Making fans for Nigel? (2022)

Book Review from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

One Party After Another. By Michael Crick. Simon & Schuster. 2022. £25

Ex-Newsnight journalist Michael Crick has something of a reputation as a hatchet-job specialist, though this book is more well-rounded than expected. It is helped by the fact that Crick is a good writer and so the book is an entertaining read, well-researched and salacious perhaps in equal measure. He portrays Nigel Farage as ‘the great disrupter’ and as the arch-UK populist of his time, and there can be little doubt about that aspect of Farage’s life.

Crick argues that Farage was like this from the outset, from his apparent teenage dalliance while at Dulwich College with the National Front, straight to his high-octane career as a City metals commodity trader (bypassing university, which never interested him). It was the decision in 1990 by the then Conservative government to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) that impelled Farage to take politics seriously – he had previously been a sometime member of the Tory Party but had also on one occasion voted Green.

Joining the Anti-Federalist League set up by Dr Alan Sked, he was eventually to take it over – pretty ruthlessly according to Crick – and turn it into what became UKIP. Crick does a good job of chronicling the turbulence at the centre of Farage’s life since (the multiple affairs, the serious drinking culture, the near-death experiences including the plane crash on election day in 2010) which has mirrored in some ways the turbulence of his political career. Hence the title One Party After Another – Farage has been UKIP leader and then resigned only to return so many times it is genuinely difficult to keep count, and of course then went on to form the Brexit Party and latterly Reform UK. He is portrayed as a veritable ‘force of nature’ who bizarrely couples a genuine talent for communication with a profound difficulty in working with other people.

His ultimate legacy is Brexit of course, though while Crick doesn’t underplay the role of Johnson, Gove, Cummings and their ilk in this, he does rather underplay the role of the tabloid press, who arguably enjoyed their last hurrah in promoting the greatest irrelevance ever purveyed to the British working class. And all with the help of arriviste businessmen and hedge fund managers who bankrolled the operation both before and after the 2016 referendum. Crick outlines how this campaign then paved the way for the 2019 General Election, the collapse of Labour’s ‘Red Wall’ and the eventual UK withdrawal from the EU. Crick says:

‘For a hundred years the Labour Party had depended on class loyalty. People voted Labour because they’d always voted Labour, and their families and friends all voted Labour too… In the 2016 referendum, Labour officially urged people to vote Remain, yet in hundreds of traditional working-class Labour seats, especially in the Midlands and the North, Labour supporters and trade unionists voted emphatically to leave the EU. The 2016 referendum burst the rising dam of resentment in such places that Labour no longer delivered for poor people like them with insecure, lowly paid jobs, and that under Blair, Miliband and Corbyn, Labour had become just another London party for wealthy middle-class types who’d gone to university’ (p.547).

In some ways, it’s difficult to disagree and Farage’s Brexit Party rubbed salt in this wound. But for what? Crick argues that part of Farage’s legacy is that it may be difficult for the Labour Party to ever form a government on its own again. But as people are now discovering with a likely pending recession (according to the Bank of England) and because Brexit has helped propel price rises to their greatest rate in decades, Brexit was just another illusion as a supposed solution to people’s problems. In fact, not only wasn’t it the answer, it wasn’t even asking the right question.

Farage was a key player in creating one of the biggest political apparitions of the last century and as time passes this is likely to become clearer. As a result, what seems like a career that had a massive impact now (Crick rates him as one of the five most significant political leaders of the last 50 years) might look rather differently when those voters in the Red Wall seats notice their lives haven’t actually changed for the better after all. Meanwhile, both UKIP and Reform UK have struggled to find a new purpose and given the political trajectories of both Northern Ireland and Scotland currently, it might not be too long before one of the greatest political ironies of all time emerges when UKIP has to rename itself ‘EWIP’.

Farage is currently marooned at GB News, which ever more seems to exist as being purely and simply his very own ‘news’ channel. Here he continues his rather repulsive dalliance with fellow egomaniac Donald Trump together with his campaign against men in little boats crossing the channel at great peril, effectively an unwanted latter-day Dunkirk without white faces. A man of the people until the end, clearly.

DAP

Arthur Scargill (1985)

Book Review from the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Arthur Scargill and the Miners by Michael Crick (Penguin, £2.50)

Great men do not make history. Churchill did not win the last war — for most of it he was too drunk to find his way to a map of Europe, let alone to the scene of the action. At most, individual men or women play exceptional roles which explicable combinations of social factors have created. To see the miners' strike as a contest between Arthur Scargill and The Establishment (an analysis presented at times by both media hacks and Leftist leader-worshippers) is to personalise an historical process which cannot be comprehended through the biographical microscope. In order to understand the strike it is far less important to know about Arthur Scargill (whom the media has attacked with an obsessive hostility) than it is to comprehend the workings of the capitalist social system, the nature of which the media-producers would be too ignorant to tell the truth about, even if they had a will to.

The first weakness of Michael Crick's Arthur Scargill and the Miners (Penguin. £2.50) is its concern to explain the history of industrial relations in the coal mining industry, and particularly the present miners' strike, in terms of the leading characters in the NUM. Biographical accounts of contemporary "political celebrities" can be enlightening — and Crick's portrayal of Scargill is well above the standards of some tabloid-style mini-biographies-for-the-proles — but should not be confused with the study of the social events within which "great men" are but small parts.

What Crick tells his readers about Scargill is sometimes surprising. We are informed that at the age of thirteen he read Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists but, as a supporter of import controls, we can only conclude that he did not accept Owen's correct pronouncement that capitalist tariff arrangements are no concern of the working class. At the same age he read Jack London's The Iron Heel and is quoted as saying that London was the main influence in his becoming a "socialist''. That he is not a socialist is clear from other information provided by Crick. His father is a member of the Communist Party and is. according to Scargill, on its pro-Russian side. Scargill claims to be a Marxist like his father — although "now he rarely describes himself as such" (p.136). His mother was a devout Christian and it would seem that Scargill's "Marxism" is not of the sort which regards religion as the opium of the people, for "Scargill says he is a Christian ..." (p. 142). Perhaps the Bishop of Durham will soon be joining the Christian Marxist Movement and the Pope will be signing up with the Secular Society. In 1955 Scargill tried to join the Labour Party in Barnsley, but could not get a reply after writing twice. He joined the Young Communist League the following year, and when the denunciation of Stalin became fashionable found it necessary to defend the old dictator because "he did play a valuable part during World War Two".

In the early 1960s Scargill left the YCL. but it is not clear precisely why. In one interview quoted by Crick, given by Scargill to John Mortimer, he "objected to the moving of Stalin's body outside the mausoleum and changing the name of Stalingrad. It would be like us trying to pretend Churchill never existed. It was distorting history." Other reasons for his departure from the ranks of British Stalinism were that he objected to the Russian government not allowing dissidents to leave the country and that he was not happy with the strict party discipline of the CP youth section. We are told that "Cuba seems to come nearest to Scargill's idea of a model socialist state" and Scargill is quoted as saying that Cuba is "a 100 per cent improvement on what you have in the Soviet Union" (New Left Review, July/August 1975. p.33). In fact. Scargill's conception of socialism is state capitalism: "all the means of production would be brought into public state ownership" (p. 141; this is Crick s summary of what he thinks is Scargill's view). The wages system would still exist in the "Socialist Britain" envisaged by Arthur Scargill: "the wages of workers — mineworkers or any other section of the working class would be determined on the basis of discussion within the central system" (BBC2. Futures, 30 September 1982).

Arthur Scargill is not a socialist — at the moment — but he does have more than a little experience and understanding of the class struggle. He recognises that class war is inescapable within capitalism: regarding the successful mass picket of Saltley Gate in 1972 he wrote. "We took the view that we were in a class war. We were not playing cricket on the village green, like they did in '26." He realises that in strikes "We had to declare war on them, and the only way we could declare war was to attack the vulnerable points . . . " (Quoted from the New Left Review article, cited above). He is also perceptive enough to realise that schemes for so-called workers' control, often advocated by the Left, should be opposed by workers:

I reject the argument that you can have some kind of workers' control within capitalism What you can have is class collaboration within capitalism. Once we've put workers on the boards they become bureaucrats . . . those who actually sit on the boards of directors . . .  begin to think with a completely different outlook from when they were workers' representatives (Marxism Today, April 1981.)

This contrasts with Scargill's predecessor as NUM President, Joe (now Lord) Gormley, of whom Crick writes that he "loved meeting and doing deals with Prime Ministers Conservative or Labour — or with Sir Derek Ezra, the Coal Board chairman. Often the NUM Executive was excluded altogether from negotiations with the government as Gormley stitched up some deal at Number 10, or at Hobart House, the Coal Board headquarters" (p.71). In short. Gormley was a typically undemocratic leader — but we do not recall the Fleet Street hypocrites crying for NUM ballots when the Lord-to-be was collaborating with the bosses behind his members' backs. The problem for Scargill if we accept that he recognises the inevitable antagonism between classes in society and is opposed to collaborating with the master class — is that he must face up to the revolutionary struggle beyond trade unionism which the media accuses him of wanting to further, but we suspect he does not yet comprehend.

Crick's book refers repeatedly and tediously to divisions in the NUM between the Left and the Right. He is not to be blamed for using such sterile terminology, but socialists are bound to point out that such political cliches convey little about ideas. Sadly, it is characteristic of the journalistic analysis of society to see social movements in terms of political intrigue at the top: leader-watching. It would have been more useful for Crick to consider why various ideas have arisen among workers at different times — to realise that the militancy of many miners during the present strike has been a response to priorities imposed by capitalism and cannot be understood by reading the minute books of NUM committees. Indeed, the pages of the book dealing with the history of trade unionism in Nottinghamshire (Spencerism, the Tory miner and the economic reasons for the class collaboration of the miners in that area) are the best in the book (pp. 113-18). It is a pity that Crick's need to publish a media story prevented him from pursuing the kind of serious analysis presented on these pages.

In 1982 Scargill stood as NUM President on a manifesto declaring unequivocally that he would support the implementation of national NUM policy to strike against pit closures; he won 138,803 votes — his nearest rival receiving 34,075 votes, and the other three contenders collecting between them less of the votes than those cast for Scargill. To explain the miners' strike in terms of Scargill undemocratically hoodwinking the NUM membership is both facile and not easily demonstrable Nonetheless, the recorded statement by Jack Taylor, President of the Yorkshire Area, that "I will tell you what worries me about ballots .  . . We don't really trust you" (NUM Special Conference Report, 19 April 1984) is indicative of an arrogant vanguardism on the Left from which the leadership of the NUM is by no means immune. (The "you" in question was not all NUM members, but just the Nottinghamshire ones.)

Scargill and the Miners is a book about a man who is a leader. The miners, mentioned in the title, are hardly discussed in the text. Crick's outlook is symptomatic of the journalistic leader-vision which blocks up the means of mass communication in society today, and you have seen in this article most of what is worth reading in the book (but for pages 113-8. which you can read in the library). Send the £2.50 to the Socialist Party instead — we can use it to print some real analysis.

Steve Coleman

Trotskyism (1984)

Book Review from the September 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Militant, Michael Crick (Faber & Faber, 1984)

Much of this book deals with the history of the Militant Tendency from its stumbling beginnings in the various Trotskyist organisations (whose remains have littered the fringes of the Labour movement for fifty years) to its present, influential role in Labour's left wing.

Entrism is discussed as a specifically Trotskyist tactic, but one interpreted in as many different ways as there are Trotskyist organisations. Militant have developed a peculiar brand called Deep Entrism, a modified version of the "waiting for Lefty" entrism whereby they join a party at a time of social and political upheaval in order to be at the forefront of the revolution when the right moment comes.

Michael Crick notes (page 25) that "it is particularly ironic that three of the main leaders of the recent campaign against Militant should have all incurred the wrath of party officials at one time or another: Denis Healey—the Communist infiltrator of the 1930s; Jim Mortimer—member of a proscribed organisation; and, above all, Michael Foot". He also finds it interesting that "rebels should so easily become leaders" (page 25), but it comes as no surprise to socialists or anyone else who sees the futility of workers placing their trust in leaders of any kind. The argument against leadership is eloquently (if unintentionally) stated throughout the book.

The chapters relating to the organisational manoeuvrings of the leadership, Militant and other groupings in the Labour Party will be regarded by some as a central and important feature of the book. In fact, it borders on the irrelevant. The book however is worth reading as an outline of the history and nature of Trotskyist organisations. The cult of leadership is demonstrated by looking at the various Trotskyist organisations, which seem to have been dominated by only three or four individuals over the past half century.

Allied to this question of leadership, the book examines the organisational form taken by all such parties, the form of democratic centralism. Nominally the leadership is elected by the members, but an outgoing leadership will propose to a conference the new leadership and central committee by means of a "slate" (or list) of candidates. Members do not vote for individuals but for such a slate and it is rare indeed for an alternative slate to be proposed. This explains the "remarkable continuity of the Militant leadership over the years" (page 105). It should also be noted that this process of a self-perpetuating leadership explains the enormous power and prestige such a leadership has relative to its own organisation.

The organisation of such groups as Militant and all other followers of Bolshevism is certainly centralised, but has little to do with any democratic process.

Crick's book is largely a patchwork of interviews with old acquaintances and colleagues of the Militant leadership, the author's own observations and prejudices and already well-known facts about Militant but there is virtually no new material on the organisation. Much of the information on Ted Grant appears to be intended to reduce argument to personalised ridicule, unfairly depicting Grant as a senile eccentric. It is indicative of the state of the Labour Party that while sections can hold enquiries  into entrist groups or whatever, and spend ". . . in the year leading up to June 1983 four of the Executive's monthly meetings . . .  devoted almost entirely to the issue" (page 200), they cannot find time to seriously examine the nature of capitalism or to reach any conclusion regarding the urgency of socialist revolution.

Militant may sloganise and print radical catchphrases on its front page headlines but is in fact just another reformist organisation which is well suited to the Labour Party. Whether Militant and the Labour Party retain their companionship or not is a matter of complete indifference to workers. The tragedy is that in the eyes of many workers, revolutionary socialism is confused with Trotskyism, Leninism and  Bolshevism. It is an urgent task to remedy this situation and expose the quack remedies not only of Militant, but all those on the political left who distort the meaning of socialism.

Steve England

Further Reading:

Socialist Standard September 2006 - 'Death of a tendency'

Socialist Standard April 1982 - 'Which Way to Socialism: Militant Tendency or SPGB?'