Reviews

Arthur Aughey reviews A Floating Commonwealth: Politics, Culture and Technology on Britain’s Atlantic Coast, 1860-1930 by Christopher Harvie.

(Oxford 2008, 319pp +xii)

G M Trevelyan once described social history as ‘history with the politics left out’. Christopher Harvie’s A Floating Commonwealth could be described as British history with England left out. Or to put that more accurately, British history with London left out, for Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester get their proper due in this story of the industrial, commercial but above all, intellectual, intercourse across the Irish Sea and its Atlantic connections through the North and St George’s Channels. In the ecumenical spirit in which Harvie writes, where the British Isles has become (p31) ‘These Islands’ (which would probably mean, as Terence Brown observed, that when Harvie is in Tuebingen he should properly call them ‘Those Islands’) the possessive ‘Irish’ should become, I suppose, ‘Our’. His extra-metropolitan focus does a great service and helps us to see the country as others, outside London, saw it. This sensitivity to the historical texture, vibrancy, energy, creativity and significance of the provincial world is Harvie’s great contribution to historical study.

Andrew Blick reviews A Question of Honour: Inside New Labour and the true story of the cash for peerages scandal by Lord Micahel Levy.

(Lord Michael Levy, A Question of Honour, Simon and Schuster, 2008, 320pp)

Late in 1973, a record called ‘My Coo-Ca-Choo' entered the UK singles charts. It was credited to the glam-rock singer Alvin Stardust; but customers who thought it was Stardust singing on the recording were being had. The voice belonged to Peter Shelley, a musician with a small share in label which released it, Magnet. The main man behind Magnet was Michael Levy. He excuses the stunt on the grounds that it was ‘fairly standard industry practice at the time.'

This book is the latest in a string of insider accounts of the Blair inner circle. It charts the progress of Levy from a humble background, becoming a chartered account, then music business magnate and finally Peer, and tennis playing partner to and ‘Personal Envoy to the Middle East' for Tony Blair. Most famously Levy was chief fund raiser to Blair, popularly known as ‘Lord cashpoint'. This memoir covers familiar ground such as the internal tensions at No.10 and disputes between Blair and Gordon Brown, adding some interesting anecdotes.

Though it deals with other issues, understandably the publishers have billed it as ‘the true story of the cash for peerages scandal'. Levy was at the centre of a police investigation which was triggered when the press learned that a number of individuals who had provided undeclared loans to the Labour Party to fight the 2005 General Election and had subsequently been proposed for peerages, which were queried by the House of Lords Appointments Commission in November 2005. After a complaint in March 2006, an inquiry began into whether an attempt had been made to confer peerages in contravention of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. The investigation was later broadened to include possible violation of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 and perversion of the course of justice. All three major parties were under investigation. Ultimately in 2007 the Crown Prosecution Service determined that it would not bring forward any criminal proceedings, but not before Levy was arrested twice (along with three others); 90 individuals were questioned including Blair; and immense and deserved negative publicity was generated about the way parties and senior politicians do business.

John Palmer reviews What's Wrong With the European Union and How to Fix it by Simon Hix.

(Hix, 2008, Polity Press, 228pp)

In the midst of what has been a largely introverted - even turgidly morbid - debate about the future of the European Union following, the "No" vote outcome in Ireland's referendum on the EU Lisbon Treaty, the publication of a book which grapples with just why voter malaise with the EU has become such a problem is a healthy antidote. What's Wrong with the European Union and How to Fix it by Professor Simon Hix of the London School of Economics challenges much conventional wisdom by insisting that the EU suffers from too little politics - not too much.

At the heart of Hix's analysis is a conviction that it is long overdue for the peoples of the EU to be given a far greater voice in shaping the political future of the Union and the political character of its leadership. Hix believes that with - or without - the Lisbon Treaty - there should be far greater and more transparent choice about who should become the next President of the European Commission - the key executive body of the EU. This - he rightly believes - will encourage the political parties to openly contest each other's programmes for handling the current economic, social, environmental and other challenges facing the Europe in an ever more inter-dependent world.

Arthur Aughey reviews Imagined Nation: England After Britain by Mark Perryman.

(Perryman, Lawrence & Wishart, April 2008, 248pp)

This book, inspired by Billy Bragg’s The Progressive Patriot, is another contribution to the contemporary Condition of England Question. The editor has assembled a good company of contributors, some familiar, some celebrated, and some less well-known, whose essays, individually and collectively, are worthy of serious reflection. This review will concentrate mainly on the collective spirit albeit with reference to individual authors. Those who have been following the debate will be familiar with not only the arguments but with the tone. Nor will they be surprised that the energy comes from those on the left rather than the right.

First, there is the call for the English to re-imagine a strong national consciousness (to recover one would be too conservative). This left/liberal vision celebrates a civic, liberal, multi-ethnic, hybrid, mongrel, idea of Englishness (choose the appropriate label) but it is an idea that, in the past, it has struggled to reconcile with native populism. There has always been the suspicion, best expressed in the past by Paul Gilroy, of the ‘two World Wars and one World Cup’ beer-fuelled nativism lurking beneath the traditionally conceived civilities of Englishness. This is a suspicion which often makes the liberal-left vision more elitist and therapeutic in its approach to the nation than its conservative counterpart which, in its turn, is more ill at ease with England’s cultural diversity. The vision in Imagined Nation provides an alternative understanding of English patriotic sentiment: that putting out more flags of St George represents what may be called the ‘autonomy of populism’, an expression of patriotic attachment that falls outside the boundaries of party political debate. Its autonomy challenges the normal discourse of British politics and its populism presents an opportunity. Many of the contributors, Andy Newman and Stephen Brasher for example, try to identify the opportunity for the left.

Daniel G. Williams reviews Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale by Dai Smith.

(Williams, Parthian Books, 2008, 514pp)

Theodor Adorno’s statement that ‘the past life of the émigré is, as we know, annulled’ once seemed particularly apt when considering Raymond Williams (1921-1988). Williams, the most influential socialist writer and thinker in post-war Britain, an innovator in adult education, a pre-eminent member of the English Faculty at Cambridge, and doyen of the New Left, will be of primary relevance to readers of Our Kingdom for two reasons. First, his careful attachment to issues of democracy and to socialism as a means of emancipation that had to be cultural as well economic and political. Second, for his engagement with the national question from the 1970s onwards and his reiterated argument that ‘we cannot live very much longer under the confusion of the existing “international economy” and the existing “nation state”…These are political forms that now limit, subordinate and destroy people. We have to begin again with people and build new political forms’. In this review of an important biography, I want to look at the second aspect, for Dai Smith’s study reveals the deep consequences of Williams’s national formation as a Welshman, born in the border village of Pandy.

Fred Inglis, in his biography of 1995, was typical of many in finding it difficult to take what he saw as Williams’s “late-come Welshness” seriously, dismissing it as “a fit of the kind of fervour which overcame Williams several times in later life”. Stefan Collini admired the way Inglis “made no pretence at writing like a visiting anthropologist” for biographer and subject were members of the same “tribe” of intellectuals on the English Left. The view from Wales itself was rather different. Ned Thomas, amongst others, asked rhetorically whether it mattered that Inglis’s biography “often seems to get things wrong when it talks about Wales”. The errors, argued Thomas, were not due to a ‘moral shortcoming’ but an “objective one”.

"Colonials often know more about the metropolis than metropolitans themselves. Metropolitans perceive the colonials (if at all) in single and stereotyped terms…If and when Dai Smith’s biography appears, we shall expect a more comprehensive treatment, because the Welsh world and the world of the English Left will equally be open to him."

Twelve years later, Dai Smith has indeed produced a seminal biography. And the success of the work is partly due to the fact that the Rhondda born, Balliol educated, Professor at Swansea University, is able to analyse, sympathise, and engage, simultaneously, with the very different networks of loyalty to which Williams belonged. In A Warrior’s Tale, Williams’s formative experiences on the Welsh border become the crucial viewfinder for bringing the later life into focus.

Paul Kingsnorth reviews Who cares about Britishness? by Vron Ware.

(Ware, Arcadia Books, July 2007, 180pp)

It doesn’t seem an especially good start to this book-length exploration of the fading essence of ‘Britishness’ that even its author openly admits to not caring very much about the question posed by its title. That title, writes Vron Ware, ‘wasn’t even a question, it was more of a reply.’ When she began the project, she explains, she didn’t care about Britishness herself. The trouble is that she doesn’t seem to care by the end either, and along the way she hasn’t persuaded us that we should. Quite the opposite, in fact: if this confused and self-negating book is the best that ‘Britishness’ can do, then the long-heralded end of the union might turn out to be rather a good thing. One suspects that the book’s sponsors, the British Council, were hoping for rather a different conclusion.

Ware lays her cards on the table in the first few pages. Britain, she writes, ‘may be a country, but it is not really a place.’ When you come through the channel tunnel, you are informed that you have arrived in England, and the signs at Heathrow welcome you to London. Britain is not a nation at all, but a composite of four nations. It has, she observes, ‘a standing army but not a football team. It has an anthem, a flag and a queen’, but no patron saint and no constitution. These are all good points, but Ware goes further. Britain, she reckons, is essentially rubbish. The most noticeable things about the Brits are their ‘flaws’: ‘they drink too much, swear too much, blame the government for everything and laugh at themselves when things get rough.’ Pretty much the only good thing about this poor bloody country, in fact, is ‘its record of functioning multiculturalism.’ In other words, the best thing about Britain is the bits that aren’t British.

Arthur Aughey reviews Real England: The Battle Against the Bland by Paul Kingsnorth.

Debbie Moss on From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience since 1975 by Mark Garnett.

Garnett's history of the rise in disengagement and voter apathy suffers from its lack of convincing explanations and an overly narrow understanding of politics.

(Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, Jonathan Cape 2007, 480pp)

Peter Oborne reviews Who Runs Britain? by Robert Peston.

This book brilliantly shows how New Labour hand-in-hand with a rapacious capitalist class have created the conditions for our present crisis.

Peter Facey on Paying for the Party: Myths and Realities in British Political Finance by Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, Policy Exchange.

(Policy Exchange, April 2008, 64pp)

This Policy Exchage pamphlet offers few solutions to party funding deadlock.

John Palmer on We the Peoples of Europe by Susan George.

This book makes a powerful call for a more just and democratic Europe but ignores the gains made from recent reforms.

Tom Griffin reviews Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland by Jonathan Powell.

Powell's book sheds light on the political manoeuvrings of the peace process and draws out important lessons we have yet to learn.

Andrew Blick on Swimming with the tide: Democraticisng the places where we work by Chris Ward and Zoe Williams, Compass.

(Swimming with the tide, Compass, March 2008, 34pp)

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Slight shifts in public knowledge of and interest in politics, nothing tectonic. "Key findings" in the poll for the fifth annual Audit of Political Engagement, now produced solely by the Hansard Society, show that just over half the public report an interest in politics (down 4% since last year) and rather more (55%) say they know nothing or not very much about politics (up 4%). More than half the public feel that they don't understand any of 11 "key constitutional issues."

Guy Aitchison reviews No Overall Control? The impact of a Hung Parliament on British Politics edited by Alex Brazier and Susanna Kalitowski, Hansard Society (with contributions from David Butler, Vernon Bogdanor, Philip Cowley, Helen Margetts, Mark Gill, Rosanne Palmer, Stephen Thornton, Mark Cowley, James Mitchell, David Docherty, Austin Mitchell, Simon Jenkins, Simon Hughes and Philip Norton).

(Hansard Society, March 2008, 116pp)

Guy Aitchison on Race, Identity and Belonging introduced by George Shire (with contributions from Bilkis Malek, Ejos Ubiribo, Paul Gilroy, Patrick Wright, Roshi Naidoo, Tariq Modood, Zygmunt Bauman, Nira Yuval-Davis, Amir Saee and Farhad Dalal).

(Soundings 2008, Race, Identity and Belonging, 138pp)

This collection of recent essays challenges dominant assumptions on race and identity in modern Britain.

Gareth Young reviews Where Stands the Union now? Lessons from the 2007 Scottish Parliament election by John Curtice, ippr.

(ippr, February 2008, 13pp)

New ippr report's use of polling data underplays Scottish and English dissatisfaction with the current Union settlement.

To begin Professor Curtice looks at Scotland's position in the Union, and he casts a critical eye over commercial polls that indicate significant support for independence. What is understood by 'independence' is crucial and he suggests that for many respondents 'independence' means greater autonomy within the Union, rather than separation.

Gareth Young reviews Beyond the Constitution: Englishness in a post-devolved Britain by Michael Kenny, Richard English and Richard Hayton, ippr.

New ippr report calls for positive engagement with Englishness but ignores the need for political recognition.

(ippr, February 2008, 11pp)

Stuart Weir reviews You've been Quango'd! Mapping power across the regions by Chris Leslie and Owen Dallison, NLGN.

A new NLGN report calls for quangos to be more representative.

HEALTH WARNING: THIS IS A LONG REVIEW OF AN IMPORTANT BOOK

Guy Aitchison reviews Constitutional Patriotism by Jan-Werner Muller.