John Newsinger | ukwatch.net

Gordon Brown: From Reformism to Neoliberalism

Tim Holmes — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:12:36 +0000

“The distribution of income in Britain has now become so unequal that it is beginning to resemble a Third World country”, wrote Gordon Brown in his 1989 indictment of Thatcherism, Where There Is Greed. He complained that since 1979 “an extraordinary transfer of resources, from poor to rich, has taken place”. Indeed, so great had the level of inequality become that it was “difficult to argue that there remains even a common interest between the top 1 percent to whom Mrs Thatcher has given so much, and the rest of the nation”. And, of course, inequality was even more glaring with regard to the distribution of wealth. According to Brown, the richest 10 percent of the population owned more than 50 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 50 percent of the population owned only 7 percent. Even more outrageous, under Thatcher “the wealth of the top 1 percent, who now own 17 percent, had more than doubled”¹. Remember, this was written in 1989 and the situation was to get considerably worse in the run-up to Labour’s 1997 election victory.

Now that he has been chancellor of the exchequer for ten years in a New Labour government with a large majority, what has Brown done to remedy the injustices and inequalities of the Thatcher years? Not only has he done nothing to reverse “the extraordinary transfer of resources from the poor to the rich” that so outraged him in 1989; under New Labour the situation has continued to get worse. When New Labour came to power in 1997 the proportion of the country’s wealth in the hands of the richest 1 percent had reached 20 percent. By 2004, with Brown as chancellor, it had increased to 24 percent². According to one commentator, the 600,000 individuals who make up the richest 1 percent were, on average, £737,000 richer than they had been under the Conservatives³. More recently, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2005-6 saw both relative and absolute poverty increase. The institute reported that income inequality today is “higher than Labour inherited by a statistically significant amount”⁴. Brown is still trumpeted as the Labour Party’s most successful chancellor ever.

In Where There Is Greed Brown not only condemned increasing inequality under Thatcher, but also savaged the Conservative policy of privatisation. He was particularly critical of the dramatic increases in pay that the top executives of the privatised utilities awarded themselves. He also censured the erosion of civil liberties under the Conservatives, complaining that “information on individuals is now compiled and held on an unprecedented scale” and that “the right of assembly and the right to protest have been curtailed in ways that were not contemplated under any other postwar Conservative administration”. New Labour have, of course, far surpassed the Tories in their assault on civil liberties – with Brown’s full support. But back in 1989 he even complained of the government allowing “the Murdoch empire” to take over the Times.

What was Brown’s answer to all this? “Socialism has always been about more than equality,” Brown insisted, very deliberately distancing himself from the Labour right. Indeed, he warned that hardwon political and social rights were always in danger while they “existed side by side with huge concentrations of private unaccountable power”. The way forward was to forge “a strong economic democracy”. This was his vision of socialism⁵.

How did Gordon Brown, the champion of “a strong economic democracy”, become the champion of privatisation, of the market, of the interests of the super-rich, of globalisation, of the whole neoliberal agenda? The Brown who in 1989 warned of the danger posed by “huge concentrations of private unaccountable power” went on to embrace them, court them and govern in their interests. And this was openly celebrated: in March 2006, for example, Brown proudly announced the establishment of an International Business Advisory Council to help ensure that British economic policy remained in the best interests of global capital. Its members included Lee Scott, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of WalMart; Lord Browne, chief executive of BP; Jean Pierre Garnier, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft; Robert Rubin, chairman of Citigroup; Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group; Sir John Rose, CEO of Rolls Royce; Sir Terry Leahy, CEO of Tesco; and Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay⁶. Needless to say, these people are not friends of the labour movement, either in Britain or abroad; they are its enemies, extreme examples of those whose huge wealth Brown had once considered made it difficult to believe that they still had any “common interest” with the rest of humanity.

Brown’s courtship of Rupert Murdoch, conducted in competition with Tony Blair, has been even more grotesque. This competition between the prime minister and chancellor led Murdoch to complain in a recent interview that whenever he visited Britain he always had to “have tea” with both men “or they are very suspicious that you are lining up with the other one”. For Murdoch, the test for Brown as prime minister will be “how much would he let the private sector get involved in health and education”⁷. This courtship of the reactionary, unionbusting, taxdodging Murdoch, something unprecedented in Labour Party history, tells us everything we need to know about the politics of New Labour.

This article will examine how Brown got to where he is today. It will chronicle and attempt to explain his remarkable trajectory from student radical to left Labour MP to becoming one of the principal architects of New Labour and, at last, to the enthusiastic embrace of neoliberalism.

Student radical

Brown was born in 1951, the son of a Presbyterian minister. He was brought up in a middle class household with a strong social conscience. In 1967 he arrived, aged 16 and with this social conscience still intact, as a student at Edinburgh University. Here Brown, along with thousands of others, found himself part of a student revolt. Although he was certainly influenced by the radical ideas of the time, Brown never embraced the politics of direct action and in 1969 he joined the Labour Party. This did not involve any commitment to Harold Wilson’s Labour government, but rather a belief that the Labour Party in Scotland could be transformed into a vehicle for radical change. Brown first came to prominence as a student politician in 1970 when the university principal, Michael Swann, categorically denied that the university had investments in any companies involved in apartheid South Africa. This was a lie of Blairite proportions. Brown received leaked documentary proof of this, and a special issue of the student newspaper was produced to expose the scandal. He went on to get a first class degree and began a PhD on the history of the Scottish Labour Party.

Brown continued to be involved in student politics and in 1972 campaigned on a “student power” platform for election as rector of the university. The rectorship was an office elected by students, usually contested by various notables and celebrities, and, once elected, the rector only ever played a nominal role. To the horror of the university authorities, Brown won an overwhelming victory, and immediately demanded that the university should support the campaign for increased grants. During his time as rector, he argued for working class representation on the university court, proposing that two vacancies be filled by the president of Edinburgh Trades Council and by the secretary of a tenants’ association. In retrospect, Brown was to regret this protracted involvement in student politics, but to his credit he was actively involved in the Chile Solidarity Campaign, set up in response to the CIAsponsored military coup that overthrew the government of Salvadore Allende on 11 September 1973 (“the other 9/11”), and supported the miners during the 1974 strike that brought down the Heath government⁸.

It was in this period of military coups, American defeat in Vietnam and governments brought down by industrial action that Brown edited The Red Paper on Scotland, a collection of articles published in 1975. It was a new leftish celebration of radical politics, which included contributions from Tom Nairn, John McGrath, John Foster, Robin Cook and others. Brown’s own contribution condemned “the gross inequalities which disfigure Scottish life”, and argued that the times cried out for “a new commitment to socialist ideals”. He urged “a coherent strategy” of reforms designed “to cancel the logic of capitalism” and to lead “us out of one social order into another”. This would involve “a phased extension of public control under workers’ self-management and the prioritising of social needs by the communities themselves”. He called for “a planned economy” and for “workers’ power”, identifying himself with “Scotland’s socialist pioneers, Hardie, Smillie, Maxton, Maclean, Gallacher, Wheatley and others” – a pantheon that included both revolutionary and reformist socialists. What was needed was “a positive commitment to creating a socialist society”⁹.

Brown’s student activism denied him a teaching post at Edinburgh University. Instead he got a post at Glasgow College of Technology in 1976, and in 1980 gave up academic life to work as a producer at Scottish Television. Brown was elected onto the executive of the Scottish Labour Party in 1976 and eventually, in 1983, was elected Labour MP for Dunfermline East in the face of Thatcher’s post-Falklands general election victory.

Labour MP

Brown became a Labour MP as the Thatcher government’s assault on the labour movement was moving towards a climax with the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-5. He confronted this turning point in the class struggle as a left wing Labour MP, someone who was never to embrace Bennism, but who nevertheless continued to advocate a reformism that he believed would raise up the working class, confound the capitalist enemy and accomplish a peaceful transition to socialism. In 1983, together with Robin Cook, he published a powerful collection of articles on poverty and deprivation in Scotland entitled Scotland: The Real Divide. In his introduction Brown argued that the “first prerequisite for eradicating poverty is the redistribution of income and wealth from rich to poor”. In what reads like an indictment of his later policies as chancellor, Brown insisted:

“Taxation should rise progressively with income. Programmes that merely redistribute poverty from families to single persons, from the old to the young, from the sick to the healthy, are not a solution. What is needed is a programme of reform that ends the current situation where the top 10 percent of the population own 80 percent of the wealth and 30 percent of the income, even after tax. As Tawney remarked, ‘What some people call a problem of poverty, others call the problem of riches’.”

Such views would later become anathema. At the time, however, he was adamant that “the goal would not simply be the minimalist one of equalising opportunities, a strategy akin to what Tawney described as ‘the impertinent courtesy of an invitation to unwelcome guests in the certainty that circumstances would prevent them from accepting it’.” So much for the cornerstone of New Labour’s claim to be “progressive” today. Moreover, a crucial point of the package of reforms that Brown was advocating was that taxation of the rich should be increased – increased, that is, from the then top rate of 60 percent¹⁰.

The 1984-5 miners’ strike was the most bitter and hard fought class struggle in Britain since before the Second World War. It was a decisive moment when the opportunity to defeat Thatcherism was lost and the labour movement went down to a historic defeat¹¹. In Scotland, Brown gave the miners his full support throughout the battle, appearing on picket lines, donating a significant proportion of his salary and challenging the Thatcher government’s decision to confiscate the benefits of striking miners’ families. His commitment to the miners’ cause earned him honorary membership of the Scottish Miners’ Union. In the aftermath of the strike he published his biography of the Scottish leader of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), James Maxton, a labour of love that it had taken him 20 years to write. Maxton was one of the great spokesmen for reformist socialism in the period between the two world wars. He supported workers’ struggles, savagely attacked the capitalist class and was a constant critic of the compromises and betrayals of the Labour Party leadership that were to culminate with Ramsay Macdonald’s defection to the Conservatives in 1931. The collapse of the Labour government saw Maxton lead the ILP out of the Labour Party in 1932. He condemned the Labour Party as irredeemably compromised and no longer a vehicle for socialist change. Any sympathy with Maxton would be inconceivable for the Gordon Brown of today, but the Brown of the mid-1980s was different. He produced a sympathetic and scholarly account that celebrated a tradition of militant reformism, an account that was still fuelled by anger at the defeat of the miners.

Some commentators have seen the book as marking a turning point for Brown: he celebrates Maxton’s principled intransigence, but in the end rejects it because it can only lead to political impotence. This is to read Brown’s subsequent trajectory into the book in a way that is not substantiated by the actual text. Certainly Brown acknowledges contemporary criticisms of Maxton’s “purism”, but he goes on to reject them. He insists, “Maxton’s journey through the politics of the twenties and thirties must be viewed in context.” Just at the moment when the Great Depression “cried out for a radical political response, the British Labour Party seemed immobilised, frozen by the enormity of the challenge”. The great weight of his criticism is of the Labour Party, not of Maxton. There is, I would argue, no doubt that at this time Brown’s loyalties still lay with some sort of militant reformism. The book ends with a strong endorsement of Maxton’s socialist vision¹².

We have already looked at Brown’s 1989 book, Where There Is Greed, a book in which he continues to condemn Thatcher and all her works and argues for a left Keynesian reformism. What was to transform him into a champion of neoliberalism?

Architect of New Labour?

One of the problems with bourgeois political science as it is practised in British universities is that it focuses on the shadows cast by the class struggle rather than on the class struggle itself. From this point of view New Labour is regarded primarily as an electoral phenomenon, as a necessary step if the Labour Party was to secure the votes of the Thatcherite middle class and have any chance of taking power. The problem with this particular view of politics is that it ignores, indeed helps conceal, the way that power is actually exercised in capitalist societies, and in particular it renders the ruling class invisible. The reality is that New Labour was the product of class struggle or, more to the point, of defeat in the class struggle. The emergence of New Labour was predicated on the defeat of the miners’ strike and of the print unions (by Rupert Murdoch) at Wapping. These defeats registered a historic shift in the balance of class forces in Britain, and New Labour was a product of that shift. Whereas previous Labour governments had served as mediators between the trade unions and the capitalist ruling class, in the aftermath of defeat this was no longer a viable role¹³. After Thatcher’s victories the ruling class no longer needed a party to mediate with the trade unions. If the Labour Party was to get into government again it needed to make itself acceptable to the ruling class – it needed to embrace Thatcherism and transform itself into the party of business, the party of globalisation. This was to become Brown’s objective in the 1990s.

Defeat in the 1992 general election is often seen as decisive in transforming Brown from a reformist socialist into a neoliberal. In reality, it only consolidated developments that were already under way. The task of making Labour acceptable to big business began under Neil Kinnock, continued under John Smith and was merely carried forward to completion by Brown and Blair. Whereas, for Blair, the embrace of neoliberalism involved no great personal struggle because he had no previous beliefs to dispose of, for Brown it involved a deliberate decision to change sides. The effort, one suspects, damaged his personality. Nevertheless, for Brown, the class struggle was over and the capitalist class had won, both domestically and globally. Once he had come to terms with this, he embraced the neoliberal agenda with all the fervour of the recently converted. While there is no evidence to show that Brown was ever an admirer of the Soviet Union, at the very least, the victory of the United States in the Cold War would have reinforced this conclusion. And it was to the United States that he turned for the model of the New Jerusalem that beckoned humanity. It began with an enthusiasm for Bill Clinton, but has since generalised into a belief that the United States is the global future¹⁴.

What seems clear, looking back, is that it was Brown and not Blair who was the principal architect of New Labour. Blair was more the salesman. Brown was by far the most substantial of those pushing the neoliberal agenda within the Labour leadership. George Galloway has provided an interesting assessment of the calibre of the two men:

“Brown was a political titan compared to Blair; as deep as Blair was shallow, as serious as Blair was slick. Brown versus Blair was like a contest between Bertrand Russell and Bob Monkhouse (whose motto, incidentally, could easily be Blair’s: ‘Once you learn how to fake the sincerity, the rest is easy’).”¹⁵
This makes Brown’s culpability all the greater.

Nevertheless, when Labour leader John Smith died from a heart attack in May 1994, Brown found himself outmanoeuvred for the party leadership by Blair¹⁶. He regarded himself as having been betrayed by people he had trusted, something he has never forgotten or forgiven. His position was still remarkably strong, however. He extracted from Blair an agreement (the Granita agreement) that gave him control of economic and social policy in a future Labour government, together with the promise that Blair would hand the prime ministership over to him in the not too distant future. This unprecedented agreement was testimony to the extent to which Brown was the driving force behind New Labour.

As shadow chancellor, Brown played the decisive role in remaking the Labour Party as New Labour, “the party of business”. In speech after speech to business leaders, he insisted that Labour had accepted the results of Thatcherism, embraced market forces, adapted itself to the supposed realities of globalisation, and cherished the entrepreneur above all others. He even tried to invent a business background for himself. In November 1996 Brown told the Confederation of British Industry conference that “business is in my blood”. His mother had been a company director and “I was brought up in an atmosphere where I knew exactly what was happening as far as business was concerned”. He was, indeed he had always been, one of them. The only problem is that it was not true. As his mother subsequently admitted, she would never have called herself “a business woman”: she had only ever done some “light administrative duties” for “a small family firm” and had given up the job when she married, three years before young Gordon was even born¹⁷. While there have been Labour politicians who have tried to invent working class backgrounds for themselves before, Brown is the first to try and invent a capitalist background.

“Britain is made for globalisation”

Since becoming chancellor of the exchequer Brown has regularly boasted to business audiences, both at home and abroad, of how New Labour has made Britain “the most business friendly environment in Europe”, although on this particular occasion he did go on to acknowledge that there was still a lot to learn “from the entrepreneurial and flexible labour markets of the American economy”. Some of these speeches have been collected in his recently published Speeches 1997-2006. They provide a wealth of evidence of the way in which he has transformed himself from a reformist socialist into a full-blown neoliberal. In a speech to the Social Market Foundation in February 2002, Brown admitted that making Britain a paradise for business and the rich had involved “a break from a hundred years of Labour history”. Indeed, he went on to warn that “we need to affirm a yet more radical break with Labour’s past”. Whereas, in the past, the left had seen markets as “leading to inequality, insecurity and injustice”, now he could “assert with confidence that promoting the market economy helps us to achieve our goals of a stronger economy and a fairer society”. He actually went on in the same speech to accuse the Conservatives of not being pro-market enough. It had been necessary to make “fundamental changes” to Labour Party policy, but he was now confident that Britain would “be a beacon for the world, where enterprise and fairness march forward together”.

Brown was even prepared to pay tribute to the contribution made by Margaret Thatcher, no longer “the betrayer of Britain’s future”, but the country’s saviour. In a speech made in July 2004, he was fulsome in his praise: “She recognised the need for Britain to reinvent itself and rediscover a new and vital self-confidence”. She, he went on, “understood that we could gain strength from the glories of our past which could point the way to a glorious future”. While Thatcher had made mistakes, nevertheless there had been many “advances, achievements and important changes”. In this same speech, he recited some of “the real achievements” of Britain’s glorious past, which included the country’s “imperial mission” and the fact that Britain was once “centre to the world’s largest empire – the global economy of the day”.

What was needed, according to Brown, was not just the transformation of the Labour Party into “the party of business”, but the transformation of British culture. In July 2001 he urged that “a truly entrepreneurial culture” should be created in Britain. He went on:

“We want every young person to hear about business and enterprise in schools; every college student to be made aware of the opportunities in business and to start a business; every teacher to be able to communicate the virtues and potential of business and enterprise.”

Socialism, for Brown (and he still used the word to trade union and Labour Party audiences), had become “the creation of a deeper and wider entrepreneurial culture where enterprise is truly open to all”. One can imagine the outcry if any previous Labour government had ever suggested that schools should inculcate socialist values or trade union solidarity!

Brown returned to this theme later the following year (December 2002) in a speech to the Growing Business Awards. New Labour, he boasted, had “done a lot to make businessmen and women role models for young people” and to “make successful business leaders role models in every community”. They were creating “a wider and deeper enterprise culture”. In effect, British culture had to be “Americanised”.

On 2 December 2005, addressing business leaders at the Advancing Enterprise Conference in London, Brown welcomed the event as “a concrete expression of our partnership”. They had “a shared agenda” and New Labour could be relied on to “take it forward”. He was, he told his audience, particularly looking forward to the session on “our educational priorities” that was being led by that great educationalist Terry Leahy, the chief executive officer of Tesco. Brown promised them that “if we work together then I believe we shall prove that Britain is made for globalisation and globalisation is made for Britain”¹⁸.

The politics of spin

One point worth considering is how it is that Brown has still managed to appear to some people (admittedly a declining number) as being to the left of Blair. To a considerable extent this has been the result of “spin”, reinforcing wishful thinking, although it also derives from a very deliberate effort, in which Brown has played an important part, to locate New Labour within the Labour Party tradition, arguing that it is a development of “Croslandism”. Let us consider the question of “spin” first.

In 1998, in what one commentator described as a “frenzy of privatisation” that “bordered on the messianic”, Brown proposed the privatisation of the Post Office¹⁹. This was opposed by the then secretary of state for trade and industry, Peter Mandelson, who instead proposed that it be retained in the public sector, but be given commercial “freedom”. In this particular battle Mandelson carried the day. Charlie Whelan, Brown’s press officer, gave two alternative briefings, “one to right-leaning papers claiming that Mandelson had funked a desirable privatisation of the Post Office, and another to left-leaning papers and the trade unions, that Brown had ‘saved’ the Post Office from privatisation”²⁰.

Much the same story can be told with regard to the minimum wage. This is inevitably championed as one of the great achievements of New Labour by its supporters. Brown, however, only agreed to it because experience in the United States, where there has been a minimum wage since 1938, showed that it was not a serious inconvenience to business. Indeed in the United States the minimum wage has proven to be perfectly compatible with the sustained attack on working class living standards and workplace conditions that has been under way since the 1980s. All that had to be ensured was that the minimum wage was set low enough. In Britain, as Simon Jenkins observed, it was set so low “as to be almost invisible”²¹. The man responsible for this was Gordon Brown.

When it was proposed that the minimum wage should be set at £3.70 an hour, Brown insisted that the most business could afford was £3.50. In the face of his intransigence, TUC general secretary John Monks, certainly no militant, intervened. Monks, according to Tom Bower, was “puzzled that Brown, posing as the champion of the working class and diligently attending the birthday parties of the movement’s leaders, could suggest that the economy was unable to afford the increase”. Monks warned Brown that if he did not drop his opposition he would make it public and thereby “put an end to Brown’s bid to become the Labour Party’s next leader”. Brown retreated, but once again Charlie Whelan spun the story to his advantage. Stephen Byers, who had replaced Mandelson as secretary of state for trade and industry, had publicly advocated a rate of £3.60 an hour. Brown threw his weight behind this. Whelan now briefed journalists that Brown had always favoured £3.70, but had been forced “to compromise with Byers…and accept a £3.60 minimum wage”. Brown did still insist, however, that the full rate should be payable, not from age 21 as the Low Pay Unit (LPU) urged, but from age 22. When George Bain of the LPU told him that only 8,000 young people were affected, Brown remained adamant, telling Bain, “I won’t allow 21 year olds to be classed as adults”²².

“Croslandism” and New Labour

While “spin” is the main factor in accounting for whatever remnants of a left reputation Brown still has, he has also been centrally involved in the effort to identify New Labour as a species of “Croslandism”. This fascination with the intellectual standardbearer of the right wing of the Labour Party in the 1950s and 1960s is rather sudden. In the “anthology of Socialism”, Values, Visions and Voices, that Brown co-edited with Tony Wright in 1995, there are only four contributions from Crosland’s writings out of nearly 200 selected extracts. Even that intellectual giant Neil Kinnock has five contributions!²³ By early 1997, however, Brown had decided to lay claim to “Crosland’s rich and lasting legacy to Labour”. He was aware of the need to at least maintain the pretence that New Labour still had some connection with “Old Labour”, even if it was with the Labour right. He fastened on “Croslandism” as the way to achieve this. In a speech that was later published in an edited volume, Crosland and New Labour, Brown emphasised the way that Crosland had placed “equality” at the centre of the Socialist project. This was what New Labour was all about, Brown argued: “everyone should have the chance to bridge the gap between what they are and what they have it in themselves to become”. Brown tried to update Crosland’s understanding of equality with a more modern New Labour definition: “employment opportunity for all”, “continuing and lifelong educational opportunity”, “genuine access to culture” and “a redistribution of power that offers people real control over the decisions that affect their lives”.

The great advantage of this updating of the definition of equality is that it is perfectly compatible with “inequality”. And, moreover, one of the ways that power is to be redistributed is through the market! What Brown is about is substituting “equality of opportunity” for equality of wealth and income – that everyone should have an equal opportunity to become rich. This, of course, has a particular attraction for today’s Parliamentary Labour Party. To be fair though, Brown does concede that “even in a global marketplace”, it might still prove necessary to “address wealth and income inequalities”. “I believe”, he wrote, “that these inequalities can be justified only if they are in the interests of the least fortunate.” This truly original contribution to socialist thought looks remarkably like the good old “trickle-down” effect championed by the Thatcherites. At the very least, it leaves him with considerable leeway. Indeed, judging from his performance as chancellor, he has yet to find any of the increasing levels of inequality in New Labour Britain that are not in the interests of “the least fortunate”²⁴.

More recently, in 2006, Brown contributed an introduction to a new edition of Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism. First published in 1956, this book was the intellectual mainstay of Labour’s right wing, the bible of Gaitskellite revisionism. Now, 50 years later, Brown celebrated its publication as “a decisive moment in post-war Labour history” and praised its “freshness” and “relevance”. What Crosland showed was that Socialism “was about the dignity of human beings and the equal right of each individual to realise their potential in a supportive community”. Socialism was “opportunity for all”. All of Brown’s earlier campaigning for “the redistribution of income and wealth from rich to poor” was effectively repudiated²⁵.

This supposed commitment to equality has become central to New Labour’s claim to be a party of “the centre-left”. They are absolutely passionate about it, so much so that, when it was proposed to include an explicit unambiguous commitment to equality in the Labour Party’s new Clause IV in 1995, Peter Mandelson had it removed²⁶. Nevertheless “equality” continues to be a tricky concept, encouraging all sorts of unhelpful ideas and attitudes. It has to be continually redefined so as to pose no threat to the rich and the super-rich. The most promising redefinition so far has been that provided by the Equalities Review, set up by Blair in 2005. A panel consisting of Trevor Phillips; Sir Robert Kerslake, the chief executive of Sheffield Council; and Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas, a top lawyer who was made a dame for her services to the City, deliberated at great expense. They came up with something so spurious as to take the breath away:

“An equal society protects and promotes equal, real freedom and substantive opportunity to live in the ways people value and would choose so that everyone can flourish. An equal society recognises people’s different needs, situations and goals and removes the barriers that limit what people can do and can be.”²⁷

This is New Labour at its most intellectually rigorous.

“Old Labour”

What would Anthony Crosland himself have made of all this? Crosland, after a brief flirtation with Stalinism at university, positioned himself on the right of the Labour Party in the early years of the Second World War. As early as 1941, while serving in the army, he had stated his intention to be “the modern Bernstein” who would defeat Marxist influence within the labour movement²⁸. The Future of Socialism was his attempt at realising this ambition. What is crucial for our purposes is that Crosland’s arguments were premised on a belief that capitalism had been defeated, tamed, fundamentally changed, and that all that remained for the left was the implementation of a programme of democratic reforms, including “democratic equality”. New Labour is founded on the very opposite premise, on the belief that capitalism has triumphed and that the left has been defeated once and for all. There is nothing in Crosland’s writings to suggest that he would have responded to this defeat in the way that Brown and New Labour have. From this point of view Roy Hattersley, a vocal opponent of New Labour, can be best seen as Crosland’s heir. One obvious consequence of the difference in context is worth pointing out: New Labour is far to the right of anything that Crosland and the Labour right would ever have contemplated in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, New Labour is to the right of the Conservatives in this period.

Interestingly, Crosland had a much more robust attitude to equality, or “democratic equality” as he called it, than anything evidenced by New Labour. While Brown has tried to redefine equality as a watered down equality of opportunity, Crosland explicitly ruled that out. Indeed, he described equality of opportunity as “the doctrine of Tory radicalism”. What Crosland, a Labour right winger, called for were “measures…to equalise the distribution of rewards and privileges so as to diminish the degree of class stratification, the injustice of large inequalities and the collective discontent”²⁹. This certainly did not amount to socialism, but nevertheless, it has nothing in common with New Labour.

In 1962 Crosland published another book, The Conservative Enemy. Here he was even more forthright than in the earlier volume. According to Crosland, inequality in Britain was “still greater than should be tolerated in a democracy” (it was less than today) and he complained of the rich receiving rewards “far higher than any civilised person should want or need” (they received considerably less than today). He urged that a future Labour government “must grapple with the maldistribution of property”. He was particularly critical of the concentration of newspaper ownership which was a threat to “a healthy democracy” and was contemptuous of “the more depraved and poisonous of the capitalist press”. This was, of course, long before the advent of Rupert Murdoch. In short, Crosland would not have recognised New Labour as Labour at all³⁰.

Crosland talked more radically than he was ever prepared to act. Most famously, while secretary of state for education he had remarked: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England”³¹. In practice, he rejected the compulsory introduction of comprehensive schemes in favour of “persuasion”, which is why there are still grammar schools today. Similarly, while he argued that the state should take over the public schools and democratise them, he never actually did anything about it when in office. He certainly never suggested that the public schools should be invited to take over state schools as New Labour does today. Nevertheless, during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis that crippled James Callaghan’s Labour government in 1976, Crosland was one of those arguing for rejection of the IMF’s demand for cuts in government spending. What is the point of the government surviving, he complained, “if Labour measures can’t be implemented”. Callaghan’s government, he went on, “is the most right wing Labour government we’ve had for years”³². He had not, as they say, seen anything yet.

New Labour in power

Brown’s wholehearted commitment to markets, globalisation and today’s rampant capitalism was made absolutely clear to the whole world by the decision to make the Bank of England independent. He was showing the capitalist class, both at home and abroad, that he was their man and that New Labour was their government. As one sympathetic historian observed, “At a stroke much of the political economy of the Labour Party since 1945 was abandoned”³³. It is worth remembering that at least one of the reasons Clement Attlee’s government had nationalised the bank had been because of its role in the 1931 financial crisis, which had brought down Ramsay MacDonald’s government and seen him defect to the Conservatives. The bank had represented the interests of international finance, rather than the interests of the Labour government. This was never to be allowed to happen again, although the reality was that the bank always retained considerable independence. What Brown’s action signalled was that New Labour would never find itself in conflict with international finance. Brown had out-Thatchered the Thatcherites. His “great political coup” successfully positioned New Labour to the right of the Conservatives³⁴. Brown was committed to what can usefully be described as “globalisation in one country”³⁵. What followed was Brown’s rush to privatise as he came out as “Thatcherism’s most coveted St Paul”. As Simon Jenkins observes:

“Brown tore up all he had said in opposition and hurled himself into a frenzy of privatisation, scouring the cupboard for things to sell. He faced down union opposition by seeking to dispose of air traffic control, the Royal Mint, the Commonwealth Development Corporation, and Tote on-course betting. The privatisation of the Post Office…was halted in 1998 only because its departmental sponsor was Brown’s sworn enemy, Mandelson… Privatisation spread even to Whitehall. The Inland Revenue sold its entire estate to a property developer, John Ritblat, who transferred it, quite legally, to an offshore tax haven… The Treasury even sold and then leased back its own headquarters in Parliament Square.”

Brown’s frenzy of privatisation has yet to run its course. His supposed opposition to privatisation in education and the NHS is largely a matter of spin and of the factionalism within the New Labour government. Brown has carried big business into areas of the public sector that the Thatcherites never dreamed of.

Jenkins goes on to write of Brown’s privatisation of “public borrowing” through Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) and Public-Private Partnerships. As he points out:

“By July 2003 Brown was boasting of the completion of 450 PFI projects, including 34 hospitals, 239 schools, 34 fire and police stations, 12 prisons and 12 waste projects. The NHS had by 2005 borrowed some £6 billion for PFI schemes, with a further £11 billion in the pipeline. By the mid-2000s virtually all health investment was being financed by the private sector.”³⁶

What Brown had done was to find a way to make government spending attractive to and profitable for big business. The inevitable end result will be a public sector, if that is still the right term, that will be effectively in the hands of capital. The first charge on revenue will inevitably be payment of the debts incurred by PFI. In the NHS this makes the introduction of charges a certainty, and one can predict with considerable confidence an attempt by a Brown government to introduce such a scheme, limited to begin with, but preparing the way for later expansion³⁷.

One other thing that Jenkins points out is New Labour’s effective privatisation of civil service functions. Instead of turning to the civil service for advice, New Labour turns to private consultants. This is not a small matter. Whereas in 1995 £300 million was spent on consultants by the Conservative government, by 2003 the cost was £1.7 billion and by 2004 £2.5 billion. Indeed, from 1997 to 2006 New Labour’s spending on consultants has been estimated at £70 billion³⁸.

Why has the Labour Party allowed all this? Well, first of all, many party members, including lifelong members, have voted with their feet and resigned in disgust and despair. Those who remain inhabit a party that is radically different from the Labour Party in 1990, let alone 1964 or 1945. As Stephen Ingle has pointed out, the new intake of Labour MPs in 1997 “contained as many millionaires as it did manual workers”. Indeed, he goes on to put New labour into some sort of historical perspective: “The New Labour government is less representative of organised Labour than was the Liberal Party of Campbell Bannerman and Asquith”³⁹. The Labour left has never been weaker, and it has been completely unable to seriously hinder, let alone stop, the drive to the right.

What of relations between Brown and Blair? Throughout Blair’s period of office one of the most important features of his government has been the power exercised by the chancellor of the exchequer. To a considerable extent, Blair was effectively excluded from social and economic policy making, with Brown famously refusing to even discuss the budget with him. This unprecedented situation reflected the strength of Brown’s position within New Labour, but, for all that, Brown has never felt strong enough to bring Blair down and at the same time ensure his own succession. Over the introduction of student “topup fees”, for example, Brown covertly encouraged backbench opposition, but in the end backed down. On Blair’s part, there seems little doubt that if the Iraq War had been the triumph he expected it to be, then the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would have been swiftly followed by the overthrow of Gordon Brown. Far from strengthening Blair so as to enable him to remove Brown from the Treasury, the war mortally damaged him. It is the Iraq War that in the end has made it possible for Brown to take over from Blair.

It is important to recognise, however, that this bitter struggle within the government has not been over any fundamental policy differences, between a left and a right within New Labour. Brown and Blair’s mutual hatred has been personal rather than political. The differences between them are more differences of style than of substance. Brown, for example, does not share Blair’s relaxed attitude towards political corruption, something he evidenced as far back as the Ecclestone affair⁴⁰.

But those who believe, against all the evidence, that Brown was not fully behind the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq are deluding themselves. One recent New Labourite discussion of a Brown government’s likely foreign policy argues that we should “expect small but symbolic statements” distancing themselves “from aspects of Bush’s foreign policy – Guantanamo, the practice of extraordinary rendition and US hostility towards the UN”. Maybe. It goes on to argue that as far as a US attack on Iran is concerned, “it is almost inconceivable that a Brown government would support such action”⁴¹. This is so much wishful thinking. It shows the extent to which people still have illusions in Brown. Indeed, it is inconceivable that a Brown government will not support the attack on Iran when it comes. New Labour and the Conservative opposition are both married to the United States, for better and increasingly for worse, and will support US actions, either overtly or, if it is too politically damaging, covertly. There is no comfort whatsoever to be taken from developments inside the Labour Party at the present time. Hope lies outside.

First published by International Socialism 115, Summer 2007, Chris Harman, ed., by International Socialism, PO Box 42184, London SW8 2WD, www.isj.org.uk

Brown, 1989, pp119, 121.

Self and Zealey, 2007, pp70-71.

Carvel, 2004.

Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2007.

Brown, 1989, pp10, 176178.

HM Treasury, 2006.

Cassidy, 2006. Murdoch’s ambassador to Britain, Irwin Stelzer, has gone on record to recommend that Brown appoint Ed Balls as chancellor, and that Balls’s wife, Yvette Cooper, should also be given a cabinet post. The support of someone like Stelzer would once have destroyed the prospects of a Labour politician, but today it does not even raise eyebrows (see Stelzer, 2007).

For Brown’s career as a student radical see his semiofficial biography: Routledge, Paul, 1998, pp 41-63.

Brown, 1975, pp7, 9, 18,19. The book was actually printed by the Institute for Workers’ Control and among the influences that Brown acknowledges were Institute publications, the Socialist Register, Antonio Gramsci and Edward Thompson. He even footnotes the publications of the International Marxist Group and of the International Socialists (the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party). The front cover of the book is illustrated with a photograph of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders workers voting to occupy the shipyards, and the back with a photograph of Leith dockers on strike in 1913.

10.

Brown, 1983, pp20, 22.

11.

Callinicos and Simons, 1985.

12.

Brown, 1986, p298. Brown’s Maxton compares favourably, for example, with William Knox’s academic study, James Maxton (Knox, 1987). In his biography of Brown, Tom Bower argues that “in his head” Brown “understood how Maxton had undermined his ambitions for a better society by refusing to compromise to obtain power” (Bower, 2004, p51). On the contrary, in his book, Brown recognises that compromise led to MacDonald joining the Conservatives to help save capitalism at the expense of the working class.

13.

The best study of the Labour Party remains The Labour Party: A Marxist History (Cliff and Gluckstein, 1988). A new edition would be extremely useful.

14.

As one recent sympathetic account has argued, Brown’s “allegiance and enthusiasm for the American way is as great as Blair’s” (Hassan, 2004, p211).

15.

Galloway, 2003, p 141.

16.

Brown coedited a volume of tributes to John Smith (Brown and Naughtie, 1994). Brown’s own contribution includes extensive quotations from Smith’s speeches, attacking John Major’s Tory government for sleaze, every word of which could apply to New Labour today. He even quotes Smith’s condemnation of “the too-close relationship that has developed between this government and the private sector” (p96). He understandably does not mention the fact that he was criticising Smith for not moving far enough to the right when he died.

17.

Peston, 2005, pp23-24.

18.

For this and the other quoted speeches, see Stevenson, 2006, pp26, 34, 35, 37, 59, 63, 64, 124, 125, 127, 133, 146-147, 342, 370.

19.

Jenkins, 2006, pp258-259.

20.

Macintyre, 2000, pp474-475.

21.

Jenkins, 2006, p257.

22.

Bower, 2004, pp 276, 294-295.

23.

Brown and Wright, 1995. Values, Visions and Voices is an appalling book, where any hint of class struggle has been altogether exorcised. In its pages Sheila Rowbotham rubs shoulders with Ramsay Macdonald, George Orwell with Neil Kinnock, and William Morris with Hugh Gaitskell. There is, of course, nothing from Karl Marx or Frederick Engels, both of whom had quite a lot to say about Britain. Indeed the Marxist tradition is effectively suppressed. Still, despite every effort to make the collection as inoffensive as possible, some moments of embarrassment still creep in. There is an extract from an interview with Dennis Potter where he lambasts the Sun newspaper: “Just pick up a copy of the Sun. Is this Britain? Is this what we’ve done to ourselves? How can the people who work on that paper go home and face their families without a sense of shame” (pp149-150). This was, of course, before Blair and Brown had had to abase themselves before Rupert Murdoch, had both written for the Sun and had made it New Labour’s favourite newspaper. Indeed, on 1 May 2007, May Day no less, Brown actually had an article in the Sun on “Blair’s decade of achievement”. Here he identified Blair’s most memorable success as being “how we stood shoulder to shoulder with America” after 9/11. This was not written to reassure Sun readers of his continuing support for the United States, but to reassure Rupert Murdoch. Dennis Potter, of course, named the cancer that was to eventually kill him “Rupert Murdoch”.

24.

Brown, 1999, pp36, 41, 43, 44.

25.

Crosland, Anthony, 2006, pp vii, viii. Tony Blair had no interest whatsoever in any of this laying claim to a Labour heritage, indeed in 2004 he contributed a chapter to a collection entitled Neo-Conservatism (Stelzer, 2004). Other contributors included Margaret Thatcher, Condoleezza Rice and various luminaries of the US Republican right.

26.

Macintyre, 2000, pp316-317.

27.

Equalities Review, 2007, p7.

28.

Jeffreys, 1999, p16.

29.

Crosland, Anthony, 2006, pp173,191.

30.

Crosland, Anthony, 1962, pp7, 28, 37, 211,212.

31.

Crosland, Susan, 1982, p148.

32.

Meredith, 2006, p245.

33.

Brivati, 1999, p 245.

34.

Keegan, 2004. Keegan emphasises the American influence on the decision, quoting Brown thanking Alan Greenspan, then chair of the US federal reserve, for the discussions on “how central bank independence would work for Britain” (p156).

35.

The term is not original, but comes from Hirst and Thompson, 2000.

36.

Jenkins, 2006, pp259-260, 272. His chapter on Brown is simply entitled “Gordon Brown, Thatcherite”.

37.

New Labour’s foremost academic apologist, Anthony Giddens, calls precisely for “usercharging” in his advice to a Brown government: Giddens, 2007, pp83-84. He comforts fellow Blairites with the assurance that while “Brown’s political philosophy is often said to be to the left of that of Tony Blair – meaning that he leans more towards the Old Left…his speeches and writings over the past few years reveal nothing of the kind” (p35).

38.

Jenkins, 2006, p266.

39.

Ingle, 2000, p157.

40.

Blair rode into office on a white charger, without anyone realising it had been given to him in return for a favour. The character of the man was demonstrated immediately by the Ecclestone scandal. In return for a £1 million donation to party funds and the promise of more, the government exempted Formula One motor racing from the ban on tobacco advertising. Darts and snooker were not exempted. This was one of the most blatant acts of political corruption in modern times, carried out by a man and a government elected on an anti-sleaze ticket. Blair defended himself by famously arguing that he was “a pretty straight sort of guy”. Brown, to his horror, was caught out on Radio 4’s Today programme, having to lie to cover up for Blair. See Rawnsley, 2001, pp97-98.

41.

Mepham, 2006.

References

Bower, Tom, 2004, Gordon Brown, (HarperPerennial).
Brivati, Brian, 1999, “Gordon Brown” in Kevin Jefferys (ed), Labour Forces: from Ernest Bevin to Gordon Brown (IB Taurus).
Brown, Gordon, (ed) 1975, The Red Paper On Scotland (Edinburgh).
Brown, Gordon, 1983, “Introduction” to Gordon Brown and Robin Cook (eds), Scotland: The Real Divide (Mainstream).
Brown, Gordon, 1986, Maxton: A Biography (Mainstream).
Brown, Gordon, 1989, Where There Is Greed: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future (Mainstream).
Brown, Gordon, 1999, “Equality – Then and Now”, in Dick Leonard (ed), Crosland and New Labour (Macmillan).
Brown, Gordon, and James Naughtie (eds), 1994, John Smith: Life and Soul of the Party (Mainstream).
Brown, Gordon, and Tony Wright (eds), 1995, Values, Visions and Voices (Mainstream).
Callinicos, Alex, and Mike Simons, 1985, The Great Strike (Bookmarks).
Carvel, John, 2004, “Super-rich Have Doubled Their Money Under Labour”, the Guardian, 8 December 2004, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,11268,1368505,00.html
Cassidy, John, 2006, “Murdoch’s Game”, the New Yorker, 16 October 2006, www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016fa_fact1
Cliff, Tony, and Donny Gluckstein, 1988, The Labour Party: A Marxist History (Bookmarks).
Crosland, Anthony, 1962, The Conservative Enemy (Cape).
Crosland, Anthony, 2006, The Future of Socialism (Constable and Robinson).
Crosland, Susan, 1982, Tony Crosland (Jonathan Cape).
Equalities Review, 2007, Fairness and Freedom: The Final Report of the Equalities Review, available from: www.renewal.net/Documents/RNET/Research/Fairnessfreedomfinal.pdf
Galloway, George, 2003, I’m Not The Only One (Penguin).
Giddens, Anthony, 2007, Over To You, Mr Brown: How Labour Can Win Again (Polity).
Hassan, Gerry, 2004, “Labour’s Journey from Socialism to Social Democracy: A Case Study of Gordon Brown’s Political Thought”, in Gerry Hassan (ed), The Scottish Labour Party (Edinburgh University Press).
Hirst, Paul, and Geoff Thompson, 2000, “Globalization in one Country: The Peculiarities of the British”, in Economy and Society, volume 29, number 3 (August 2000).
HM Treasury, 2006, press release, 21 March 2006, www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/newsroom_and_speeches/press/2006/press_19_2006.cfm
Ingle, Stephen, 2000, The British Party System (Continuum).
Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2007, press release, 28 April 2007, www.ifs.org.uk/pr/hbai07_pr.pdf
Jeffreys, Kevin, 1999, Anthony Crosland (Politicos).
Jenkins, Simon, 2006, Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts (Allen Lane).
Keegan, William, 2004, The Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown (Wiley).
Knox, Willian, 1987, James Maxton (Manchester Univesity Press).
Macintyre, Donald, 2000, Mandelson and the Making of New Labour (HarperCollins).
Mepham, David, 2006, “Gordon’s world”, in Prospect Magazine, 124 (July 2006),
www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7535
Meredith, Stephen, 2006, “Mr Crosland’s Nightmare: New Labour and Equality in Historical Perspective”, in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, volume 8, number 2 (May 2006).
Peston, Robert, 2005, Brown’s Britain (Short Books).
Rawnsley, Andrew, 2001, Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour (Penguin).
Routledge, Paul, 1998, Gordon Brown (Simon & Schuster).
Self, Abigail, and Linda Zealey (eds), 2007, Social Trends 37 (Office for National Statistics),
www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_social/Social_Trends37/Social_Trends_37.pdf
Stelzer, Irwin (ed), 2004, Neo-Conservatism (Altantic).
Stelzer, Irwin, 2007, “When Brown Moves To No 10, He Will Need His Closest Ally Next Door”, the Guardian, 27 February 2007, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2022216,00.html
Stevenson, Wilf (ed), 2006, Gordon Brown: Speeches 1997-2006 (Bloomsbury).

A Great British Tradition

Alex Doherty — Fri, 11 May 2007 12:00:53 +0000

The British Empire has always responded to any resistance to its rule with ferocious repression. In 1857 the Great Indian Rebellion posed a massive challenge to the British Empire. It was suppressed with unprecedented brutality. The British adopted a policy of “no prisoners”, a policy which was enforced by means of massacre and mass executions. One officer, Thomas Lowe, later remembered how on one occasion his unit had taken 76 prisoners (they were just too tired to carry on killing and needed a rest, he recalled). Later, after a quick trial, the prisoners were all lined up with a British soldier standing a couple of yards in front of them. On the order “fire”, they were all simultaneously shot, “swept… from their earthly existence”. This was not the only mass execution Lowe participated in. On another occasion his unit took 149 prisoners, and once again they were lined up and all simultaneously shot. These were merely routine episodes in the British Empire’s crushing of the rebellion.

In the aftermath of the rebellion, the British tried to pretend that it had been nothing more than a military mutiny in the Bengal Army and a subsequent breakdown in law and order, and that it was not a national movement because there was no such thing as an Indian nation. This was only ever convincing to the British and their collaborators. What is interesting is that at the actual time of the Great Rebellion even the British had no doubt that they were confronted by a national revolt. This revolt certainly had many components, as do all national movements, but nevertheless it brought together Hindus and Muslims, united by a common hatred of the British, and a determination to drive them out. The Great Rebellion was, without any doubt, the most serious challenge the British Empire was to face before the First World War.

The British Empire in India had been established by a succession of wars of aggression waged during the 18th and early 19th centuries. These wars conclusively demonstrated the predatory nature of the British state, proving beyond any doubt that it was the “rogue state” of the day. Moreover, in India this state took the form of an early example of a private-public partnership. India was ruled and exploited by a private business, the East India Company, on behalf of the British Empire. In the early 19th century this company had invaded Afghanistan and Burma (twice), occupied the Sind province and the city of Gwalior, and fought two bloody wars with the Sikhs for control of the Punjab. These conflicts had established British domination over the subcontinent, a domination that rested quite unambiguously on the sword.

British rule was oppressive and brutal. India was ruthlessly exploited for the benefit of Britain, and the Indian people were compelled to submit by force. The collection of taxes was accompanied by the use of torture, something that was acknowledged at the time, although one searches in vain for any mention of it in today’s history books. Moreover, relations between the British and the Indian population were characterised by racism and violence. It was customary for the British to violently assault Indians for perceived misdemeanours, for example a spilled drink, boots not clean enough, or being too slow to obey orders, and indeed, this continued to be the case right up until the end of British rule in 1947.

There was continual resistance. What happened in 1857, however, was that accumulated grievances were to come together to produce a massive widespread revolt that saw British control overthrown throughout much of the country, and, for a while, saw the British Empire itself seriously threatened.

The most important factor in provoking the rebellion was the British annexation of the allied and friendly princely state of Awadh in 1855. This was seen as demonstrating that the British were absolutely untrustworthy and that even their allies were inevitably doomed to fall victim to their insatiable appetite for land and taxes. The annexation outraged much of Indian opinion, especially among the sepoys (Indian troops) of the Bengal Army. Inevitably hostility to the British took on a religious colouration with Hindus and Muslims joining together in opposition to what was seen as a Christian threat to their religion. Grievances regarding pay and conditions joined together with religious fears to produce a wave of mutinies in the Bengal Army that began in the city of Meerut in May 1857. The rebels killed their British officers and their families and marched on Delhi where they proclaimed the restoration of the Mughal Empire under the last of the Emperors, the octogenarian Bahadur Shah, for years a client of the British.

The mutinies in the Bengal Army set loose a widespread rebellion that involved peasant revolt in the countryside, artisan revolt in the towns, religious insurrection and revolt by sections of the gentry. It was to engulf some 150,000 square miles of territory with a population of 45 million. This was without doubt one of the great revolutionary outbreaks of the 19th century.

Why was the Great Rebellion defeated? This was a product of weaknesses on the rebel side and of strengths on the British side. While the rebellion swept away British rule throughout much of the country, instead of carrying the revolt further afield, the rebels concentrated their forces in Delhi. Here they remained while the British assembled an army strong enough to destroy them. The rebels’ only hope was to spread the revolt, to seize Calcutta and hopefully provoke rebellion and mutiny throughout the subcontinent. The failure to do so was to prove fatal. This was itself a failure of leadership, and the fact remains that the rebellion never threw up, or perhaps more accurately, never had time to throw up an effective revolutionary leadership. The British successfully crushed the movement while an effective leadership was still struggling to emerge. Consequently, the Indian Rebellion produced no leaders of the calibre of Toussaint L’Ouverture or of Dessalines, who had led the overthrow of slavery in St Domingue and the establishment of the Haitian Republic in 1804.

Savagery that rivals the Nazis

The British side had an overwhelming technological superiority. The sepoy mutineers were armed with the old Brown Bess musket, while the British were increasingly equipped with the new Enfield rifle that was more accurate at a greater range. Moreover, most of the rebels were altogether without firearms, many armed with bows and arrows and spears. The British could shoot them down without facing any effective reply. Decisive, however, was the British superiority in artillery. Instead of using their superior numbers and mobility to wear the British down, the rebels met them in pitched battles and sieges where the British forces’ technological superiority could be used to most advantage.

The British put the rebellion down with a degree of savagery that rivals the one displayed by the Nazis to European resistance movements during the Second World War. It is easy to think that this is just exaggeration, but the record is absolutely clear. Prisoners were blown from the mouths of the guns, men were burned alive and women were raped to death. All this was admitted, indeed often justified at the time. At Kanpur, where British women and children had been killed by the rebels, prisoners were forced to lick the bloodstained floor clean before being flogged and then hanged. One British officer proposed “flaying alive, impalement or burning” as the only appropriate retribution. A British sergeant later wrote of a giant tree with 130 men hanging from its branches. One can imagine the horror with which such an episode would be greeted if it was the work of the Nazis.

The excuse for this savagery was provided by the atrocity stories that were told about the rebels. They had publicly raped white women, blinded and mutilated them, burned them alive and forced them to watch their children tortured to death. These stories all had one thing in common – they were all untrue. This was later acknowledged by the British authorities when exhaustive enquiries failed to turn up any evidence whatsoever of rape and torture. Certainly British women and children had been killed in the revolt, but the rape and torture stories were lies. Nevertheless, the lies had served their purpose, unleashing the most ferocious repression and ensuring that British public opinion condoned it.

Even in the face of the tremendous propaganda campaign that accompanied the suppression of the rebellion, there were socialists in Britain who championed the rebel cause. The Chartist leader, Ernest Jones, in his newspaper, the People’s Paper, celebrated the rebellion as “one of the noblest movements the world has ever known”. Moreover, he insisted that the rebellion was “not a military mutiny but a national insurrection” that should be supported by people in Britain just as they supported the Polish, Hungarian and Italian nationalist movements. He urged the British working class to support “the independence of India”.

Both Karl Marx and Frederick Engels supported the Great Indian Rebellion. Engels, in particular, was absolutely outraged by the conduct of the British army. Their behaviour, “plundering, violence, massacre”, was a disgrace. Indeed, he argued that “there is no army in Europe or America with so much brutality as the British”. Engels pointed to the number of British officers – 150 in just one command – who had resigned their commissions in the course of the fighting, not because of any humanitarian scruples, but because they had become rich men from the amount of loot they had pillaged. He wrote that “if any other troops in the world had committed one-tenth of these excesses, how the indignant British press would brand them with infamy”. When they are the work of the British army, however, they are portrayed as “the normal consequences of war”. This double standard has, of course, continued down to today.

John Newsinger is the author of The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire, published by Bookmarks, £11.99 (phone Bookmarks on 020 7637 1848).

The Falklands - War and Lies

Alex Doherty — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:15:09 +0000

On 19 March 1982, the Argentine military junta seized control of the Falkland Islands – also known as the Malvinas – plunging Britain’s Tory government into crisis.

The government had unwittingly precipitated the attack by scaling back Britain’s already minimal military commitment in the South Atlantic, and now it faced disaster.

The Falkland Islands are 8,000 miles from Britain. They are a relic of empire and it was – and still is – crazy that they are ruled by Britain.

Nobody in Britain was remotely interested in the Falklands before the war. Two years previously hardline Thatcherite Nicholas Ridley had even proposed a deal to share control of the islands with Argentina.

In 1982 the Argentine military regime was facing widespread internal opposition. It decided to retake the islands to boost its prestige and its claim to control large parts of South America.

British Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher saw a chance to reverse her own declining political fortunes.

Thatcher faced a choice between a humiliating acceptance of the Argentine occupation – followed by her resignation and the collapse of her government – or risking a military expedition to an area of no strategic importance to Britain simply to save herself and her government.

The decision was never in doubt. Cheered on by the Labour leader Michael Foot, a task force was sent to supposedly “liberate” the British settlers in the Falklands.

Whimper

To justify the war the Tories suddenly started raging about human rights and “despicable Latin American juntas”. These same MPs had done nothing when Argentine leader General Galtieri launched a military coup in 1976. The “disappearance” of some 30,000 people provoked not a whimper.

By the time the Argentinians surrendered on 14 June, over 250 British soldiers, sailors and airmen had died to keep Thatcher in power, along with over 1,000 Argentinians.

The British government, of course, lied at every stage of the proceedings, most infamously over the sinking of the Belgrano cruiser on 2 May, when it was steaming away from the British imposed exclusion zone.

While this was only a small scale war, it had a disproportionate impact. The conflict was amplified by a jingoistic media, led predictably by Rupert Murdoch’s jackal of a newspaper, the Sun.

The war certainly played a part, but only a part, in the Tory election victory the following year. It also made Thatcher’s personal position within the Conservative Party unassailable.

Many, including Thatcher, argued the war had at last laid to rest the “Suez syndrome” – removing the inhibitions that had supposedly paralysed British governments since Britain’s disastrous invasion of Egypt in 1956. This was a myth that became one of the cornerstones of Thatcherism.

The failure of the invasion of Egypt in 1956 had long been lamented by many Tories. They saw it as a humiliating symbol of Britain’s imperial decline.

In fact, the invasion was one of the most scandalous episodes in modern British history, involving lying and dishonesty on a scale that put even George Bush and Tony Blair to shame.

Despite the undoubted humiliation of Suez, the “Suez syndrome” was really little more than an invention of the Tory right wing. It was a myth concocted by reactionary imperialists who could not come to terms with Britain’s decline. They still fantasised about Britain reasserting its imperial destiny and standing up to the US.

The reality was very different. After Suez, British governments, both Conservative and Labour, willingly subordinated themselves to the US. This so-called “special relationship” became the touchstone of British foreign policy.

The reason for this is quite clear. British capitalism had global interests, but now that the empire was gone, it no longer possessed the military power or political influence to protect them. Instead the British ruling class looked to the US to protect its interests.

This is, of course, still the case today. When Blair’s ambassador to the US was told that his job was “to get up Washington’s arse and stay there”, this was really just business as usual.

Even after Suez, however, far from being paralysed, Britain continued to wage colonial wars. In the early 1960s, British forces were fighting a guerrilla resistance in Aden and South Arabia.

This ended in a humiliating withdrawal in November 1967 for which the Tories blamed Labour prime minister Harold Wilson. This led elements within MI5 to conspire to bring the Wilson government down.

Much more significant was the “Confrontation” with Indonesia that began in 1963. At its height, this involved 59,000 British military personnel, much of the navy (some 80 ships) and even a visit by V-bombers to Singapore. It was intended to indicate to the Indonesians that nuclear attack was not ruled out.

The war ended in the late summer of 1966. Not only was the Indonesian challenge defeated, but the war helped precipitate a military coup in Indonesia. This saw over half a million people slaughtered and the destruction of the Communist Party with the secret encouragement of both the British and US governments.

Another important colonial war was fought in Dhofar, a province of the sultanate of Oman.

Communist rebellion

The British supported the sultan against a communist rebellion that lasted into 1976. What is interesting about both the Confrontation and the Dhofar war is that these conflicts were conducted in comparative secrecy and without publicity. There was not even any great celebration of success.

Both those wars were of strategic importance. The Falklands War was completely different. It was fought to keep Thatcher and the Conservatives in power. Her demand that people “rejoice” was right from the heart.

Thatcher had made the celebration of British military prowess an important part of her government’s public profile even before the Falklands.

In May 1980, for example, she had ordered the SAS into the Iranian embassy with instructions to summarily execute terrorists holding the embassy staff hostage. Throughout the rest of her time in office, she took every chance to identify herself with the SAS.

Her government, it is worth remembering, was also engaged in a “war against terrorism” – indeed they used those exact words.

Thatcher’s government tried to take advantage of the war in Northern Ireland to stoke up public fears for their own domestic political purposes.

The biggest march against the Falklands War was only 7,000 strong. But the public was not wildly jingoistic either. An opinion poll after the Belgrano was sunk showed that 60 percent did not believe the Falklands were worth the loss of a single life.

Global order

The Falklands War was about Britain’s place in the global order. Thatcher and her supporters wanted to send a clear message that the British state was ready, willing and able to defend its property and British companies abroad.

At the time it seemed an anomaly, but it heralded in a period in which war returned to the centre of the system.

Thatcher’s attempt to resurrect a wartime patriotism was intended in part to disguise her subordinate relationship with the US.

The Falklands Task Force was only despatched because the US, after some argument, agreed. In return, Thatcher did US president Ronald Reagan’s dirty work for him.

The SAS helped train Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge forces – followers of the country’s genocidal former leader Pol Pot who were now in exile in Thailand. While the US Congress would not allow the CIA to train them, the British parliament had no problems with this.

Unluckily for Blair, his time in office has coincided with the beginning of the breakdown of US domination.

While the US still possesses an overwhelming military supremacy over the rest of the world put together, this is not sustained by a similar economic superiority. In the long run, this means that US military domination will be unsustainable.

Even in the short term, while the US military has an overwhelming technological superiority, it has not got sufficient troops to impose its will on a determined resistance movement with popular support – as is being shown in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Whereas in the 19th and early 20th centuries the British state could draw on the empire, particularly India, for manpower (indeed the British army today still relies on the Gurkhas and is increasingly dependent on Commonwealth recruits), the US has no such reservoir of cheap, expendable cannon fodder.

What this means for Blair is that instead of sharing in the glory of US triumphs, he is sharing in the shame of US failures.

Blair dresses his militarism up as humanitarianism. His particular combination of dishonesty and sincerity worked for a while, but in the end came unstuck when he came up against popular opposition to war in 2003.

Blair and his cronies resorted to lying and dishonesty on a historic scale. The result has been disaster – because while the US has an extensive reach, it only has a weak grasp.

The consequent catastrophe in Iraq sees the US presiding over increasing sectarian strife in a vain attempt to defeat the resistance.

Unchecked by the most contemptible collection of MPs in the Labour Party’s history, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown remain absolutely committed to the US alliance.

If they think they can get away with it, they will support a future US attack on Iran. This is, of course, where the anti-war movement comes in.

John Newsinger is the author of several books including The Blood Never Dried – A People’s History of the British Empire. It is available from Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop – phone 020 7637 1848 or go to www.bookmarks.uk.com

From Rebellion to Liberation

Alex Doherty — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 12:06:09 +0000

John Newsinger’s new book, The Blood Never Dried, looks at the real story of the British Empire – this extract shows the reasons for the retreat from slavery.

The decisive episode in the overthrow of slavery in the British Caribbean was the great Jamaican revolt that began on 27 December 1831.

It was the most serious slave revolt in British history, involving some 60,000 slaves, engulfing an area of up to 750 square miles, causing immense material damage and costing many lives.

The conspiracy took shape in conditions of increasing hardship for the slave population, eventually embracing almost a hundred estates.

1831 was a year of drought that seriously affected the slaves own rations and the planters were intensifying the labour regime.

The slaves were aware of the growing abolitionist movement in Britain. They were also aware of the planters threats of armed revolt and secession to join with the United States.

The underground network that bound the conspiracy together was provided by the Baptist church. The official church was controlled by white missionaries, and although they were abolitionist in sympathy, they preached a message of patient obedience and resignation.

Alongside their church, however, there was the Native Baptist church, with its own black leadership, that preached a very different message.

The leader of the conspiracy, Samuel Sharpe, was the chief deacon at the colonys most important Baptist chapel.

Sharpe, according to the white missionary Henry Bleby, was the man whose active brain devised the project.

Sharpe used his position as a privileged slave to spread the conspiracy, recruiting new adherents, preaching liberation and preparing for the coming day.

At the end of prayer meetings on the plantations, selected individuals would be invited to stay behind after the service, and either Sharpe or other leaders would attempt to win them over.

The new recruits swore on the Bible not to return to work after Christmas except as free men and women.

Among the Biblical texts that spoke to their aspirations was John 8:36, If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.

What Sharpe and his fellow conspirators intended was a general strike that would continue until slavery was ended and the masters had agreed to a wage of 2s 6d (12.5p) a day.

The signal for the strike to begin was the firing of the sugar trash on the Kensington estate on the evening of 27 December.

Once this was lit, the trash was fired on estate after estate, as the slaves made their stand.

The strike was almost immediately transformed into a rebellion, although the mechanism whereby this occurred is not altogether clear.

Certainly, as far as the planters were concerned the strike was itself a rebellion to be put down by force, but there was also a widespread recognition on the part of the slaves that more militant action was necessary.

With hardly any arms, there was no way that they could hope to defeat the military, so instead they struck at their oppressors by firing the plantations.

The revolt was effectively crushed by the end of the first week of January 1832, but the hunting down of fugitive rebels continued for weeks afterwards. By the time the rebellion was officially over, the authorities claimed that 201 slaves had been killed. A figure of around 400 killed seems much more likely.

This was followed by a judicial massacre, which saw another 326 rebels executed after trials that were little more than a mockery.

Many slaves went to their deaths defiantly. Patrick Ellis told his firing squad to fire for I will never again be a slave.

Henry Bleby said of the revolt, The spirit of freedom had been so widely diffused if the abolition of slavery were not speedily effected by the peaceable method of legislative enactment, the slaves would assuredly take the matter into their own hands, and bring their bondage to a violent and bloody termination.

The Jamaican revolt had finally made clear that slavery was no longer a viable system of exploitation in the British Caribbean.

Fear of further outbreaks made the passage of the Emancipation Act a matter of urgency. Slavery was formally abolished on 1 August 1834 with some 750,000 men, women and children set free.

Interfering In Iran

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 12:13:11 +0000

At a time when Tony Blair and his partners in crime are starting to prepare British public opinion for US bombing raids on Iran, it is worth remembering the last time a Labour government prepared for military action against Iran.

This was not New Labour, but Old Labour, in point of fact, the 1945-51 Attlee government.

What provoked the government to prepare for military intervention was, incredible though it might seem, the Iranian decision to nationalise the countrys oil industry.

Iran had been part of Britains informal empire since before the First World War. Although not occupied and ruled by the British in the way that India was, nevertheless Iranian governments accepted that they had to govern their country the way the British wanted.

Failure to toe the line would provoke economic sanctions or intervention, either open or covert.

The discovery of oil at the beginning of the 20th century made the country all the more important to the British Empire. By the end of the Second World War, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), todays BP, was Britains largest overseas asset.

In effect the AIOC ran the Iranian oil industry in the interests of British capitalism, with Irans interests not so much coming second as not running at all.

Profit

In 1950, for example, the AIOC made £200 million in profit, but paid the Iranians only £16 million in royalties, profit sharing and taxes.

It paid considerably more in taxes to the British government (£50 million) than it did to the Iranian government. Moreover this imperialist rip-off was the work of a company which was 51 percent owned by the British state.

The Iranians sense of injustice was compounded by the fact that their oil cost more at home than it did in Britain. And, of course, British officials, businessmen and the like behaved with the same racist arrogance as they did throughout the British Empire.

At the end of April 1951 popular pressure forced the Shah, the British-backed ruler of Iran, to appoint a nationalist government with Mohammed Mossadeq as prime minister. On 1 May 1951 he announced the nationalisation of the oil industry.

The Labour government responded with outrage. As Emanuel Shinwell, the minister of defence, warned, If Persia was allowed to get away with it, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries would be encouraged to try it onthe next thing might be an attempt to nationalise the Suez Canal.

The foreign secretary, Peter Mandelsons grandfather, Herbert Morrison, was strongly in favour of sending the troops in to seize the oilfields and overthrow Mossadeq.

He confessed to one official that he wished he was Lord Palmerston, longing for the days when a gunboat could be sent to intimidate the natives.

Like Shinwell, he warned the cabinet that failure to exhibit firmness in this matter may prejudice our interests throughout the Middle East. There were not the troops available to seize the oilfields though.

The Attlee government had already committed British troops to fight alongside the US in Korea, there was a brutal colonial war underway in Malaya and thousands of British troops were confronting the Egyptians who wanted their Canal Zone military bases back.

Instead, it was decided to seize the Abadan oil refinery in the appropriately named Operation Buccaneer. Hopefully this would bring about Mossadeqs downfall.

What stopped this imperial adventure? Remarkably enough it was US opposition. The US was intent on undermining the British position throughout the Middle East and made clear that it would not support military action against Iran.

Attlee summed up the cabinet discussion, concluding that it was the general view of the cabinet that, in the light of the United States attitude force could not be used to hold the refinery We could not afford to break with the United States on an issue of this kind.

Once Labour lost power, Churchills Tory government cooperated with the US in covert action to overthrow Mossadeq.

Sanctions, introduced by Labour, had wrecked the Iranian economy and in August 1953 a CIA financed and organised coup (MI6 was a junior partner) was staged.

Mossadeq was overthrown and the Shah was installed as an absolute monarch, ruling through imprisonment, torture, execution and fear. There were no complaints about his regimes methods from either the British or US governments.

The Iranian oil industry was placed in the hands of an international consortium in which the British found themselves with a much reduced 40 percent share as the US pushed them aside.

The US was replacing Britain as the dominant power in the Middle East and British governments were reluctantly beginning to realise that they were now US imperialisms junior partner.

English Atrocities

Alex Doherty — Wed, 04 May 2005 13:16:23 +0000

Amid the recent outpouring of books and articles rehabilitating the purposes and practices of empire, two works have stood out for their unflinching scrutiny of British colonialism in Kenya. David Andersons Histories of the Hanged and Caroline Elkinss Britains Gulag provide complementary accounts of the Mau Mau Emergency, the former an overall study of the rebellion, the latter focusing on the Kikuyu experience of repression, and in particular on the mass detention camps through which at least 160,000 Africans passed between 1952 and 1960. Anderson, a British Africanist, has mined the substantial body of court records of the Mau Mau trials preserved in the Kenya National Archive and reconstructs a detailed account of the rebellion, providing a vivid portrait of the struggle for Nairobi. His Histories of the Hanged is the best book to appear on the Kenya Emergency so far. Elkins, at Harvard, had originally intended to write a history of the success of Britains civilizing mission in the detention camps of Kenya as her doctoral thesis; finding that British official records had been systematically destroyed on Kenyan independence in 1963, she was driven to attempt an oral history of the Emergency from the Kikuyu side. In her interviews with some three hundred men and women, which provide the bulk of the material for her trenchant book, she discovered an appalling catalogue of hardship, abuse, torture and murder.

Anderson and Elkins are not, to be sure, the first to reveal the scale and horror of the British response to the rebellion, under the governorship of Sir Evelyn Baring, scion of the banking dynasty and son of the British Consul-General in Egypt. In terms of imperial brutality, it was on a par with the suppression of the United Irishmen in the 1790s and Indian mutineers in the 1850s. As well as informing such works as Ngũgĩ wa Thiongos A Grain of Wheat, the Emergency has been the subject of much scholarly investigation, above all in Kenya, over the past few decades. But whereas studies such as Robert Edgertons excellent Mau Mau: An African Crucible (1990) passed virtually unnoticed in mainstream consciousness at the time, the two volumes under review have received considerable coverage. What accounts for the shift? Much of the contemporary resonance of Andersons and Elkinss books must stem from the renewed awareness of imperialism created by the Blair governments participation in the invasion of Iraq. Abu Ghraib, Falluja and British troops brutalization of prisoners in Basra all haunt these pages, in which the Empires disgraceful record in Kenya receives the scrupulous attention it deserves.

The Mau Mau revolt was in large part a response to white land-grabbing in Kenya. Settlement had been accelerated after 1902 as a means of repaying the exorbitant cost of the MombasaLake Victoria railway, through the development of commercial agriculture in the colony. The British had established the East Africa Protectorate in 1895, and instituted direct rule in 1920. Asian immigrants had built the railway and provided the empire with dependable clerical staff and service-sector workers. But as in Rhodesia, white settlement was the core of imperial policy. It increased steadily after the First World War and accelerated sharply after 1945, the settler population going from 21,000 in 1938 to 40,000 in 1953, with about 2,500 white-owned farms. Astonishingly, the settlers numbers doubled during the course of the Emergencymaking it plain that the Colonial Office had no intention of abandoning white rule. Londons arms-length system of government and investment in racial hierarchy had made the white settlers the most powerful actors in Kenyan politics, blocking any concessions to the black majority whose land they had expropriated. The ethnic group most affected by white settlement were the Kikuyu, who numbered 1.4 million by the late 1940s, and had increasingly been subjected to land hunger and wage squeezes as white settlement displaced them from their fertile highlands. Prevented from owning land outside the Native Reserves, as of the early 1930s most Kikuyu faced a choice of three forms of destitution: to return to the depleted soils and land shortages of the Reserves; work Europeans land outside the Reserves as insecure tenants; or join those flooding into Nairobis Eastland slums in search of employment.

The settlers stranglehold on the political system was strengthened by an agricultural boom during the Second World War, making less likely any compromise with the moderate nationalist movement that had emerged in the 1920s, led by such figures as Jomo Kenyatta. By the early 1950s, a space had been created for the development of the mass revolutionary movement among the Kikuyu that has become known as Mau Mauthe British label stuck, though it had a number of names and was often referred to by its own members simply as the Movement. Trade union activists were among its key protagonists, especially around the time of the 1950 general strike, and a prominent role was played by ex-servicemen, radicalized by the anti-colonial movement in India during the Second World War. (Waruhiu Itote, better known by his nom de guerre General China, recalled in his memoirs that he had also been influenced by the Haitian Revolution, recounted to him by an African American soldier.)

The Movement derived support from three overlapping sources. In the Reserves, there was bitter resentment against both the settlers and the British-appointed chiefs, who prospered through their collaboration with the authorities. A second strand consisted of the squattersKikuyu families who had moved to the white farms of the Rift Valley or White Highlands as tenant farmers, but were gradually pushed out, evicted or forcibly repatriated from the 1940s on, their wages and living standards falling dramatically. They were to form the backbone of the insurrection in the countryside, where guerrilla forces were known as the Land and Freedom Army. These were complemented by a third, urban componentthe Kikuyu living in Nairobi, either unemployed or working as railwaymen, street-vendors, taxi-drivers, porters. Activists here ensured that Nairobi was, in Andersons words, the Mau Maus beating heart.

The rebels distinctive mode of recruitment was the practice of oathinga Kikuyu tradition designed to enhance solidarity in times of hardship, which had been taken up by squatters resisting eviction in the mid-40s. It had then spread to Nairobi and the Reserves, and was in the process transformed into an oath of fidelity to the anti-colonial resistance, broken on pain of death. British propaganda subsequently made much of the ritual elements of the oathing ceremony, as atavistic throwbacks among a semi-savage people; Anderson in particular draws attention to the often coercive nature of the oaths. But it is clear that by 1951, the Movement enjoyed broad mass support among Kikuyu; its militants soon wrested control of the Kenya African Union from the moderates and began to acquire weapons and cash, often by criminal means, to prepare for armed anti-colonial struggle. The government responded to raids and attacks on collaborators by levying punitive collective fines on villages, and violence escalated during 1952; in October of that year, the assassination of Paramount Chief Waruhiu prompted Baring, the colonys newly arrived Governor, to declare a state of emergency.

The British were confronted with an underground revolutionary movement about which they knew very little, and which had already enlisted the great majority of the Kikuyu in its ranks and was looking to extend its influence to other tribal groups. Baring adopted the settlers line, identifying any African nationalists as Mau Mauand immediately imprisoning Kenyatta as the man behind the rebellion, when he was in fact one of its leading opponents. Though the British initially thought cordon-and-search operations combined with mass arrests would decapitate the movement and bring about its speedy collapse, their hopes for a return to normality were soon dashed. For the moment, the Movement held the initiative in Nairobi, dominating the African districts of the city and organizing boycotts of public transport and collaborationist businesses. Anderson describes how urban militants had taken their message to the mass of unskilled and illiterate Kikuyu, appealing to ethnic solidarity, but also to the embryonic class-consciousness of the unemployed, the disadvantaged and the dispossessed. This proved a potent mix. One of the great strengths of Andersons account is his ability to get down to street level. We encounter Kariithi Muthomo, an activist arrested on his way to carry out an assassination in January 1954, and Hussein Mohamed, the Special Branch informer who betrayed him for a handsome retainer of up to 100 shillings each month (the average African wage was 77 shillings). Mohamed was shot in broad daylight for his treachery and left to die in the gutter; Muthomo, by contrast, when sentenced to hang for possession of a firearm, defiantly told the judge: I am dying for my land and I am not afraid to die for that.

The man who broke the rebellion in Nairobi was General George Erskine, who had served in Palestine against the Zionist insurgency. Operation Anvil began on 24 April 1954 and continued for a month. British troops and men from the Kenya Police Reservein which settlers were prominentrounded up and screened the citys African population, with over 24,000 Kikuyu being detained in hastily erected barbed-wire enclosures. This was, as Anderson observes, a simply astonishing number: nearly half the total number of Kikuyu in the city had been imprisoned without trial, for lack of identity papers or for carrying a union card, or else after being picked out by hooded informants. The crackdown came before the Movement was strong enough to sustain such a blow and, though it still had sufficient support to pose a continued challenge in the countryside, it was never well-enough armed or organized to have any serious prospect of victory. By 1957 the Land and Freedom Army was pinned down in the central forests, and militarily all but defeated.

Operation Anvil was the turning point in the struggle, and Anderson does it full justice. Less adequate is his account of the villagization campaign which began in June 1954; though he acknowledges it was the most punitive measure carried out by the British, he devotes less than half a page of text to it. This is a very serious gap but, fortunately, it is filled by Elkins, who identifies forced resettlement of the Kikuyu as a key element of the counterinsurgency. Here the British drew on the Malayan experience, duplicating General Templers methods against the communist guerrillas. By the end of 1955, over a million Kikuyu had been marched out of their homesteads and resettled behind barbed wire in 804 villages, in an attempt to isolate anti-colonial fighters from their supporters, a decade before Samuel Huntington introduced strategic hamlets to Vietnam. Ruth Ndegwa told Elkins of the experience:

“We had not been given any warning beforehand that our houses were going to be burned. No one in the whole ridge knew that we were to move. The police just came one day and drove everybody out of their homes, while the Home Guards burned the houses right behind us. Our household goods were burned down, including the foodstuffs like maize, potatoes and beans, which were in our stores. Everything, even our clothes were burned down. One only saved what one was wearing at the time.”

She was transported to the protected village of Kiamariga, having been separated from her children in the process, only to find that she and the other new villagers were expected to construct it themselves. These Kikuyu, mostly women and children, were used as forced labour to build their own hutsuntil they had done so, Elkins was told, they just slept on the groundand to erect perimeter fences intended more to keep them in than rebels out. They found themselves subjected to a police regime more restrictive than anything in apartheid South Africa. Dissent was inevitably punished by beatings, rape, torture and murder. The new villages were stalked by hunger and disease. This, Elkins discovered, was the reality of Britains civilizing mission.

Elkinss title, however, comes not from these prison-villages, but from the network of detention and hard-labour camps that Barings administration had established by 1955, known simply as the Pipeline. Here a truly horrific system of re-education was instituted under the inspiration of the anthropologist Louis Leakey and the ethnopsychiatrist Dr J. C. Carothers. The Mau Mau oath, Leakey claimed, could be dissolved by a process of confession, followed by a cleansing ceremony. Detainees were supposed to progress along the Pipeline from the initial hard-core screening centres, where they were tortured until they admitted taking an oath, to rehabilitation through hard labourthough their recalcitrance could reverse the process. The systematic destruction of records for Kenya at the Colonial Office makes it impossible to say how many camps there were or how many people were detained. Elkins concludes that there were over a hundred camps, but acknowledges that individual loyalist chiefs and white settlers also maintained their own punishment and interrogation centres. At the height of the Emergency nearly 80,000 Africansoverwhelmingly Kikuyu, but there were also Masai and Kamba detaineeswere being held without trial; but, as Elkins observes, this was the greatest number at one time and not the overall figure, which she estimates at anywhere between 160,000 and 320,000.

The tortures to which many of those detained were routinely subjected were extreme. Several of the former settlers whom Elkins interviewed spoke of brutally maiming, even castrating and torturing to death detainees with as much concern as they talked about the weather. The British security forces were never held to account for actions which could replicate those of the Gestapo at its worst. A brief attempt was made to clean up the Kenya Police in 1954, with London police commissioner Arthur Young brought in to reorganize the force as he had done Malayas; but he resigned within a year in disgust at both the kps methods and Barings support for them. One of Youngs subordinates privately told Labour mp Barbara Castle that conditions in the internment camps were worse than he himself had ever experienced in the Japanese prisoner of war camps. Castle, together with a number of other backbenchers, attempted to confront a Conservative government that effectively condoned the conduct of the security forces and was engaged in a determined cover-up. They received little support, however, from the Labour front benchafter all, Attlee had been keen to reconsolidate rather than let go of the Empire after the loss of India, and it was not only Conservatives who felt the need to cover Britains colonial tracks.

The detention camps and barbed-wire villages by no means exhausted the British repertoire of repression. The second great strength of Andersons account is his devastating examination of the judicial massacre carried out in Kenya between 1952 and 1960. Altogether 1,090 men were hanged for Mau Mau offences during the Emergency. Of these, 346 were executed for murder, 472 for possessing arms or ammunition, 210 for consorting with rebels and 62 for administering illegal oaths. Baring had wanted to include possession of flammable materials in the schedule of capital crimes, but Churchill, then Prime Minister, had objected that men would be hanged for carrying matches. Anderson puts names to many of these victimsWakianda Gachunga, hanged for possession of two rounds of ammunition, and Karanja Hinga, for thirteen roundsand tells of eight detainees at Embakasi camp who, having overpowered their guards and escaped, were recaptured and hanged for possession of the guards weapons. But more than these details, it is the scale of the hangings that is striking: as Anderson points out, in Kenya there were more than double the number of executions carried out against convicted terrorists in Algeria, and many more than in all the other British colonial emergencies of the postwar periodin Palestine, Malaya, Cyprus and Aden.

The rebellion in Kenya needs to be set in this wider context. It coincided with an upsurge of national liberation movements across Africa, resulting in independence for the bulk of the continents colonies by the early 1960sfirst Sudan in 1956, then Ghana in 1957, with much of British and French Africa following in 1960. The exceptions to this pattern were largely states with significant settler populationsAngola, Mozambique, Zimbabwewhere protracted wars were fought into the 1970s, and sovereignty not gained until 1975 in the case of the former two, and 1980 in the latter. In this sense, Kenyas independence might be regarded as having come relatively early, in 1963. But perhaps a closer and more telling comparison is Algeria, where there were also a large number of settlers, and where an armed revolutionary movement forced the retreat of the colonial power in 1962.

Anderson attempts a certain relativization of the British atrocities through comparison with the Mau Mau killings. But important as it is to analyse critically the conduct of insurgent forcesincluding the brutal Lari massacre of 1953the scale is simply incommensurate. Thirty-two white settlers were killed during the Emergency, and roughly 1,800 pro-government Africans. But as Anderson suggests, the number of Mau Mau rebels killed in combat was almost certainly over 20,000, and Elkins argues on the basis of census projections that some 130,000 Kikuyu lost their lives. Would white-settler rule have survived, as in Rhodesia, if the Movement had not taken up arms? Certainly no British government was ever going to dismantle it of its own volition. Indeed it was the Movement, against all the odds and in the face of horrific repression, that forced the British to withdraw support from the white settlers and eventually hand the country over to moderate nationalists. Kenyatta, whose kanu party won the elections of 1963 by a landslide, was keen to ensure that the spectre of Kikuyu rebellion did not rise againabove all because his regimes key personnel, and main beneficiaries, were those who had been loyal to British rule. (Anderson expresses a certain sympathy for the latter throughout, in contrast to Elkinss more uncompromising tone.) The official line in Kenya for years echoed Kenyattas words in 1968, when he wrote that Mau Mau was a disease which has been eradicated and must never be remembered again.

Nevertheless, the graves of anti-colonial fighters continued to be sites of pilgrimage, and rebel veterans associations gradually emerged into public life; since the 2002 election of Mwai Kibaki, whose family reportedly had connections to the Movement, the issues of how to commemorate the dead and compensate survivors have been the subject of widespread discussion. Needless to say, this has not been the case in the former imperial metropole, where amnesia about British crimes in Kenya has been all but total, and the outcry at the time of the repression relatively mutedthough the killing of detainees at Hola camp in 1959 was condemned even by Enoch Powell. To explain this, both Anderson and Elkins point to the governments success in demonizing its opponents, portraying them as savages against whom any methods were justified; race, too, would seem to have been an important factor. Even so, the way that all knowledge of the Emergency in Britain disappeared in subsequent years is quite astonishingmost people, including those on the left, knew considerably more about the misconduct of the French in Algeria and Americans in Vietnam than about that of their own authorities in Kenya.

What explains this myopia? One of the most persistent myths about the British Empire concerns its end, now often recalled in a nostalgic haze as a dignified, peaceable retreat, and certainly a far cry from the mêlées accompanying French withdrawal from its colonies. Obliterated from view have been, among others, the catastrophe of Partition in India, the brutal repression of insurgency in Malaya and the vicious campaign against the liberation movement in Kenya. Anderson and Elkins have painstakingly recovered much important material, and it is to be hoped that their work will make such omissions impossible in future. Both books perform a valuable service in confronting neo-imperial mystifications with the real casualties and costs of decolonization.