New Conservative’ Cameron.
As with Blair and New Labour, PR is everything. But will it work in the Tories’
favour?
Surprisingly,
during the past few weeks the Tory poll lead has been drastically reduced from
20 points last summer to single figures in February and, according to one poll,
to a mere 2%. This, it has to be said, is against a background of widespread
disillusionment with all professional politics and politicians. It is likely
that when the election comes, probably on May 6th, the turnout will
be even lower than it was in the elections of 2001 and 2005. There is no
enthusiasm for either of the main parties. The Tories know this and have
therefore sought to play the personality card, hoping that Brown’s unpopularity
will work to Cameron’s advantage. It has been remarked that with the
electorate, Cameron is more popular than the Tory Party he leads and that the
Labour Party remains more popular than its leader. Whatever may be the case,
one thing is clear. The Tories are becoming increasingly worried that they may
not win an outright majority. The prospect of a hung parliament, in which the
balance of power is held by the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish and Welsh
Nationalists, should be taken seriously.
At just the
moment when they hoped to be able to extract maximum mileage from Andrew
Rawnsley’s revelations about Brown’s bullying, the Tories have been hit by a
scandal of far more serious political importance. Their deputy chairman, Lord
Ashcroft, who in recent years has donated £5 million to the party, has been
exposed as a ‘non-dom’ (someone not domiciled in the U.K.) who, on most of his
vast income made outside Britain, pays no tax in this country. Michael Ashcroft
is a billionaire whose main residential base for many years has been in the
poverty-stricken tax haven of Belize where his business interests and property
holdings are immense. His multi-million donations to the Tory party are
targeted at marginal seats in the forthcoming election, where the Tories are
anxious to overturn slender Labour or Lib.Dem. majorities to boost their
chances of winning power. Thus, Ashcroft’s intervention in the British
electoral process is a very serious matter. That is bad enough, but it gets
worse.
For ten
years Ashcroft has been a member of the House of Lords and, as such, he is part
of the legislature which formulates taxation policy. In 2000, after intense
lobbying on his behalf by his good friend William Hague, then leader of the
Tory Party and now shadow foreign secretary, his ennoblement was eventually
granted subject to the condition that he become permanently resident in the
U.K. This he made a ‘clear and unequivocal assurance’ to do by the end of the
year, and Hague announced that his lordship would, as a permanent resident,
contribute ‘many millions’ in taxation to the exchequer every year. Ashcroft,
we now know, failed to take up permanent residence here in order that he would
not have to contribute those ‘many millions’. Instead, he managed to negotiate
some dubious status as a ‘long term resident’, which enabled him to avoid
paying tax. He then donated many millions to the coffers of the Tory Party.
This issue
has been on the boil for a long time. Cameron, Hague and other top Tories have prevaricated
and obfuscated when asked about Ashcroft’s tax status. Ashcroft himself,
needless to say, has haughtily disdained to respond at all to such impertinent
questions – until he was compelled to do so by a demand from a Labour MP
for information under the Freedom of Information Act. The Tories are squirming
under the heat of this spotlight and they attempt to turn off the heat with
counter-attacks against Labour-supporting non-dom donors. However, none of
those has operated on anything like Ashcroft’s scale and none of them has held
such a powerful position in the party. Still, it is difficult to regard as
anything other than opportunistic, criticism from Lord Mandelson who enjoys the
company of Russian oligarchs and famously said that New Labour had no problem
with people becoming ‘filthy rich.’
The fact
that the devious intrigues of billionaire ’Baron Belize’ and his ilk may not
raise too many eyebrows amongst the general public is, perhaps, a sober
reminder of the contempt with which most politicians are now regarded by most
people.
PRAISE FOR
A DIFFERENT MICHAEL: In memory of Michael Foot: 1913 – 2010.
Sometimes
the death of a public figure throws into sharp relief certain features and
values of the times in which we live and brings us to reflect on the nature of
changes that have occurred over decades. So it was with the passing of Michael
Foot who died at the age of 96 on the 3rd of March.
He was a
well-known figure in British politics for more than sixty years, first coming
into prominence on the left of the Labour Party in the years after the Second
World War. He was elected to Parliament in the Labour landslide victory of 1945
for the Devonport division of Plymouth which he held until 1955. He returned to
Parliament in 1960 as MP for the South Wales mining constituency of Ebbw Vale,
which had been represented until his death in 1960, by his great friend Aneurin
Bevan. He remained MP for the constituency until he stood down in 1992.
Like his
hero, Nye Bevan, Foot aroused great hostility amongst Conservatives. He is
frequently derided for his period as leader of the Labour Party between 1980
and ’83 which led that year to the worst electoral defeat Labour had suffered
since 1935. Unmentioned in any of the obituaries is an episode from 1983 that
expresses the brutishness of the ascendant Thatcherite mood. At the Tory
pre-election conference the unspeakably awful ‘comedian’ Kenny Everett, called
upon to perform for the jubilant hordes of young conservatives, shouted inanely
‘Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away! Let’s bomb Russia!’ Highly amused, they
roared their approval. In fact, the seemingly frail Foot, who had used a
walking stick ever since a serious car accident, was as tough as nails. The
Labour Party had suffered a serious split after the election defeat of 1979
resulting in most on the right of the party breaking away to form the
short-lived Social Democratic Party. Labour could never have won the election
in 1983, no matter who had led it.
Michael
Foot was not a ‘great leader’ of the Labour Party, but he was a great man and a
wonderful human being. Whatever their differences with him, he deserves the
most fulsome praise from those who, as he did, proudly describe themselves as
socialists. He deserves the praise of all who work for a better future for
humanity. Why is he worthy of such praise?
He was a
passionate social democratic radical. He had an unblemished record as an
anti-fascist. His first book, written under the pseudonym ‘Cato’ in 1940 when
he was 27 years old, was a blistering criticism of Baldwin’s and Chamberlain’s
appeasement of Nazi Germany. By the end of the year it had sold 150.000 copies.
He was an outstanding journalist, for many years an editor of the Labour Left
paper ‘Tribune’. With Bevan and Mikado he founded the ‘Keep Left group in the Labour
Party during the years of Atlee’s government. In the late 1950s he was a
founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a cause to which he was
committed for the rest of his life. In a tradition now almost lost, he was a
marvellous, captivating speaker – one of the great parliamentary speakers
of all time to rank with Aneurin Bevan and Churchill.
But perhaps
his greatest achievement was his mastery of the pen. He was a historian who
threw himself with passion into literary biography. His subjects were the
greatest in the English radical tradition. He wrote biographies of Hazlitt,
Byron and, of course, Bevan. The sheer scope of his interests and erudition as
an essayist is evident in the wonderful collection of monographs about his
contemporaries brought together in ‘Loyalists and Loners, published in 1986.
Michael
Foot was married for many years to the film-maker Jill Craigie who died in 1999.
Well into very old age he was a familiar sight, with his shock of white hair,
walking his dog on his beloved Hampstead Heath. It is sad to think that we may
never look upon his like again. He towers head and shoulders above those who,
unlike him have succumbed to the shallow pomp of peerages, or been corrupted by
power, money or high office. He wanted none of that. The billionaire financial
wizards and political mediocrities responsible for the present crisis have no
comprehension of the values represented by Michael Foot. It is his memory and
those values that we should cherish and their world which should be swept away.