Taking Out The Trash

Politics and paranoia book review

Tribune magazine has just published my review of Politics and Paranoia by Lobster magazine editor Robin Ramsay. It was written before I'd had a chance to look at Christopher Andrew's history of MI5. This book could almost be read as companion piece to that official history.

(Incidentally, Lobster's first online only edition comes out next month and has an extensive article by me on the construction industry blacklisting scandal.)

Just because you're paranoid. . .

The Labour Party, whether in government or opposition, seems to have a pathological inability to deal with the intelligence services.

Either this is through fear about being bitten or a sense that the chaps really do know best and Labour should stick to stuff like the NHS.

Politics and Paranoia is a collection of talks that Robin Ramsay, editor of the parapolitical magazine Lobster, has given around the country for the last 20 years.

Ramsay abides by the First Law of American politics after Watergate: “No matter how paranoid you are, what the government is really doing is worse than you could possibly imagine.”

In an engaging and lucid style these talks cover topics such as the rise of New Labour, the complex network of plots that targeted Wilson and Heath, the British American Project for the Successor Generation, mind control research, the War on Terror and several furious dissections of Labour’s subservience to the City.

You do get a fair amount of repetition as he cuts and pastes key sections and quotes for reuse. Ramsay is frank about what he does and does not know (by implication, we know even less) and he’s not edited the talks where he’s got things wrong, but acknowledged it in a footnote.

Of course any talk about conspiracy theories immediately gets ‘ordinary’ people rolling their eyes. Green inkers who think Roswell aliens on the grassy knoll assassinated Kennedy’s body double to protect the Queen’s cocaine empire.

Yet as Ramsay points out: “…even ignoring all the evidence of large scale political conspiracies, and organisations such as intelligence services which are conspiracies pure and simple, it is blindingly obvious, is it not, that political parties, for example, are intrinsically conspiratorial. Routine internal party politics is a network of interlocking cabals plotting to get their hands on this group, committee, caucus meeting, council, party, pressure group.”

Reading over some of these talks, where Spycatcher was still fresh and Colin Wallace had only just been released from prison, you realise there is an immense institutional will to forget.

A man who has evidence of dirty tricks by the intelligence services against Labour and Liberal politicians gets framed for manslaughter. And nothing happens.

Ramsay believes that on too many occasions the Labour Party did not show leadership that would have kept up the media pressure.

Thatcher taunts Kinnock after one of his staff spoke to Peter Wright’s lawyers and Kinnock dives for cover rather than ask the obvious question about how she knew. Once in power MI5 and MI6 continue to act with impunity.

Can you imagine a Labour MP making a maiden speech like Ken Livingstone’s where he aired the allegations of Wallace and Fred Holroyd and accused the sainted Airey Neave of being involved in dirty tricks?

In several of Ramsay’s talks he discusses the destabilising of New Zealand in the 1980s as it pursued policies not sanctioned by the US.

If Labour thinks that acquiescence to the secret state during its time in power will protect it in the future then this book shows that to be a naive at best.

ENDS

Transition book review

I'm a great fan of Iain M Banks and slightly less of a fan of Iain Banks. Either way; a new novel from the Scottish writer is enough to make me pop into a bookstore or update my Amazon wishlist.

Below is a review I have done for the magazine Tribune on Banks's new novel Transition. I think his sc-fi writing is great. The Culture series has been tremendous. I don't know what they put in the water up there but he is just one of several sci-fi writers from the region producing some excellent work at the moment. (Ken MacLeod and Charlie Stross come to mind)

Transition, though, is not of that calibre. It is more of a fantastical novel such as The Bridge but with a weakness of plot and, in particular, of character. It's not changed my opinion of Iain Banks. Still, if you've an interest in some of the ideas behind Transition then this might be a start.

The M in Iain Banks is pretty crucial.

Iain M Banks is the author who has carved a series of well-regarded sci-fi novels mostly set in the vaguely libertarian-socialist future society called the Culture. Banks-without-an-M writes fiction which actually gets made into TV programmes (The Crow Road) and attains cult status (The Wasp Factory).

Admittedly, my list of completed Banks novels is far better on the sci-fi side. However I’ve always felt that while quality there was solid, some of the ‘straight’ fiction came across as a little light. Dead Air and The Business both had their moments but primarily appeared to be a contractual obligation on behalf of the author.

Now we have a Banks book with an M and with what could reasonably called a sci-fi plot.

Transition is set on Earth. In fact it is set on every possible Earth. The conceit is the many worlds theory which suggests every time there is a fork in the road and you take one path rather than other, two divergent timelines are created. There are an infinite set of worlds where some might only differ in the motion of a single electron and others where life never managed to coalesce.

The characters in Transition are, mostly, those who can ‘flit’ between these different worlds through force of will and a helpful narcotic.

Those who flit form the Concern, a sort of uber conspiracy which goes about interfering in the destinies of these other worlds to make sure that the good guys succeed and the bad guys do not. The problem is that one person suspects the Concern has a much more selfish and deadly agenda.

Banks structures his book with a series of first person pieces from the half dozen or so principal characters. The fractured effect neatly mimics the sense of a universe reflected in a shattered mirror.

These solipsistic narratives also help show how difficult it is to understand the grand plan behind the Concern’s individual interventions.

The problem is that Banks hasn’t gone to an awful lot of trouble to make the majority of characters particularly appealing or memorable.

Several, Aidan, the drug-dealer-made-good in particular, are very two-dimensional. He spouts lines an EastEnders’ scriptwriter would balk at.

The plot kicks off briskly and then rapidly flattens out as Banks moves his characters around like so many chess pieces. It’s all rather flaccid, despite the ever increasing number of sex scenes. Then, in the last 60 pages, the pace really picks up and there is a terrific showdown.

I fear, though, that many readers will start Transition but not make it through to that finale - and I’m not sure the book deserves their dedication anyway.

ENDS

Saturday at the movies: Manufacturing Consent

All this debate about Newspeak in the 21st Century (see comments in post a bit below) and because I've been reading up recently on Bernays and Lippmann and watching a bit of Adam Curtis for my MA I thought I'd post a little morsel of Chomsk to (en)lighten your weekend.

Final bow for footie

Tribune has published my review of The Last Game, Jason Cowleys' book on the 1989 Liverpool v Arsenal title decider and the cultural changes it presaged (review in full below).
I found the book strangely apolitical, considering it was written by the editor of The New Statesman, and generally neutral about the then Thatcher government.
But Cowley does a great job in bringing the game back to life and also writes movingly about his father. However I've yet to find a Liverpool fan ready to take up my offer to borrow the book!

I REMEMBER that London had that slightly fetid air it has after a day of constant sun. I’d gone to a party with some friends and the host had been miffed, obviously, that we wanted to watch the television. But you had to watch the match, even if it did seem like a lost cause.

Afterwards a few of us ran a couple of miles to Highbury and partied outside the ground. I was on the bonnet of a car singing songs when a kindly policeman, smiling and indulgent, suggested I might like to get down.

Jason Cowley’s new book about the Football League title-deciding match in 1989 between Liverpool and Arsenal at Anfield certainly stirs the memories, but The Last Game is not an exercise in nostalgia.

For Liverpool fans, that period remains all too bitter. As we’ve been reminded recently, 1989 was also the year of the Hillsborough tragedy. And Liverpool were soon to be overtaken by Manchester United as the pre-eminent force in British football.

Margaret Thatcher was celebrating ten years in Downing Street blissfully unaware that within 18 months she, too, would be deposed from the top. It was also the year that Rupert Murdoch launched Sky TV, the success of which was built on the millions of pounds it poured into buying football television rights. That torrent of cash, along with the Taylor report, utterly changed the game. Football is now consumed rather than enjoyed.

If you are looking for a period of change – for football and for politics – then 1989 is a pretty good year to pick. For Cowley, as for most fans, football is a very personal love affair and this is the third element of his book – The Last Game is also an honest and moving memoir about Cowley’s relationship with his West Ham-supporting working class dad.

Any book about Arsenal and the nature of men will, of course, be compared with Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. But The Last Game has a much more ambitious scope. As a former editor of The Observer’s excellent Sport Monthly (Cowley is now editor of the New Statesman) you would expect the passages about the footie to be the strongest parts. But it is in fact the personal story which stands out.

The political elements say little new and Cowley gives Thatcher far too easy a time although this might be because the young Cowley was more interested in the apolitical rave scene when he wasn’t on the terraces.

As for the football, well, Cowley’s telling of the game itself is masterful and his pen portraits of the Arsenal players involved are well drawn. His Liverpool material is weaker. Cowley quotes footballer-turned-pundit Jamie Redknapp for his opinion on John Barnes. Personally, there is a very, very long queue of people in front of Jamie Redknapp whose views I would be more interested in. The interviews are hardly revelatory and the final chapter on the state of football today says little of surprise to any football fan.

There are too few books which attempt to put our national obsession into a political context and, despite these reservations, The Last Game is a highly readable and at times very moving exploration of a period of football that has now gone forever.

Review of Paul Mason's book Meltdown

Update: Interesting (if short) review from Tom Watson MP

Tribune has just published my review of Paul Mason's book Meltdown, on the global economic crisis. You can't see the review online so a copy is below.

"A succinct and well-structured post mortem on the last days of casino capitalism" is my bid for the sentence which ends up on the back of the next edition.

It's one of a number of books on the credit crunch (such an innocuous term) and while I'm not that bothered with Vince Cable's The Storm I would like to try The Gods That Failed by Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson which predicted many of the current problems.

But, as it is, I have Jason Cowley's The Last Game on the Liverpool v Arsenal title deciding match in 1989 to review next (reviewed by the excellent Jim White here). It's bringing back a lot of good memories.

If there’s one boom caused by the global financial bust then it’s in books telling us how it all happened.

Paul Mason, Newsnight’s relatively new economics editor, got to cover the biggest economics story of the last 70 years and could hardly believe what he was reporting. The one constant through the breathless prose is the sound of his jaw dropping as another low is breached.

The book is roughly in three sections. The initial part is the traditional bit where a journalist talks in the present tense as events unfold around them. Mason is always being woken at some ungodly hour to be told another venerable institution has gone belly up and then has to rush off to stand outside a big glass building or watch Alistair Darling give a press conference.

There are nice details such as the body language of Treasury officials betraying their terror.

Having set the scene, Mason then tries to put the crisis in context. Some of this will please supporters of the position that it’s all America’s fault. For Mason it stems from deregulation during the Clinton presidency combined with a complete lack of oversight by all the institutions we usually rely on. That includes the media.

As the mind boggling sums of money accumulated nobody thought to peek behind the curtain. It’s here that Mason sticks it to Brown. Second only to America in cheering on this gigantic house of cards was the Labour government and the then chancellor. It had given up on manufacturing as a basis for the country’s prosperity and bet everything on the City of London.

Mason does not spare us the complex details of the financial deals. Reassuringly he tells us that MPs have been left holding their heads in their hands having tried to similarly fathom where the money went. A glossary of terms at the back helps you get through this.

He also makes the vital point that the collapse has already had a direct and savage impact on the poorest. Swathes of urban America have been cleansed of people who defaulted on their mortgages as industries folded. Meanwhile the short lived commodity bubble priced food directly out of reach of millions of people in the Third World.

In a short final section of a short book, Mason suggests how this changed financial and political landscape might develop.

He sees an opportunity to institute systems “shaped by the willingness of ordinary people to impose limits, standards and sustainability on capital”.

Being such a short, and somewhat rushed, conclusion it doesn’t quite have the force that it might have. However this is a succinct and well-structured post mortem on the last days of casino capitalism.

ENDS

I've got the Auge

I get to review a range of books for Tribune magazine - and usually you can tell what's coming before you open the first page.
Recent additions to my bookshelf have been I'm With The Brand (about, er, brands. In America this had a different, crapper, title), Secrets & Lies (about the CIA and mind control), the Post-American World (about how the American empire might renew itself) and A Billion Lives (by the former UN honcho Jan Egeland).
Good, snappy titles. All bar one had good research and an original story to tell. (Secrets & Lies was very disappointing).
Now I'm now waiting for a review copy of a new edition of Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity by Marc Auge.
An introduction to what?
Well I picked it out of the catalogue because of a summary by author Patrick Wight who wrote the quite marvellous The Village That Died for England.
Wrights says of Non-places:

“Shopping malls, motorways, airport lounges — we are all familiar with these curious spaces which are both everywhere and nowhere. But only now do we have a coherent analysis of their far-reaching effects on public and private experience. Marc Augé has become their anthropologist, and has written a timely and original book."

Sounds great. A little Iain Sinclair and a little Guy Debord and some anthropology.
But get yourselves a snappy title folks. I'm a child of the TV generation and if I can't graffiti it onto a bridge across the M4 it's not worth a damn.
*apologies for the appalling pun in the title.

Update: having looked at Patrick Wright's blog I found this post about Melvyn Bragg's brilliant In Our Time rather amusing.