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Welcome to the Weblog, which gets updated whenever I have time — which has not been often recently. Also new this week: Not in our name…

Saturday 22nd February

Here’s something I meant to include on Wednesday but didn’t have time (not least because this keyboard is dying). I recall in 1997 Gore Vidal commenting on Tony Blair’s campaign that “In America if a politician says ‘Trust me’ we check our wallets.” One of Roy Hattersley’s columns explains why we don’t trust him or his government.

Doctor Reid … was attempting to explain away the unfortunate comparison he had made between the security alert at London’s Heathrow airport and the destruction of the World Trade Centre twin towers in which 3,000 people died. Part of his bluster was a refutation of the allegation that tanks at Heathrow were part of a publicity stunt designed to reconcile a reluctant nation to war. What sort of people, he asked, would exploit the tragedies of war in order to manipulate the press?

One possible case immediately came to mind. The sort of people who had pretended that a research student’s out-of-date thesis, speculating about the possibility of a terrorist attack, was an up-to-the-minute intelligence report predicting that one was likely to happen. And that was only one example of the dubious techniques which have been employed to justify almost every contentious aspect of government policy.

Yep.

In August 2000 I wrote a piece on Web Design about using animations on web pages; my basic advice was: don’t, unless you really need to (and you probably don’t really need to even when you think you do). Some time later I wrote about background images, and the necessity to ensure they do not make a page unreadable. In the original version of that article, a couple of sites I encountered provoked me to comment that you should never use an animated GIF as a background image unless you really hated your site’s visitors. A couple of years later, when checking the articles for anything which needed correction or updating, I removed that comment because it seemed that message was getting through everywhere, and in fact I can’t recall coming across a site with such appalling design since the end of 2000. Even the site which I had used to illustrate why this was such a bad technique mended its ways; almost all the animations were removed from it and the background was a plain, static colour: much easier on the eye.

A friend brought to my attention, though, that Neath Archers have to some extent renewed their love affair with animations. That first page doesn’t look too bad, although there is one animation on it:

That, by the way, was the image which used to be tiled on a black background as the site’s background image. Seriously.

Elsewhere on the site, though, are a couple of pages devoted to animations. It seems bowmen have a well-developed sense of humour.

Wednesday 19th February

The mention the other day of Tony Benn’s verbal joust with Jim Naughtie on the Today programme reminded me of something. Benn has, of course, been one of the big political names in Britain for some decades and at one point there was a real possibility he could have become leader of the Labour Party; unfortunately for him, he happened to be temporarily without a seat when what would have been his chance came up.

His good points are not inconsiderable: he is a genuine socialist (if somewhat patrician), and truly does speak with conviction; he does not adjust his views to court popularity based on the input from focus groups; he is not an intellectual lightweight; he talks about issues, he doesn’t attack people.

On the other hand, it does have to be admitted that his views seem sometimes to come from a distant planet where the natives might say, “Tell us some more of this Earth thing you call ‘logic’.” He must be the only man outside of Iraq — actually, make that one of the only two men (I almost forgot about George) — who believes that the reason Saddam doesn’t want Iraqi scientists to leave the country to be questioned is in case the CIA bribes them to tell lies. As cynical as I can sometimes be, even I won’t buy that one.

This tendency to sustain beliefs which almost anyone else would — and in fact frequently do — laugh at is no new thing. I seem to recall, for example, Benn being one of that deluded gang which believed the Labour Party under Michael Foot lost the 1983 general election because it wasn’t left-wing enough. (For those too young to remember, that election was fought by Labour on a very left-wing, Bennite even, manifesto which was described by Gerald Kaufman as “the longest suicide note in history.”)

Whenever Benn has gone off on one of his more, er, colourful flights of fancy a memory has bobbed up which always brings a little smile to my face, the memory of Clive James’s review of an unusual Granada programme broadcast in February, 1977.

James was for about ten years the Observer’s TV critic, a rôle in which he combined intelligence and wit even when the programme in question displayed neither quality; he was unusual at the time in taking television seriously.

Fortunately, some at least of James’s columns were collected in three volumes (Visions Before Midnight, The Crystal Bucket and Glued to the Box) which subsequently were themselves collated into a single volume: Clive James on Television (all published by Picador). The column I recall from 1977 is in there, on page 194 (if you come across the single volume, it’s on page 48 of The Crystal Bucket in the column entitled “Wini und Wolf”):

The State of the Nation (Granada) cast journalists as politicians in a compressed reconstruction of the Cabinet debates re the IMF loan. With Anthony Crosland at death’s door, there was a case for postponing the programme, but Mrs. Crosland bravely agreed to its transmission. As it happened, Crosland came out of it well. His unexpectedly trenchant arguments against cuts in social services were put by the best natural actor of the bunch, Peter Jenkins of the Guardian. David Watt played Callaghan. Everybody caught one another’s eye with a ‘spot the loon’ look when Benn was talking.

As James notes, “The show was probably true to life, since each Minister had a vested interest in briefing the journalist chosen to play him.”

That quote is something of a “blast from the past”, as Tony Blackburn would once have said. (Possibly he still does say it, for all I know.) The IMF is still around, of course, but it is rarely heard of these days; in the mid-Seventies, I don’t think a day went by without it being mentioned in the news bulletins. Peter Jenkins died in 1992; a collection of his “political writings”, Anatomy of Decline, is available, but I doubt that many who are not particularly interested in either politics or journalism have heard of it. Even those of us who were alive at the time and old enough to pay attention can find it difficult to recall that Jim “What crisis?” Callaghan was prime minister for about three years in the Seventies. Of course, there was a lot more on people’s minds at the time than “Sunny” Jim.

It is Crosland’s name, though, which really seems an echo of the distant past. I suppose that in a way it is — he died on February 19th, 1977, twenty-six years ago today. He was one of the big names in the Labour Party then, but how many outside the Labour Party remember his name? How many inside it, for that matter, given its Blairite abandonment of everything it once stood for? Crosland it was who declared as his aim the destruction of “every fucking grammar school in the country” (here’s a New Statesman leader which takes the view that this aim was the right one, but Crosland’s approach was wrong), yet he was (and is) regularly described as being on the right wing of the Labour Party. In a Guardian column last year, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Crosland’s death, Roy Hattersley recalled his response to such descriptions:

[O]n that Sunday he condescended to express his astonishment that anyone could be such a “bloody fool” as to believe that the nuclear deterrent (which he strongly supported) and what was then called the Common Market (about which he was lukewarm) were the defining issues of political belief. The test was equality.

Today, when a supposedly Labour government seems intent on policies which will increase inequality, particularly regarding access to education, and reduce civil rights and liberties, it is a refreshing thing to encounter, even from a generation ago, the voice of a Labour politician who truly believed in advancing equality for all. It is difficult to argue with Hattersley’s assessment (and it says a great deal about what Blair has done to Labour that Hattersey’s is now a radical voice):

… I have never pretended that I know what Tony would do and believe were he alive today. I can only say that what he believed then … still seems not only right but incontrovertible.

Those beliefs were set out in The Future of Socialism. “In Britain, equality of opportunity and social mobility… are not enough. They need to be combined with measures… to equalise the distribution of rewards and privileges so as to diminish the degree of class stratification, the injustices of large inequalities and the collective discontents” which they cause. I speak again for myself when I say that I have yet to hear a convincing argument against that definition of the good society.

Today, few are the Labour politicians — let alone secretaries of state — who would openly express such, well, socialism. I wonder if that will begin to change with Blair’s increasing estrangement from much of his support over the increasingly imminent war with Iraq. Last week, before the vast numbers of demonstrators poured onto the streets to say, “Not in our name!”, he received a significant warning from a Labour MP:

Today’s 30-minute session was dominated — to an unusual extent — by the looming war with Iraq. Labour backbencher Phil Sawford said he’d be at the anti-war rally on Saturday and asked Mr Blair if had a message for those attending. Mr Sawford then twisted the knife: “Bear it in mind, prime minister,” he said, “that these people are your friends, not your enemies.”

Even better was a statement by the MP for Hampstead. I have never been an enormous admirer of Glenda Jackson: in some rôles she performed excellently, but I always felt her acting more than a little mannered; as for her political career, well, it has rather made me regret she no longer acts. This brief performance, however, was exquisite:

Then, right at the end of the session, Glenda Jackson … got up claiming her exchanges with Adam Ingram the previous day had been misrepresented in Hansard. She said it had reported her as shouting from the backbenches that she wasn’t proud of her party.

And in her best Shakespearean voice, Ms Jackson told the Speaker that was inaccurate: “I am very proud of my party,” she said. “It’s my government that I am ashamed of.”