Bob Ainsworth: can an ex-Trot be a credible defence secretary?
Posted on Friday 31 July, 2009
Filed Under The left
AS A former staff journalist on Socialist Worker, Peter Hitchens really should think twice before repeatedly banging on about the one-time Trotskyist affiliations of a fair few New Labour cabinet ministers.
Does the expression ‘spent conviction within the meaning of the rehabilitation of offenders act’ really have no meaning to him?
Yes, yes. We all know by now that Alistair Darling sold Black Dwarf outside Edinburgh Waverley station, Alan Milburn worked in a Tyneside leftie bookshop nicknamed Haze of Dope, and Stephen Byers spent a stint as a Millie.
The question is, does the brand of politics these people identified with decades ago connect in any way to their current praxis? Hitchens Minor simply asserts this to be the case:
None of them, in my view, has given up the radicalism of the past. They have simply discovered that they can use Parliament to achieve a revolution they once thought would need barricades and red flags.
Evidence?
And these, I stress, are only the ones we know about. Who knows how many others – MPs, Ministers, civil servants, judges, BBC executives, even Bishops – still treasure revolutionary aims?
OK Peter, name three policies outlined in the Transitional Progamme – and don’t you dare tell me they didn’t make you read in when you were in the International Socialists – that have been enacted by New Labour in office since 1997? Nationalising a couple of banks to bail out capitalism doesn’t count.
Where exactly does Trotsky advocate cuts in corporation tax financed by scrapping student grants and reductions in benefits for single mothers and the disabled?
Did I miss the pamphlet in which the Old Man demanded the maintenance of Tory anti-union laws and Tory privatisation policies, draconian measures against asylum seekers, increased income inequality, compulsory ID cards in a capitalist state and the renewal of Trident?
Not only did New Labour fail to institute the New Jerusalem, it hasn’t even brought us to the outter suburbs of the greater Tel Aviv conurbation.
Never mind. It did give me quite a chuckle to read that new defence secretary Bob Ainsworth was a candidate member of the Coventry branch of the International Marxist Group in the early 1980s, at a time when I was a fully paid up cadre IMGer.
Technically, the IMG no longer existed at this point. Internally we were known as the Socialist League; externally, we were supporters of the newspaper Socialist Action. But such small print is for Trot trainspotters only, I guess. But let Peter continue:
I can recall members of the International Marxist Group yelling ‘Victory to the IRA!’ on student demonstrations. So I was interested to see stories that the latest Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, was a ‘candidate member’ (they didn’t let just anyone in) of the IMG in 1982 and 1983, when he was 30 years old, not a student.
No, we didn’t just let anyone in. It was a standing joke on the far left that you actually had to pass an exam in Marxist theory before you were allowed to sign up, although this may be an urban myth. The stipulation was certainly not in place at the time I joined.
Nevertheless, the candidate system operated for a purpose, which was to determine an applicant’s degree of political commitment and suitability for membership of a revolutionary organisation.
To become a candidate member was in itself a conscious decision, and the term had specific meaning. To use the phrase we used at the time, candidate membership conferred ‘all of the duties but none of the rights’ enjoyed by full members.
Yes, you had to sell the paper. Yes, you had to pay a fair chunk of your income in dues. And yes, you had to go to endless bloody meetings, even though you got only an indicative vote.
Now, I wasn’t based in Coventry and do not recall meeting Ainsworth at the time. I have no idea of the extent of his involvement. But the insistence on the part of his office that he simply attended a couple of IMG meetings at the invitation of a mate does not ring true. That would have made him at best a close contact, and would not even have qualified him as a sympathiser.
I guess it is even possible that we failed him after his spell as a candidate. We were an organisation with a certain rigour and panache, and neither are qualities that Ainsworth exudes in bucketloads.
The question is, does a tangential brush with the British section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International disqualify someone from being defence secretary? There are any number of reasons to doubt his suitability for the post, as the man himself admits, but having been a bit of a leftie a quarter of a century ago does not strike me as one of them. There are no indications whatsoever that Ainsworth still clings to one iota of whatever he once may or may not have believed in.
Hitchens’ own progression from Cliffite to Conservative parliamentary wannabe and from there to the further shores of rightism beyond the Tory Party illustrate quite clearly that there is no correlation whatsoever between a youthful paper seller and a mature reactionary, even if they are biologically speaking one and the same person.
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40 Responses to “Bob Ainsworth: can an ex-Trot be a credible defence secretary?”
“We all know by now that Alistair Darling sold Red Dwarf outside Edinburgh Waverley station”
you’re meaning Black Dwarf, or?
Exactamundo. My bad.
Someone should tell Hitchens that the Cold War ended 20 years ago and this kind of communist indoctrination, infiltration, subversion talk with it. Old habits die hard and I think the one Hitchens has retained from his radical days of sniffing out the heretic among the party faithful ought to be put to sleep.
The former Red who came to his senses, realized the pernicious error of his old allegiance and denounced his former comrades became a popular role during the 1950s (Ward Churchill as one of the most prominent figures of the type) and the American scene still has a few New Left turncoats wandering from venue to venue like old, famous no more comedians still retailing their tired routine before an elderly Republican audience exercising the Red hating passion of their own youth (David Horowitz as an example). I dare say Hitchens has the same function within the pages of the Mail although some of the readership must pause and wonder at his references to minor players in an almost totally forgotten war.
Peter Hitchens, as ‘Clockback’, has been attempting to ensure this detail remains in Ainsworth’s Wikipedia article over nearly a fortnight with no success at all, but with a high level of rather curious obsessiveness.
In a nutshell, he takes a false determinist line in thinking gay and women’s rights, or what he claims are attacks on ‘the family’, are offshoots of the Fourth International’s fragments. I seem to remember Militant’s attitude on the former was somewhat backward before Section 28 and the frustration of leading feminists with the various groups are a matter of record.
So, what you’re saying is that the Labour Party have all grown up?
Why haven’t you? ;o)
Mum, aren’t clowns supposed to be funny?
All I can say is that Bob Ainsworth must be a nastier piece of work than I thought he was, if he knows why he shouldn’t be in charge of an army sending working class boys (and girls) out to be killed.
Wikipedia has become the venue of choice for the modern version of Stalinist style history re-writing with one party airbrushing people out of old photos and their opponent airbrushing them back in. So I guess Hitchens has stayed true to his conception of Trotsky’s party.
Trotsky (as you know) founded the Red Army so a former member of the 4th International has no principled objection to ‘an army sending working class boys (and girls) out to be killed.’
Perhaps Ainsworth has a secret ambition to relive the Old Man’s glory days during the Civil War. Prepare the armoured train for a journey through Afghanistan rallying the troops.
FT
I like that! Trotsky’s Red Army vs Ainsworth’s British Army … wish I’d have thought of the gag myself!
Yeh, fellow traveller, because it’s exactly the same isn’t it, the Red Army going to a country thousands of miles away in the interests of imperialism. Dickhead.
The Red Army invading Afghanistan could never happen? In the interest of what, exactly?
Besides I speculated upon Mr Ainsworth’s possible self-delusion about his role not about the objective situation. Y’know, a Walter Mitty type Midlander imagining himself finally occupying his political hero’s boots.
Now crawl back under your rock.
They say the human body completely renews itself every seven years.
Hitchens has probably retained the urge to sniff out and extirpate heresy from those days. But an early youthful brush with a left group hardly says much about what they do or think more recently. In fact, an early left reputation sometimes even gives cover for a much more right-wing profile in the present.
There is a touch of 1950s Red Scare about Hitchens as well. People who had been in the American CP for a few years, typically in the 1930s, would be hauled before a committee 20 or so years later to recant and name names, and be blacklisted or worse if they did not. If foreign-born, they risked deportation.
I have to say that Mr Ainsworth makes a very unconvincing Strelnikov.
Peter Hitchens was in the International Socialists for the best part of a decade Mark, hardly an ‘early youthful brush’!
Must admit, I like Peter. He’s daft as a brush of course, but that’s just part of his olde-worlde charm.
His new book is most enjoyable, by the way, and has a potted account of Peter’s Trot days. I might knock out a review if Dave doesn’t beat me to it, or even if he does.
Splinty
Yeah, he seemed oddly OK the only time I met him.
All those ex-trots have brought something into the Labour Party anyway. A good dose of their version of democratic centralism. Apart from that I can’t think of too much else. I guess it’s about as much as Peter Hitchens took into journalism.
“Did I miss the pamphlet in which the Old Man demanded the maintenance of Tory anti-union laws and Tory privatisation policies, draconian measures against asylum seekers, increased income inequality, compulsory ID cards in a capitalist state and the renewal of Trident?”
Yeah. So why are you still a memeber of the Labour Party?
“Did I miss the pamphlet in which the Old Man demanded the maintenance of Tory anti-union laws and Tory privatisation policies, draconian measures against asylum seekers, increased income inequality, compulsory ID cards in a capitalist state and the renewal of Trident?”
Yeah. So why are you still a member of the Labour Party?
You know, call me ‘Thicky Uk’ but I always thought that a stint in one of these far Left groups was a necessary rite of passage for those aspiring to membership of the executive commitee of the Bourgeoisie. Y’know all that bossing about, control freakery, back stabbing and what have you. Not to mention pissing off the Working Class.
The perfact background for these ‘New Labour’ specimens.
BTW does anyone know how many of these erstwhile Trots went into big business?
Oh, and how many are now on the Conservative benches?
Now that would be fascinating! And very illuminating…
Gosh, he was in that long?
It may be then that it had some lasting influence on his development, even if it fills him with revulsion now. Actually, not only does a background in a left group not immunise you against bourgeois ideology, but it might even be a stepping stone towards embracing it. So Hitchens might have gone from hostility to “actually existing socialism” in the IS, to hostility to socialism, period.
There is also a CP version of the phenomenon. John Reid went from being a pro-Soviet CP member to a pro-American New Labourite. Substituting one superpower allegiance for another, it would appear.
As you say Dave, being a Candidate member was more than turning up at a couple of meetings.
When I was in the IMG proper in the 1970s – I joined mid-decade – we had had to gone through six months of being a Candidate. During which time we had to go through a series of lectures in basic Marxism – preparing our own brief summaries of classics like Lenin’s Imperialism. And get some basic training on activist stuff, like writing simple leaflets. This was while I was still in London so these courses were held in Pentonville Road. That’s on top of all the other activities you had to do. As you note.
I did know the Coventry IMG (I left the IMG in the late 1970s when I was at Warwick – which is in Coventry as everyone knows). In fact our student cell meet up with comrades there reguarly. When I subsequently lived a number of years in Leamington Spa and was actiive in LARAFC we regularly saw them and co-operated with them. One, a teacher, is still active on the left of the NUT (or so the local NUT President tells me). They were a pretty serious decent lot. I cannot imagine you could have got to be a Candidate with them that easily.
As for the rest: what a joy it is to see these bastards drown in misery.
Just want to clarify, incase anyone thinks I’m insensitive to the fate of Afghani workers and peasants, I don’t think killing them is very nice either.
Er, Fellow Traveller, you referred to Trotsky and the Red Army. Tell me brainiac, what year did Trotsky die and what year did the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan take place?
Just for the record, my recollection is that Ainsworth was a member (“supporter”)of the Militant Tendency in Cov in the 1970′s and a mate of their industrial organiser Bill Mullins. I always assumed that, like Mullins, he worked in the car industry, but I may be wrong.
Of course, he’s not the most right-wing ex-Trot (or ex-Stalinist): think Roger Rosewell, or Gary Bushell. A BNP’er near me in Brum, one Dave Gardiner, is a former SWP’er who also associated with the Class War outfit for a while. But, in fairness, he was never a prominant SWP’er and I think has mental health issues (he’s also, according to the leaked BNP membership list, a pagan…)
Hitchens doesn’t seem to recognise the possibility that people change. If Darling was flogging Black Dwarf well back in the last century, he must really be pushing the same line now in a more covert way. And so on.
No. Darling went to an expensive school but was something of a champagne socialist in his youth, probably mouthing the fashionable slogans of the time. Then he got on the council, then he got into parliament, found that actually being a socialist will obstruct your personal ambitions, and the rest is history. He wanted to get ahead in the existing system. He may indeed have picked up control freakery from his “radical past”, but also saw that the IMG wasn’t going to bring about revolution but continuing in it might be bad for his career.
Student politics are a training ground in the ways of politicians, rather than important in themselves. I suspect that a youthful entanglement with a “revolutionary” group has played a rather similar role in the lives of some of these people.
Maybe Hitchens paranoia against these Trots is a cover for his own Marxist agenda. Maybe he believes that only far right policies can hasten the demise of capitalism!
Peter won’t thank me for saying this, but he still has a very broad SWP streak in him. Not in his concrete opinions, but certainly in his style, which is perhaps something the ex-revolutionaries have in common. Ainsworth as a Millie makes a bit more sense, he does have that plodding style. Perhaps Dave Nellist might remember.
The thing that I find interesting about Peter is that he’s still a very sharp observer and capable of some great political criticism – some time back he did a fantastic pen-portrait of Jack Straw that rings absolutely true. But this is floating about in a sea of greatly entertaining wingnuttery.
Still, I’d rather have him than the likes of Jane Ashworth or Alan (Not The Minister) Johnson, who’ve ended up on the wilder fringes of Ziontology and Decentism.
“Still, I’d rather have him (Peter Hitchens -JD) than the likes of Jane Ashworth or Alan (Not The Minister) Johnson, who’ve ended up on the wilder fringes of Ziontology and Decentism.”
Splintered: you’re either mad, bad or so anti-”Zionist” that your brain’s addled and you see the Jewish state (made up of asylum seekers from the greatest persecution the world has ever seen) as the main problem in the world today. You are a perfect example of why so many left-wing Jews see the mainstream “left” as their enemies – because you *are*.
Lord preserve us from goyishe “friends of Israel”. Perhaps Jim could explain why, at every meeting on the Middle East I attend in London, all the Jewish speakers are critical of Israel, and all the AWL speakers accuse the Jews of being antisemitic. Not to mention Jim’s ability, using Matgamnite telepathy, to read into my brief comment about his ex-comrades an entire programmatic outlook on the Middle East.
Anyway, readers may be interested in Peter’s latest column. He’s in good form this week.
Tis a funny old world when one time radicals seek political solace and guidance from the Daily Mail.
Never thought I’d see that.
Splintered: “Lord preserve us from goyishe “friends of Israel”. Perhaps Jim could explain why, at every meeting on the Middle East I attend in London, all the Jewish speakers are critical of Israel, and all the AWL speakers accuse the Jews of being antisemitic. Not to mention Jim’s ability, using Matgamnite telepathy, to read into my brief comment about his ex-comrades an entire programmatic outlook on the Middle East.”
Splintered: your
enthusiasm for Peter Hitchens, and hatred of Jane Ashworth, is a good starting point. It suggests a lack of basic left-wing sympathies, and common ground with traditional (Richard Ingrams/PaulFoot)English – public school anti-semitism, of the type adopted by the SLL/WRP, Galloway/Respect and high-pitched, posh contributors to “Any Answers” most weeks. It’s a version of “who are these common, working class Jews” who have displaced our nice Arab friends in Palestine – an attitude still prevalent in the Foreign office.
An Ex-Trot can be a credible Cabinet minister, but a guy with a toothbrush moustache can’t!
If Jim adduces that I have an English public school background, he is sorely mistaken. And I fail to see what my personal fondness (not political agreement) with Peter Hitchens (who is of Jewish descent, and a defender of Israel) and my contempt for Jane Ashworth has to do with the price of Jaffa oranges.
Besides, all the leftwing Jews I know are always moaning to me about how they keep being abused as antisemites by goyishe AWL members. I don’t know what psychodrama Sean and his mates are enacting by performing hasbara for a squalid Middle Eastern regime, but it doesn’t qualify them to set themselves up as defenders of the Jewish people.
To use a good old Yiddish phrase, gay kakn afn yam.
“Besides, all the leftwing Jews I know are always moaning to me about how they keep being abused as antisemites by goyishe AWL members. ”
Can you give specific examples of who was abused as antisemites. What was it they said ?
Splintered: learn to read. I did *not* call you a public schoolboy: I said you shared the classic Ingrams/Foot/Dayell public school attitude towards Jews. Peter Hitchens’ Jewish background is of no more relevance to this discussion as would be (say) Tony Cliff’s.
Just answer the question that Bennett asks: who, exactly has been abused by the AWL as an “anti-semite” (who *isn’t* an anti-semite? So that excludes Atzmon for a start). I await your considered reply.
Actually I thought the header should be can an ex trot be a competant and objective journalist.
But working for the Daily Wail answers that question before it is asked.
GW
There has always been a nasty and virulant strain of antisemitism withing the british nobs class of gentlemen’s club gargoyles…
“After all, there had been a great deal of scepticism in the press, and more than a few MPs had expressed doubts about the composition of the panel – no military or legal experts, two Jewish historians thought to have been in favour of the war and a token woman, Baroness Prashar, whom few people had hitherto heard of.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/richard-ingrams/richard-ingramsrsquos-week-tony-blairs-reputation–is-safe-from-destruction-1765907.html
Fellow Traveller, where exactly did Ward Churchill realize the pernicious error of his old allegiance and denounce his former comrades? Ward Churchill, nemesis of the Horowitz academic neo-cons and author of the Cointelpro Papers?