13 February 2012

Webbs on the Web

The diaries of NS founder and social reformer, Beatrice Webb, tell a fascinating personal and politi

Published digitally and in full for the first time today, the diaries of Beatrice Webb, leading Fabian and social reformer -- as well as co-founder of the London School of Economics and New Statesman magazine -- offer a fascinating insight into British social life from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Funded by the Webb Memorial Trust and part of the LSE Digital Library, Webbs on the Web comprises 9,000 pages from Beatrice's diary manuscript (plus 8,000 transcribed pages) and covers such varying issues as the demoralised Labour party, a fierce attack on the financial institution, and the joys of clothes shopping. Surprising, then, that some of such entries were penned one hundred years ago.

Among the highlights, we read Webb on bankers after the formation of a national government following the onset of the great depression:

We know now the depth of the delusion that the financial world have, either the knowledge or goodwill to guard the safety of the country over whose pecuniary interests they preside. They first make an appalling mess of their own business - involving their country in loss of business and prestige - and then by the most bare-faced dissimulation and political intrigue they throw out one Cabinet and put in their own nominees in order to recover the cost of their miscalculation by hook or crook from the community as a whole.

Of the Irish playwright and New Statesman contributor in its early days, she writes in 1913:

We are unhappy about [George Bernard] Shaw. About five years ago I thought he was going to mellow into deeper thought and feeling, instead of which he wrote Fanny's First Play! He used to be a good colleague, genuinely interested in public affairs and a radically kind man. Now he is perverse, irate and despotic in his relations, and he is bored with all the old questions. And the quality of his thought is not good.

Leading economists, too, are at times the subject of gossip (1931):

In London we lunched with Beveridge, who heartily dislikes Keynes and regards him as a quack in economics. These two men are equally aloof from the common man: but they have little appreciation from each other - Keynes the imaginative forecaster of events a speculator in ideas - his mind flashing into the future - Beveridge bound down to the past - bureaucratic statistician, intent on keeping intact the inequality between the few who can govern and the many who must be governed - and believing in the productivity of the acquisitive instinct. The contrast is carried out in the women of their choice - the perfect artist Lopokova with her delightfully sympathetic ways, and the hard-faced administrator and intriguer Mrs. Mair - the Russian prima donna dancer and the Scottish business woman and social arrivist. Beveridge is beginning to suspect that I am a Bolshevist at heart, and therefore "out of the picture"; but he still believes in the good sense and experience of The Other One: with his comfortable slogan of the inevitability of gradualness.

And that same year following the party conference, Webb writes of Labour:

Dull, drab, disillusioned but not disunited . . .

› The turning of the tide

Alice Gribbin is a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was formerly the editorial assistant at the New Statesman.

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Brexit

29 November 2016

Ken Clarke: Angela Merkel is western democracy’s last hope

The former chancellor on how anger defines modern politics, and why Jeremy Corbyn makes him nostalgic for his youth.

Ken Clarke is running late. Backstage at the Cambridge Literary Festival, where the former chancellor is due to speak shortly, his publicist is keeping a watchful eye on the door. Just as watches start to be glanced at, the famously loose-tongued Tory arrives and takes a seat, proclaiming that we have loads of time. He seems relaxed, his suit is loose and slightly creased, and his greying hair flops over his somewhat florid face. His eyes look puffy and slightly tired – the only obvious sign that at 76, retirement is not far off.

Despite his laconic demeanour, the former chancellor says he oscillates between being “angry and depressed at the appalling state politics in the UK has descended into”. After 46 years as an MP for the Nottinghamshire constituency of Rushcliffe, he will not stand for re-election in 2020. His decision was announced in mid-June, just before the Brexit vote. Europe has in many ways defined his long career. He feels sharply the irony that the cause that drew him into politics was the 1961 campaign by Harold Macmillan's government for Britain to gain access to the European Economic Community, as it was then. Now, he will be bidding farewell to Parliament while the country prepares to exit the European Union. “The only consolation I have is that the UK has derived enormous benefits for being in the EU. . . I hope future generations don’t suffer too much with it coming to an end.”

Clarke is here to promote his memoir, A Kind of Blue, for which he received £430,000 – a record for a British politician who has not served as prime minister. The apt title reflects his own status as a Tory maverick as well as his love of jazz hero Miles Davis. He seems to enjoy the attention that book promotion brings – joking with the former Labour home secretary Charles Clarke, who happens also to be speaking at the festival.

Beneath his good humour lies a deep unease about the rise of populist, far-right forces that are rampaging through western liberal democracies from the US to France. “It’s resistance to change, resistance to the modern world and a desire for simple solutions to very complicated political problems,” he says. “The manner in which the political debate is publicised has changed, the mass media is hysterical and competitive and social media is taking over with short soundbites. It has thrown politics into complete confusion.”

Although he cites coverage of the New Statesman’s recent interview with Tony Blair as an example of media hysteria, he is positive about Blair’s intervention: “My understanding [of the interview] was that Tony only wants to play a part in trying to reform centre-left politics, and that’s a good thing . . . I want to see the sensible social democrats win the argument in the Labour party.”

Aware this might sound surprising, given that Labour are his political opponents, he justifies it by stressing the need for a credible opposition capable of putting pressure on the government. Jeremy Corbyn might make him “nostalgic for my youth when there were lots of Sixties lefties”, but it is clear he holds his leadership at least partly responsible for the “total collapse” of the Labour party, which has seen it lose “almost all of its traditional blue-collar base in the north and north midlands to reactionary, prejudiced, right-wing views”.

He is equally scathing of Corbyn's praising of the late Fidel Castro as a “champion of social justice”, after news of the communist dictator's death broke late on Friday night. “[Castro] is a historical throwback to a form of simplistic ultra left-wing orthodoxy . . . He achieved some things in health and education but combined it with an extraordinary degree of cruelty and a denial of human rights.”

Clarke still has one political hero left, though: the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who recently declared she would run again for a fourth term in 2017. He describes her as the only politician succeeding in keeping the traditon of western liberal demcoracy alive. “She is head and shoulders the best politician the western world has produced in the last 10 to 20 years,” he says. If successful, the Christian Democrat would equal the record of her mentor, former chancellor Helmut Kohl, and provide some much-needed stability to European politics.

Less of a hero to him is Theresa May, who he famously referred to as a “bloody difficult woman” in July during an off-camera conversation with Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary, which Sky News recorded. The clip caused a sensation. “I brought great joy to the nation,” he says, chuckling. “My son rang me up laughing his head off, and said it was the first time in my life I’d gone viral on YouTube.”

Today, however, he expresses some sympathy for the tortuous political situation the Prime Minister finds herself in, saying she must have been “startled by the speed” at which she suddenly ascended to the role. He is prepared to give her time to prove that, “she has the remarkable political gifts which will be needed to get the politics of the UK back to some sort of sanity”.

Later, during his talk in the historic debating chamber of the Cambridge Union, a more sentimental side slips out. His wife, Gillian, died 18 months ago. His book is dedicated to her. He rarely discusses his grief, preferring to keep that side of his life private. But when asked to recall his fondest memory of his student days at Cambridge University, he says simply meeting her. “Let me give a corny answer, it is going across to a girl at a [disco], picking her up, getting on quite well and staying married to her for over 50 years,” he says, his voice slightly trailing off, before he recovers, shakes his head, and pours his energy back into politics once more.

Serena Kutchinsky is the digital editor of the New Statesman.