Between the Lines: Dispatches, News Priorities and GBH (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the July 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Men with baseball bats threatening their political opponents; whispering campaigns and smears leaked to the press in order to discredit certain MPs; statements to the police about physical intimidation. Dispatches (C4, 8pm, 12 June) has shown what life is really like inside the Tory party. And there we were thinking it was all tea parties with fairy cakes made by the W.I. and orgasmic rallies in Blackpool. Not so, it seems. Where there is power to be fought for these louts fight dirty.

One Tory referred to the infiltration of his party by a "sinister brotherhood of extreme right-wingers". These are known within Tory ranks as The Movement and comprise of a number of free-market ideologues who dream of a utopia where the fire brigade is privatised and every beggar has the freedom to become a self-employed rent boy.

We have debated against some of these jerks (in fact, your reviewer recognised quite a few of the faces in the Soho room where the camera caught them plotting) and they are the sort of people whose main crime is that they are open enough to admit in public just how stupid and nasty their social dreams really are. Their opponents, including the current Tory chairman, Patten, are despised as "wets" who hold "unsound" sympathies for such evils as the NHS and income support payments. The Movement kids await the second coming of Thatcher and write documents about the threat to democracy in South Africa.

As targets for a pre-election documentary they are easy to attack and worthy of all the contempt intended by the programme-makers. Underlying the programme is an assumption that these sinister extremists have brought politics into disrepute — if only it could be left to the good guys like  . . . ?

As if we would believe for one minute that the likes of Major and Lamont are any less cynical and machiavellian in their sordid struggle to run British capitalism on behalf of the exploiting class. The fact is that capitalist politics is a dirty, dishonest business. These people can only win by deceit and false promises. That certain younger Tories have introduced filthy smears and baseball bats into the equation is just accentuating the constant.

NEWS PRIORITIES

On the day that the National Childrens Home report stated that one in ten children in Britain on Income Support are not fed at least once a month because their parents are too poor to buy food, what do you think was the first item on The News at Ten (ITV, 10pm, 6 June)?

Prince William had been hit on the head at school. Shock! Horror! The cameras were on the scene at an instant. Look at the tears in the eyes of that compassionate millionairess, Princess Di. Her son suffered no brain damage, a neurologist reported, although even if he was so brain-damaged that he could never lift a finger it would make not a scrap of difference because wee Willy is in the class which never does need to lift a finger. The kids in Britain who are starving because of poverty do not have or need the tears of rich princesses. What they need is a society of production for use, not profit. What they need is action by you, dear reader.

GBH - PART ONE

We shall wait for the completion of the Channel Four series, GBH, before commenting extensively next month. To be sure, the series went off to a very promising start. The scene between the corrupt Labour leader and the headmaster of the Special School, in which the latter is filled with amusement and indignation at the former's audacity in calling himself a socialist, is one of those brilliant televisual moments that are shown all too rarely. We look forward to seeing how the plot develops and concludes. Here are two predictions (written in early June):

1. As the series goes on it will become harder and harder to tell the difference between the left-wing gangsters on GBH and the right-wingers shown on Dispatches.
2. There will be reference made to the real Socialist Party.

Steve Coleman

The Eileen Critchley Show (1991)

It turns out that Channel 4 is currently repeating Alan Bleasdale's drama GBH on its More4 channel. Best known for his earlier TV drama Boys From The Blackstuff, which by common consent is considered one of the most important and best loved dramas in the history of British television, Bleasdale was lauded and condemned in equal measure for GBH because so many people thought it was little more than a knockabout attack on the local politics of his hometown, Liverpool, and the then Militant Tendency's domination of its Labour council. Reproduced below is a review of the drama that appeared in the Socialist Standard at the time of its original showing, which delves deeper and goes beyond the notion that Bleasdale was doing little more than writing ten hours of television drama so that he could stick the metaphorical boot into Derek Hatton.

The Off the Telly website carries an interesting article on GBH, as part of a series of articles on Bleasdale and his work.

TV Review From The August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Channel Four hyped it relentlessly as a Great Drama of our times. Militant renamed it BGH: Bleasdale Gets Hatton. Hatton himself went on Channel Four's Right To Reply to say that Michael Murray must have been based on him because the fictional character was a bullying, corrupt council leader. The Right wing objected because the series portrayed MI5 as being a shower of devious criminals - heaven forbid the thought. The SWP, who rarely comprehend anything that was not written by a dead Russian, denounced Bleasdale as a brown-nose who sold out to the ruling class. GBH (C4, Wednesdays and Sundays) seems to have upset them all. So does all great drama.

What was GBH about? Taken literally, it was implausible nonsense. Whole cities are not thrown into chaos by half a dozen or so Equity ruffians; Good and Evil rarely take on such vivid personal realisations as Murray and Nelson; even corrupt Labour leaders have more political know-how than Murray was shown as having. As fictional political history the series was drivel. Sadly, it is as fictional political history (FPH) that most lefties watched it and switched off in disgust. GBH was about power. It was about why people lust for political leadership, what they do with it, and how, after all the panting after it and delusion of luxuriating in it, most politicians come to discover that they do not really have it. Politicians are tools of power. The French professor, Maximilien Rubel, once wrote a letter to the Socialist Standard saying that the people who are our rulers are paranoid megalamaniacs who cannot be trusted. Maybe so, maybe not - certainly, even the most balanced of leaders must act like a madman if they are to dance to the cacophony of the profit system. Michael Murray, abused and beaten by power, became a political abuser and beater. It was the only way he knew. The political was personal. The brilliance of Bleasdale's writing was that Murray, the hateful petty tyrant, was so much more than that. He was more even than a comical, power-hungry stooge; a modern Chaplinesque Great Dictator. Murray was a man with whom we empathised. His was a world of the used and the users; he had been used and now he tried to use others. His world was our world: the world of human exploitation on every level.

Jim Nelson, Michael Palin's romantic hero of the series, was a man afraid and therefore strong because he understood - or began to do so - his fear. He spoke more than once of how in our society the poison is seeping down. The poison in question is the poison of power-madness and obsessive exploitation. The simplification that evil emanates from Tory bastards may have satisfied simple-minded rebels a decade ago, but now it is clearer to see just how the human perversions of power-madness are coming from all directions, including those movements which pose as being for the people. In short, the fleas from the Tory dog have rubbed off on to the Labour poodles who can only fight the Tories by being like Tories. As for Militant, it is infiltrating amongst the fleas, only able to get power by being more loathsome than the rest. They are playing the same game.

The message of GBH is that if you try to beat the Devil by dressing up as Satan you end up not being able to tell who is who. Murray thought he was being manipulated by Trots when he was really being used by MI5. The only reason he couldn't tell the difference is because there wasn't any. MI5 broke Murray. Bleasdale overstated the real power of the state to intervene in electoral politics. But then this was not FPH. What he got right was the power of the decent many to resist the arrogant few. That is one of the most hopeful political lessons; it must be, for workers are the many and the force against us is the very, very few. The scene in the final episode when the "decent workers", as the caricature portrayed them, stopped the "ignorant little gobshites", as the script referred to the thuggish Trots, from dictating to the majority was an inspiring moment. At that meeting leadership collapsed and illusory power was no shield: Murray wept and the boys who had only ever read one book and knew how to shout slogans were shown that democracy is bigger than them.

But wait a minute. Where was that great scene taking place? In the Labour Party hall. What was a bloke of principle and courage doing in that old wreck of a political whore-house? Here we see Bleasdale the faithful Labourite overcoming the writer of insight. On one level GBH was a series about why Labour should expel Militant. We socialists could not care less if they expel them or sleep with them or form a coalition with the Monster Raving Loonies, but if that is the political message which was being offered to us, then when are we to see the series about hypocritical, compromising, well-bribed Labour "moderates" who do not need to be crushed by MI5 because they are safe? You do not need state conspiracies to neutralise Neil Kinnock or Tony Blair - they come ready-neutered.

GBH will be talked about for a long time to come. It should be. Both Robert Lindsay (Michael Murray) and Michael Palin (Jim Nelson) performed in ways that we will not see again soon. The wit of the writing was a model of classical characterisation and symbolic plotting. It made us think, even though we were not all thinking the same thing. GBH was about a horrible corrupt country - "a cold land" - where the opposition was dirty and the "intelligence" people filthy and all of us either in it or against it.

Steve Coleman

Further Reading:
From the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard
Leftist Wonderland: Militant in Liverpool