Protesting G20: two unwelcome blasts from the past

Listening to last Thursday’s Today Programme covering the G20 protests, I experienced two waves of unwelcome nostalgia. The first was when, amidst futile attempts to rendezvous with the Brockley Anarchists—or some other such implausibly-named group—the reporter stumbled across an elderly woman selling the Morning Star. She seemed sweetly eccentric at first, but her tone soon modulated into a beleaguered righteousness that I found all too familiar. In the early 1980s, having fled the Labour Party to escape the rising tide of Trotskyism, I became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It’s difficult now to recall my motives for joining. I had a hopeful conviction that, since Marx’s analysis of history was so compelling, the Marxist prescription for the future was probably the best we had. But I also had a romantic notion about commitment to an enduring cause. All my heroes seemed at one time or another to have been party members and somehow, in the absence of an “International Brigade,” this seemed the next best thing.

I sold the Morning Star at rallies and marches, and campaigned for candidates who had no hope of being elected. There was no Spanish Civil War to fight but there were real causes to support, and soon we had found the biggest cause of all: for this was the time of the miners’ strike. I supported the miners—how could I not? These brave and admirable men had stepped into the breach: they were taking the stand we all longed to take. But my genuine commitment was tinged with a sense of hopelessness. This was the wrong fight, at the wrong time, over the wrong issue, against an adversary who had chosen and prepared the ground and was willing to go to almost any lengths to win. It was doomed from the start and most of us realised that from very early on. The BBC’s daily count of returning strikers felt like a grim toll of our mounting battle losses. But the battle united a largely unwilling left in one last heroic march into oblivion: banners flying, cornets blaring, CND badges glinting in the sun.

The aftermath, predictably, brought despair and polarisation. And my faith in Marxism eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions—a fate predicted for capitalism but shared instead by communism as a political force in the world. The CPGB went the same way: split from top to bottom, it couldn’t withstand the blow dealt it by the demise of the Soviet Union. A clutch of splinter groups emerged from the wreckage—and it was one of these, the Communist Party of Scotland, that claimed the allegiance of our elderly Morning Star seller, and gave me my first uneasy sense of déja vu.

Now, I’ve just had a look at the Morning Star website. It includes an interesting little potted history, which features the following sentence: “[The Morning Star] outlived an 18-month ban (1940-41) by a vindictive Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, which was only called off after a grass-roots protest movement involving millions of people.” To which I can only say, "Get real, comrades!" The Daily Worker, as it then was, was banned for supporting the enemy while the country was at war. When Stalin fell out with Hitler, it changed its tune.

The second unwelcome blast from the past came with the names of the two main speakers at the Trafalgar Square rally: Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill. It’s depressing to see that the left hasn’t managed to find more suitable heroes in the quarter century since that great cataclysm. But, in a way, it shows that they’ve remained true to their traditional values—and particularly to the collective ability to suspend disbelief when it comes to inconvenient truths.

Tony Benn is a strange sort of hero. His appalling, self-seeking antics in the 1980s were, in large part, responsible for the Labour Party’s near destruction and subsequent decade of unelectability. If he had won the party leadership, Labour would not exist as a serious force in British politics today. But then, he probably wouldn’t care: he described the 1983 general election, in which the party was crushed and humiliated, as “a great victory for socialism.”

This kind of politics reminds me of the worst traditions of Irish republicanism, preferring comfortable impotence to engagement in the processes that might actually achieve anything. The highest aspiration here is “a sacrifice in every generation.” And all the time we have Benn’s monstrous, never-ending diaries, tidying history into a seamless narrative of his own infallible rightness. There are few more unpleasant experiences than hearing that pompous, self-satisfied voice trashing the reputations of those no longer able to speak for themselves.

Benn and his supporters soon began to use terms like “traitor” and “betrayal” to intimidate and belittle opponents. Arthur Scargill seems unable to open his mouth without uttering those words. His life has been a long struggle against the forces of evil and you’re either with him or against him. In some ways he’s been admirably consistent: he personally berated Kruschev for attempting to discredit Stalin’s legacy, telling him that “you can’t get rid of him by removing his body from the mausoleum.” Fifty years later, his devotion to Uncle Joe is undimmed, and there is a huge overlap in membership between his Socialist Labour Party and the Stalin Society. Somehow, on the left, this is regarded as legitimate: can you imagine the response a Hitler Society would provoke?

No doubt they’ll call me a traitor. I'd gladly accept the compliment.