Journalism

Journalism

I worked for six years in newspapers, four of them on Fleet Street, and I continue to write reviews and occasional opinion pieces for newspapers and magazines.  I have written for the Times, Sunday Times, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph.
Opinion Pieces

I have written about corruption in local government and a decline in representative democracy.  In My Democracy, Which Democracy?  I wrote for the OUP Blog 
'I support democracy. I like to think I do so to the extent of willingness to fight and perhaps die for it. This is not so extravagant a claim, within living memory the men in my family were called upon to do exactly that.
Universal suffrage is consequently my birth-right, but what is it that I am being permitted to do with my vote, when the political parties have so adjusted the system to suit themselves?'

Other pieces included comments on current events such as I Was (not) A Teenage Revolutionary for the Daily Telegraph where I contrasted the radicalism of the past with that of today, 'it was 1969 and the revolution was exciting - you had to be part of the movement or history would pass you by.'  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11276136/I-Was-Not-A-Teenage-Revolutionary.html
I am printing in full some pieces which appeared appeared in national newspapers.
My Loyalty to the Party has Reached Breaking Point
The local elections on May 4 will be a personal and sad occasion for me. On that day, I will be the first person in four generations to vote against Labour.

My family voted Labour for as long as they had a vote and there was a Labour candidate standing. But what the party has done with the town halls is such an affront to any conception of public representation that loyalty is stretched to and beyond breaking point.

It is often said that New Labour abandoned the socialism of Old Labour. In fact it only abandoned half of socialism: all that stuff about fairness and justice and equal opportunities, the revolutionary zeal to make the popular will manifest. Unfortunately, that was the bit I liked about it.

The New Labour project was to retain and surge forward with other aspects of socialist systems of government: the huge budgets on salaries and prestige projects; the centralisation of decision making; the suffocating bureaucracy; the reliance on managers and party apparatchiks (none of whom are ever responsible when things go wrong) the obsession with leaders.

Oh, the worship of leadership, ‘strong local leadership’ in the deputy prime minister’s words, as if politics consisted of nothing else. In the world of New Local Government manager shall mumble mealy-mouthed excuses to manager and each think themselves leaders of high calibre. I always thought local government was about representation - I should have been focusing on the leadership principle.

This government imposed on us, with no consultation with the general public, the 2000 Local Government Act. With this the division between elected councillors and appointed officials has been blurred to the extent that none of them, are representing the public, all are managers of the same system that pays all their salaries and supplies all their pensions. The ‘Local Leadership, Local Choice’ that John Prescott promised us is in fact a choice between identikit managers

In the abandonment of socialism there is a supposed embrace of the market system that is carried out with every trick of presentation and jargon, with glossy presentational brochures, bar charts and focus groups. What is not done is the very reason the market system is in any way admirable in the first place: because it supplies value for money. Local government today does not do that, hence the council tax bill that has increased by 91 per cent in the past ten years over a time in which councillors have paid themselves vastly more for doing a job which used to be voluntary public service.

I have even witnessed that jewel of the old Eastern European justice system, a show trial: the humiliation of ‘working people and their families’ by a flagship New Labour council in pursuit of a dubious policy goal.

The council in question spent £600,000 to try to persuade council tenants to vote for their homes to be sold off. The local housing group, containing organisations representing council tenants and private tenants, campaigned successfully against the council: the sell-off was stopped when tenants voted against.

Instead of assessing the housing policy in the light of public mistrust, the New Labour response was to attack those who campaigned against its failed sell-off. Community representation was not a guide for future policy but an obstacle to their organisational plans.

The methods used were the manipulation of council procedures, unaccountable meetings, and bogus legal threats. The council tenants’ organisation was forced into liquidation. Once it used to be that canvassers could expect a welcome on any council estate, and tenants privately renting were natural supporters. The organisation representing private tenants (to which I had often acted as an advisor) had been set up by working class people to deal with their own bad landlords, they were a genuine indigenous, grass-roots organisation full of lifelong Labour people. 

This private tenants’ group was ‘tried’ by a meeting at which allegations were made about the members of the organisation behind closed doors which the people accused were not allowed to know. In a Kafka-esque charade they were then invited in to give a defence to allegations, the terms of which they were ignorant.

The more cynical or conspiratorial folk believed the leading councillors involved were on the take, receiving a payoff from a housing company for selling off council homes on the cheap. I doubt this, I think they were just so blind to any concept of public service that their personal needs were perfectly satisfied with the pleasure of hitting a policy target. They had become management automata.

Of course, none of this ever went before a committee open to the public gaze and subject to questioning. Many councillors (who I suppose should be described as ‘Old Labour’) protested at the injustice of these procedures but to no avail, as back bench members they had no power.

While this all may seem like a little local story, it is not the scale of it but the mind set that it reveals which appals. The attitudes it displays, with the gaping hole where there should be natural justice or even compassion, are so widely repeated across the country that it is clearly a symptom of the system of local government that has been imposed on the town halls.

New Labour has lost the values that made the party worth supporting. It is simply no longer a vehicle for social progress. Indeed, there is evidence it is going in reverse.

Goodbye New Labour, now I’ll vote strategically for any candidate willing to do something to restrain council arrogance.

                                          The Independent 21 April 2006
What Next for Councils of Despair? 
Angry voices are being raised about the state of local government, just two and a half years after the reforms of the Local Government Act 2000 completely transformed the way town halls operate.

An independent organisation, LGOWatch, called on Sunday for the setting up of an independent local government complaints commission to bring order into a system it described as ‘morally corrupt’ at its first national conference held in Croydon.

A strong warning light should be flashing in Whitehall, for the 2000 Act was supposed to herald a regime of quality, efficiency and leadership. In fact it has meant the introduction of the payroll vote and pork barrel politics into English local government, along with the acceleration of an arrogant, managerial style of operation.

One fact, glaring and inescapable is that the total council tax bill in England has risen by 30% in the years the Local Government Act has been in operation, from £14 billion in 2000-1 to $20 billion in 2004-5 (all councils had to have a new constitution in place by December 2002, though some had changed before that).

In the old system local decisions were made in – admittedly sometimes interminable - committee meetings by councillors informed by council officers. Council officers were paid experts with very limited decision-making powers. Councillors were elected representatives who were paid nothing but expenses and small sums, never enough to make a real difference to someone’s personal wealth.

The Local Government Act 2000 changed all that. Now councillors are paid and officers make decisions. The Act was lobbied for by those who would gain most: senior officers who would get enhanced power and prestige to justify salary increases; senior councillors who would get generous salaries and pension rights in place of their meagre attendance allowances; and private industry supplying local councils who would gain from an accelerated privatisation policy.

They worked together in organisations such as the New Local Government Network of ‘senior local government figures’ working with the private sector (so-called ‘corporate partners’) and seeking to ‘transform local services’. Well, they did that.

Councils were now going to be run by a mayor in consultation with a ‘cabinet’ of senior councillors and a rump of ordinary members who were supposed to be operating a ‘scrutiny’ function over the mayor and cabinet.

The voters were, of course, consulted: they were asked whether they wanted the cabinet system with a directly elected mayor or the system with a mayor appointed by the council. They were not asked if they wanted to retain the committee system that had maintained probity and gradual social development since 1835. It was the sort of ‘consultation’ we were going to get used to under New Local Government.

The word ‘leadership’ recurs in promotion of the supposed benefits of the new system, but how many people were ever looking to local councillors for ‘leadership’? (though perhaps it is more than were looking to local government officers for the same quality).

Slow deliberation in committees and public meetings on hot issues is now replaced by a series of ‘consultations’ on policy, though genuine consultation is utterly alien to the managerial mind and what in fact happens is the glossy presentation of decisions a few senior councillors have already taken. It is rule by the sort of people who think the solution to life’s problems is to introduce a management consultant.

Why is it all costing so much more?  

One reason is the lack of financial brakes before decisions are taken. ‘Scrutiny committees’ supposedly examine council actions, but scrutiny after the act is no scrutiny at all, particularly as the majority party will almost never condemn the actions of its own cabinet members – or they might end up not only out of office but out of pocket.  

Even the possibility of suffering personal loss through misconduct has now been removed from local government. Councillors used to be subject to having to make up financial losses caused through their personal misconduct. These ‘surcharge’ provisions were repealed and replaced by an obligation on councillors to sign a code of conduct.  

The proposals were promised to ‘combat local sleaze’ but introducing large sums of money into the system seems a bizarre way to achieve that.

The money councillors receive varies vastly according to no obvious principle. Thus the leader of Manchester City Council gets £48,765 while the mayor of my local council in south London (only one of 32 London boroughs, after all) gets £71,543.  Ordinary councillors in Basingstoke, with no special responsibilities, get £5,556; in Lewisham they get £9,025.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister knows that this issue of the salaries councillors pay themselves, for work which was done on a voluntary basis a few years ago, is the hottest of hot potatoes. Asked if there are figures kept for payments to councillors nationally, or even guidance on a national scale of remuneration, they distanced themselves: ‘It is for the authority to decide in the light of recommendations [from independent remuneration panels] the level of allowances paid to members. The ODPM has no role in providing guideline figures. Nor have we historically or currently collected information on levels of payments actually made by local authorities.’  

By the way, the ‘bad news’ that Jo Moore wanted to bury after September 11 was about giving selected local councillors enhanced pension benefits.

Local government always seems small and uninteresting compared to the big questions of the day, but in fact it is vast, employing 2.1 million people in England and Wales and consuming a quarter of all government spending. The local is national.

Have the changes of the Local Government Act passed even the electoral test and led to increased participation or voting levels? Again, to cite Lewisham as an example because its figures are easy for me to come by: turnout was 29.7% at the 1998 elections under the old system and 25.6% at the 2002 election with all the bells and whistles of a directly elected mayoral contest. No cheers for New Local Government there, then.

National government has created a system of local administration in which the arrogant abuse of authority is more likely, and probable.  Sunday’s conference was a straw in the wind but still a sign of engagement by non-partisan citizens. More power to them.
                                                                 The Times 1 August 2005
The Bite of the Watchdog
Not before time, the Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is today hearing evidence on the effectiveness of the Local Government Ombudsman.

Anyone who does not feel a sense of injustice at the way local authorities routinely conduct themselves has, I would suggest, experienced so much shabby behaviour they have lost their sense of outrage.

The need for an effective body policing local government excesses is more important now than ever before. Who monitors the slowly unfolding disaster that is local government under the Local Government Act 2000 changes? These ‘reforms’ destroyed the distinction between local government officers and councillors. Officers used to be paid but had limited decision-making powers. Councillors were unpaid elected representatives. Now they are all paid and officers have greater authority.

The introduction of money into the system of local representation is an open door to corruption – this is not to say that corruption is invariably dining with your local council, just that the door is open, the lamps trimmed and the seat warm. Mr Graft will not be turned away.

The ballot box theoretically gives the public a choice, but no one gives the public to the right to vote for councillors who are not paid, or a council in which they can participate in public committee meetings. Now there are no unpaid councillors and most of the committee meetings have been abolished. An increasingly popular electoral choice is for people not to vote, to demonstrate their disgust with the system, or vote for a joke candidate such as a football mascot.

With both councillors and officers paid for participating in the system, there is no incentive for anyone to rein in its cost, or administrative excesses. Our one defence against misuse of local power is the Ombudsman’s office, set up in 1974 to investigate ‘maladministration’ leading to ‘injustice.’ The Act under which the Ombudsman operates does not define injustice, he has to do that himself, and define it he does.

Of 11,600 complaints sent to the LGO for England in 2003/4, only 180 cases, that is fewer than 1.6% of the total, were found to be maladministration. How is such an absurdly low figure of findings in favour of people who think themselves aggrieved reached?

I was given an object lesson in Ombudsman investigation when I represented a small community group in a London borough who suffered legal bullying culminating in a travesty of a hearing in which in which the organisation was called before a group of three councillors and three officers and accused of something written on a ‘secret agenda’ so they had to defend themselves from a charge which they did not know.

When this abomination was reported to the Ombudsman he found that the abuse of legal services to achieve a dubious policy goal was ‘not something in which the Ombudsman can become involved’ as ‘I believe that the Council is entitled to consult whichever officers it believes is appropriate.’ The Ombudsman’s officer claimed he could not question the decision to hold a meeting in confidential session and to deny the subjects of the meeting information about the charges against them as ‘this is a decision it [the council] is entitled to reach and not something that the Ombudsman can question.’

One wonders how much more glaring an injustice the Ombudsman has to see before taking action. The underlying problem is that the Ombudsman’s office is too close to the organisation it is charged with investigating. Two of the three current English Ombudsmen are former local authority chief officers, all three deputy Ombudsmen worked in local government before joining the commission. How can we expect impartiality from people who owe their status and their professional background to precisely the local government ethos they are called upon to investigate? Their automatic assumption seems to be that councils have acted in a fair and public spirited manner, and that the complainant is in the wrong. 

Do these local issues really matter? Local government already suffers from a lack of scrutiny, as it is all just too little for national coverage and few local newspapers are up to the challenge of investigative reporting. Yet local government is not little, it is the biggest employer in the country, with 2.1 million staff in England and Wales, spending a quarter of all national government expenditure. The local is national and we should pay more attention to a fair system of complaints about it.

A local government complaints commission, on the same lines as the new Police Complaints Commission, would not be a solution to the abuses of local government, but it would at least prevent the obvious absurdity of the guardians guarding themselves.
                                                   The Times 15 March 2005
Reporter
I was trained as a reporter mainly on the South East London Mercury.  I then worked on Fleet Street for four years, contributing to  the Evening Standard, Daily Mirror, News of the World, Guardian, Daily Star and others - basically whoever was using freelances.  I think the pic on the right is the only one that exists of me actively in hack mode, showing 'tough and uncompromising reporting' which was what was said of me when I was given the Young Reporter of the Year award at the British Press Awards. 
Reviews

I have reviewed widely for national newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Times, Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph.  I currently contribute to the New Statesman, Literary Review, Times Literary Supplement and Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine.  Sometimes I feel a publication has such an original voice that I should do my bit to give it attention, so I write about it for blogs.  Reviews of two such books follow.
Cruel but True Memoir of Life on the Margins

'Some writers are called “fearless” because they take a shot at the government or patriarchy from a swivel chair in an office. Carraway is on the literary barricades and she genuinely has no fear – or shame or humility or any of the other emotions that keep people polite and in check. What she does have is a lot of anger...'

https://insidecroydon.com/2019/07/31/carraways-cruel-but-true-memoir-of-life-in-the-margins/         
Journals Vol 1 (1996-2001): A Soho Golden Age

'In the 1880s the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun roamed the streets of Christiania (Oslo) and wrote a book about what he felt: Hunger (1890). That is what is in the book: an account of his famished wanderings. In a work widely described as being the foundation text of modernism, it introduces stream of consciousness, interior monologue, it has no background or plot, his human inter-actions are misunderstandings, his logic for his actions (such as it is) is bizarre and personal. 

Reading Ernst Graf’s journal made me think again and again of the starving Norwegian. The narrator, guided by nothing but habit and eroticism goes to strip clubs, porn cinemas and prostitutes. He remarks, ‘Any day out in London that does not end in me getting my cock out, or being completely naked, is an incomplete day.’ This is Knut Hamsun with a hard-on.'











No Modernism Without Lesbians


by Diana Souhami



Head of Zeus     pp456           £25


This is a piece I did for one of the literary magazines which was commissioned before the Great Beastliness which is Covid-19. By the time the piece was submitted there were fewer advertisers, fewer pages, fewer buyers, and this review never ran.  This was a shame because it was one of the better books of 2020 so I am giving it all the life I can by running it here.

It was said there were two things you must never ask Gertrude Stein: about being a lesbian and what her writing meant. She probably wouldn’t have liked this book which takes lesbians and modernism as a theme, the latest in the series by Diana Souhami that she refers to as ‘Di’s dykes.’


Souhami suggest that throwing off patriarchal authority in personal relationships meant walking through a door leading towards the dismantling of nineteenth century artistic structures which is the basis of modernism. She depicts Paris between the wars as fostering the birth of the modernist movement, led by renegades who took to Paris to escape the disapproval of fathers and of censors. 


The hero of such disapproval who emerges from this book is Bryher, the wealthy patron who said, ‘I have rushed to the penniless young not with bowls of soup but with typewriters.’ She made contributions to subsidising modernism in literature, painting, magazines, film-making and architecture and helped scores of Jews, including Sigmund Freud, to escape the Nazis.


The daughter of a British shipping magnate, she early on cut her hair short and abandoned ‘Annie Winifred Ellerman’ to become known by the single name Bryher. ‘She was sure if she hoped enough she would turn into a boy,’ she wrote of her younger self. As an adult she was not exactly feminine; when her mother bought her a floral chiffon dress she turned up at Drury Lane to take her place in the royal box wearing it inside out and back to front.


At 27, Bryher married Robert McAlmon, an impoverished, homosexual, poet, so she could leave her parents’ home and receive an enhanced income under a trust fund that she was due only on marriage. The parents were delighted she had at last turned out normal and forced upon the couple ‘a cascade of gifts and other unimaginable bridal atrocities.’


She was enamoured of Hilda Doolittle, the poet H.D., who was, ‘the most beautiful figure that I have ever seen with a face that came directly from a Greek statue, and the body of an athlete.’ H.D. was bisexual, but was unable to give Bryher the love she required, even though they lived together for many years.


In a bid to make sense of H.D.’s sexuality, Bryher introduced her to Havelock Ellis and she began analysis with him. His contribution to her sexual education was to have her piss on him: ‘a large stream gushed afar in the glistering liquid arch’ as he put it. Souhami notes, ‘the therapeutic value of this to H.D. was unclear.’ H.D. was later analysed by Freud who she told of his rival’s penchant for urolagnia at which he, ‘bust his cat-whiskers with joy,’ she recollected.


Another of Souhami’s lesbians essential to modernism was Sylvia Beach who started the progressive bookshop Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank where she was visited by James Joyce. As she put it, ‘he put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw.’ Undeterred by a lack of capital, experience and all the requisites of a publisher, she determined to publish Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would do so. Joyce sponged off Beach for years (taking money given to her by Bryher), and almost sent her mad with revisions to his manuscript. Once it was a success, he started doing deals with other publishers to get the book out abroad, which undercut her market.


Beach’s bookshop was the centre of modernist life where she welcomed Americans fleeing censorship and prohibition at home where, ‘They couldn’t get Ulysses and they couldn’t get a drink.’ Sometimes visitors just wanted directions to Gertrude Stein’s place at 27 rue de Fleurus where she used to sit in her drawing room surrounded by adoring young men. Her partner Alice B. Toklas entertained women in the kitchen at her own instigation: she was pathologically jealous and wanted to be the only woman near her beloved. This did not of itself keep sex away from Stein; Ernest Hemingway said, ‘I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it and it was a good healthy feeling.’ He both mused on the weight of her breasts and said she was like a brother to him; it was an emotional state of affairs which Souhami describes, with her customary restraint, as ‘unusual.’


Stein is one of the women in what Souhami calls her ‘daisy-chain of famous lesbians’ to whom she has previously paid attention, in Gertrude and Alice of 1991.  Her Wild Girls of 2004 looked at the life of Natalie Barney who also appears here with her ambition to make Paris the sapphic centre of the western world.


Barney was American, as were Stein, Toklas, Beach and H.D. She shared bed, couchette, polar bear rug, riverbank or wooded glade with many women, and not always one at a time. ‘Love has always been the main business of my life’ she explained. Weaker women would ‘bathe vicariously in Natalie’s Amazonian power;’ most mornings she could be seen galloping bareback in the Bois de Boulogne. She called her Friday salon at the rue Jacob the Adadémie des Femmes, a response to the Academie Française whish excluded women.


It is an open question whether the book proves its point that there would have been no modernism without lesbians. Natalie Barney was undoubtedly lesbian but was less of a modernist than a decadent. Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein were both lesbian and modernist. H.D. was definitely modernist but there was a lot more sex with men than woman, calling her ‘lesbian’ is a stretch. Bryher would doubtless have been, had the medical expertise existed, a female to male transsexual.


Regardless of sexual labels, this is an easy-going, delicious confection of a book, fascinating for its insights and anecdotes about these artistic and sexual pioneers and is full of quotes, not all of them intentionally funny. To leave the last word to Gertrude Stein: ‘go go go go go go, go. Go go. Not guessed. Go go. Toasted susie is my ice-cream.’

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