Love and Liberty

The argument over Syria is depressing. After decades of an appalling regime and months of appalling civil war, poison gas has pushed many people simply to say – enough. And, morally, they’re right. Who can’t understand the urge to say, these are terrible things, and they must be fought? But real life doesn’t let us be the Sheriff, all guns blazing. The last decade above all has taught us about playing at cowboy ‘peacemaking’. So much as I empathise with Nick Clegg, it’s time to tell him to be a grown-up.

Syria up-ends all the usual certainties of UK politics. Nick Clegg talks about hard choices trumping idealism, and being practical, and concentrating on what can be done, not what we want to do in an ideal world… Not today. Today Nick says, this is what I believe in, it’s simply right, never mind the cost or the consequences, we can work those out later. And it’s the Liberal Democrats who are having to lecture their Leader, slow down, think about it, we don’t have unlimited money, we need to get people to agree, we’re living in the real world and you can’t just commit to everything you want out of idealism.

Political leaders make all the decisions, and their parties grumble and follow… Not today. To the credit of British democracy, all three leaders have blatantly had kicks in the nadgers from their much less gung-ho MPs. Ed Miliband’s constant u-turns after agreeing military action with the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister are only the most obvious signs – and the press treating this as ‘Miliband changing his mind, and again’ only the most obvious sign that the media simply do not understand that parties are not always monolithic and that leaders are sometimes told where to go by their troops.

It’s a harsh lesson to learn, though the use of chemical weapons is a terrible crime, and weakens us all, and we want to do something about it… Sometimes even the most powerful of us can’t get everything they want.

First and Second Principles

First principle: yes. It was wrong. It was horrible. It was in defiance of international law.

Second principle: so call in the international police.

…Oh.

And that’s where it all falls apart.

There were brief times when the UK, or the US, or even NATO, had both the military and moral authority to do pretty much what they liked. In the ’90s, intervening to save lives in Kosovo, it looked like the world would agree to such action, even if the Security Council didn’t. It wasn’t quite legal, but by what looked like wide consent it was the right thing.

It takes naivety past the point of stupidity not to realise that the world has changed, and that the US and the UK changed it for the worse.

We need a system of international law and enforcement to do what Liberals have always done – stand up to bullies. But none of us have any idea how to get there, and our leaders closing their eyes and wishing because they understandably can’t bear that they have so much power but so much impotence at the same time will not make it real.

We need to face up to the unpalatable fact that, after George Bush and the Labour Party’s invasion of Iraq, the US and the UK cannot be the international police. In principle, you can’t uphold international law by breaking it. In practice, too much of the world would see us yet again not as neutral law-enforcers but only the bigger bullies.

Deputy Prime Minister, I know you, and I know you’re sincere, and I know you feel that something must be done. Be mature enough to realise that sometimes you can’t do something, and that trying might make things far worse.

The Practical Problems

Nick Clegg has written “Five reasons why this is not Iraq”. They’re well-considered reasons. They come from the head and the heart. They’re mostly right. But they’re largely irrelevant. No, it’s not Iraq, but it’s absurdly delusional to ignore the fact that everyone on Earth will see it through that prism. Yes, the Coalition is getting a lot right that Labour’s warmongering lie factory got wrong: waiting for weapons inspectors; letting Parliament decide; publishing the legal advice; committing to something far short of an invasion. Before Iraq, that might have been enough. Today, it simply isn’t.

The practical problem of who you’re taking action on behalf of looks like the most insurmountable one. I’ve written before that international law is the gravest of the three big issues on which Liberals lack an instinctive compass – because it’s impossible for all those concerned to give informed consent. I’ve written before that without that, who appoints you a policeman? Who holds you accountable? If you’re wrong, what defence are you left with other than ‘might is right’? And the fact is that the limited framework of international law we have is ‘enforceable’ by a far more limited and flawed body of international decision-making in which many countries with interests against the letter of international law must give their consent, and in which Russia and China in particular can stop any idealist interventionism from having the fig-leaf of legality. There is no ‘citizen’s arrest’ in international law. There is law – or there isn’t. Breaking the law ‘to do good’, again, means no-one will trust you to keep it, or trust your motives. You might or might not be able to improve things in Syria: the likelihood is that no-one will agree on the balance afterwards. The certainty is that international law will be broken, that making it a reality will be put back, and that countries and people who already distrust the US and the UK for the previous governments’ disgusting actions will be further poisoned against us and say whatever government’s in power, they’re all the same.

The practical problem of what happens next is one you clearly haven’t thought out. Say that you manage a precise, proportionate missile attack – whatever that means. Say that somehow the Syrian regime neglects to smear all the world’s TV screens with images of bloody horror that you perpetrated, as any side now can in any war. Say that things have gone ‘according to plan’. But say that Assad doesn’t back down. Does he ever? So what would you do? More missiles? More planes? Tanks? Troops? Or would you back down, and lose face, and do even more damage to the international prohibition of chemical weapons than that which you fear now – with every future perpetrator knowing that you will go only so far, then crumble? You couldn’t answer that question in your Radio 4 interview this morning. If this isn’t going to be another Iraq, we have to ask, too… What next?

The practical problem of the “war crime” is that today we must demand proof. It would be unforgivably irresponsible not to. Even those of us against the Iraq War ‘knew’ about their weapons of mass destruction, because for Labour to sell us monstrous lies on that scale seemed inconceivable. Now we know that they spun and lied their way to war on sexed-up nothing, we can’t take the word of any government and we can’t just take our instincts as proof. It looks very like there was a gas attack: but the weapons inspectors need to investigate. It seems very like it was Assad’s regime: but evidence has to prove it. We need compelling evidence not just of what but of who. We all know of cases where the police said ‘We know he did it, so let’s just get him’. And we’re not even the police. For too many, we’re seen as the gangsters. The consequences of getting this wrong are incalculably higher than just any old-fashioned copper fit-up scandal.

The practical problem for the Liberal Democrats, at last coming to selfish party interests, is that we just can’t afford yet more ‘betrayal’. It isn’t only pacifists who are weary of war. The UK has been fighting for more than ten years – apparently for nothing. The vast majority have just had enough. And for the Lib Dems, it’s worse. One of the few bits of moral high ground we still have that lets our supporters sleep at night (and still vote for us) is that unlike the Labour Party, at least we didn’t invade another country and soak ourselves in blood in defiance of international law. No, this isn’t Iraq, but just as you’re going on your feelings, a hell of a lot of other people are going on theirs that it feels the same. Not least when bloodsoaked liars Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell are already cheerleaders for their next Iraq.

Look at the opinion polls if you don’t trust my instinctive analysis. This is an adventure on which the political leaders and the voters are absolutely split apart, and no more so than Lib Dem voters: the widest gulf between any party leader’s position and that of his voters is for you. Listen to your voters. Listen to your party. If you can’t even get their consent, how much harder will it be to persuade all the countries that are not already minded to trust you? If there’s any issue likely to make both your supporters and your members vote with their feet and leave you with no power at all, or even rise up and break the Coalition, this is the one.

Nick, I know you long to do something, but this is real life and you are not Batman. It’s a hard choice for you, but the most practical thing you can do is – say no.


For further reading, choose by the hundred, but I particularly recommend Caron Lindsay’s round-up “Syria: what do Liberal Democrats want?”, Mark Pack’s “Syria – I know what’s wrong; working out what’s right is rather harder” and Millennium Dome, Elephant’s “Syrians versus Badgers”, in which he hopes that one day, “people will stop thinking that the solution to a problem is to throw ordinance at it”.

Labels: American Politics, British Politics, International Politics, Iraq, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Stupid Ideas

This week’s Liberal Monday is on a Wednesday: the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most celebrated speeches of the Twentieth Century. Dr Martin Luther King Jnr’s speech to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom still has tremendous power both for in itself and for its place in history – the right person, at the right time and place, with more than the right moral clarion call in its inspired oratory. The BBC marked the occasion with a tribute on Radio 4 at 9am, plus a documentary to come on BBC2 at 9 tonight.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

“I have a dream today!”

What is there to be said of this great appeal for equality, justice and fellowship that hasn’t already been said? Well, there’s this morning’s tribute, for a start. I was a little sceptical of Radio 4’s I Have a Dream this morning – reminiscent of the BBC’s 1997 recording of Perfect Day, the main part of the programme was a ‘cover version’ of the speech performed by a wide array of different people from different countries. It seemed like a bit of a gimmick. But on listening to the collage, ranging from John Lewis and Joan Baez, who were both part of the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom that day, to the Dalai Lama, to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani student shot by the Taliban for being a girl who went to school, I found it incredibly moving. With a full speech, the reading doesn’t just switch reader on every line, instead segueing between Dr King and impassioned stretches by so many other people it had touched with enough time for each different person to get a sense of how much it means to each of them. And unlike the original line-up of speakers after the 1963 March, this version of the rally’s showstopping final number has women in it, without which it would seem odd today but shows that not only racial attitudes have changed in the last half-century. It’s repeated on the World Service at 3.30 this afternoon and on Radio 4 this Sunday at 1.30pm.

You can also listen to the programme for the next week on BBC iPlayer here; you can read about it and the many contributors here; you can read the text of the speech here; and, above all of those, you can watch Martin Luther King delivering the original speech here.

I’d heard the whole speech before, though much more often excerpts from it – most of all, the extraordinary “I have a dream” peroration of the second half that echoes down the decades. But listening to it fresh this morning, without the thrilling cadences of Dr King whose voice gave perhaps the greatest speech I’ve ever heard, though the multiple performance had much less power than the original, it made me concentrate more on the words.

The speech itself is fascinatingly constructed, an appeal to America’s history and heartstrings with astonishing moral force. I think of the passion, the imagery, the repeated refrains, but it’s far more than that. The speech comes to us now with the power of fifty years of Dr King being proven right and becoming a lasting symbol on its side, but in itself it cascades back through history.

Dr King stood at the Lincoln Memorial and made his own and the marchers’ demand for the fulfilment of Lincoln’s promise an integral part of President Lincoln’s own history; I remember going to Washington in my twenties and wanting to visit that Memorial as soon as I could, looking up at the great graven face of Lincoln but seeing and hearing King in my head. And his speech grounds itself firmly on Lincoln’s own promise, deliberately opening between the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the hundredth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address with a championing of one and the echo of the other: “Five score years ago…” Dr King samples Shakespeare, economics, current affairs and a host of other touchstones, but in speaking for a new America rising irresistibly on the deepest feelings of the old, there’s no mistaking the other great stream pouring through the speech – religion. It’s not just in the words, testifying to the equality of all God’s children, but coming through his own preacher’s experience and oratorical style. The American Dream is only real for any American if it’s shared by all Americans, and that’s because God created all equal. And in that shared language, he was speaking to many who wouldn’t otherwise want to hear him.

For me the most fascinating thing about the speech from my own experience of watching and making a great many different speeches is how it’s essentially two speeches, Dr King’s extraordinary gift making them appear seamless. I know that my own best speeches have been ones delivered without a prepared text, but my worst ones, too: it’s a risk to try to fly. What he does here is start in the safer, meticulously prepared style as a run-up, then suddenly lifts off. There’s the carefully crafted written word fixed in American history, a reasoned argument. And then, apparently spurred by Mahalia Jackson’s cry of “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” he switches from his written text into the part that everyone remembers: the repeated rhetoric beamed straight into the heart through Biblical words and a million-watt charisma, every phrase resonating with the American Dream and with the Gospel call. And that, clearly, is the powerful spiritual appeal of the preacher.

That’s not to say that the “I have a dream / Let freedom ring” extended climax was entirely off-the-cuff. Dr King had had three years of honing that exact metaphor, from his 1960 speech “The Negro and the American Dream” onwards, but clearly it was on the day that it was most needed that suddenly the theme came together and, inspired and inspiring, helped transform America.

There’s much more to the speech – embracing both the more timorous and the more militant sides of the Civil Rights movement, the uncompromising demand to make brotherhood a reality, passing sometimes shocking judgement on the segregationists and the shameful, but then not just rising but soaring above them, preaching against hate, the realisation on his part and on “our white brothers’” part that “their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom”. But I still get teary-eyed reading or watching it for myself, so watching or reading it for yourself is going to have much more of an impact than reading about it.


It’s a sign of how far things have come that under the institutional bigotry of the times, in 1963 twenty-one US States prohibited mixed-race marriage. That’s almost impossible to believe, fifty years later, when Martin Luther King’s speech has become one of America’s great moral foundations. Today, thirty-seven US States prohibit same-sex marriage. I wonder whose soaring rhetoric will transform the next fifty years?

Labels: American Politics, Bigotry, History, Liberal Mondays, Liberalism, Martin Luther King, Religion, Speeches, The Golden Dozen

The Labour Government eagerly joined President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. An illegal war.

The main ‘justification’ for invading Iraq was a series of lies to Parliament sexed up by the Labour Government. The Labour Party has the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands. Ten years ago in March, Labour joined President Bush in invading. Ten years ago today, President Bush announced it was “Mission accomplished”. That was another lie. The Labour Party stayed the main cheerleader for the hundreds of thousands of deaths and tortures that followed.

So much for Labour’s “ethical foreign policy”. Twenty years ago, the Labour Party abandoned socialism and the Red Flag. Ten years ago, the Labour Party chose to stain the Union Flag in the blood of hundreds of thousands instead.

Who Are the “Traitors” and “Collaborators”?

The Labour Party demonised anyone who opposed the war as “traitors” and “collaborators”. The Liberal Democrats were proud to stand up for international law and do the right thing – even though at the time opposing the war hit us badly in the opinion polls.

The Labour Party still call the Liberal Democrats “traitors” and “collaborators”. Now it’s because we’re in coalition with another British political party who isn’t the Labour Party. They howl and shriek daily that trying to fix the economy after the Labour Government spent all the money and much more they didn’t have – in part by spending so many billions on an illegal war – is exactly the same as being Nazis.

The Labour Party say this because they remember what they did. And the only way they can cope with their guilt for all that death is to accuse someone else instead. But I remember what the Labour Party did, too.

• Remember – who was it who joined the coalition with President George W. Bush?
  

• Remember – who was it who led Britain into an illegal war?
  

• Remember – who was it who involved Britain in illegal torture and rendition?
  

• Remember – who was it who lied and lied and sexed up fake intelligence that weapons of mass destruction which didn’t exist could be launched in forty-five minutes?

Remember what the Labour Government actually did.

The Liberal Democrats Did the Unpopular Thing Because It Was Right

And remember what the Liberal Democrats did – we were the only party to oppose the war back when it seemed political suicide to do so.

Ming Campbell writes how Britain lost its moral authority. I remember how he was desperately ill and came out of hospital to vote against – so that every single Liberal Democrat MP voted against the war.

Andy Strange remembers the Liberal Democrats marching against the Iraq War (I remember bringing bags of sweets and feeding them to Shirley Williams and other leading Lib Dems on the front line of the long march to keep them going on a bitter day).

Caron Lindsay reports Scottish Lib Dem Leader Willie Rennie’s speech about the Iraq War.

Nick Clegg writes on the lessons of Iraq.

Labour Leaders Past and Present – Blood-stained Bullies, Cowards, Hypocrites

Brave, brave John Prescott, the Labour Party Deputy Prime Minister who screamed “traitors” and “collaborators” then and still screams “traitors” and “collaborators” now admits ten years later that the invasion of Iraq “cannot be justified”.

Lord Prescott is the authentic voice of the Labour Party. A bully. A coward. A hypocrite. A moral vacuum who stayed in power at any cost. A man who went along with President Bush in an illegal invasion, lied to support it, attacked those who were against it.

And ten years later, ten years too late, Lord Prescott admits it was all wrong. So vote Labour!

While brave, brave Ed Miliband worked for the Labour Government as a leading advisor through every second of that time and slimed his way to being a Labour MP on the back of it.

To reap the rewards of insider power and become a Labour MP, Ed Miliband supported the war to the hilt.

To become Labour Leader, Ed Miliband said seven years too late that he “considered” resigning.

Brave, brave Ed Miliband.

Things To Remember

So when the Labour Party pretend to be sweetness and light, just remember what they did with thirteen years of absolute power. Remember that war-mongering, evidence-sexing, amnesia-promising, freedom-crushing, LGBT-hypocrisising, rich-brownnosing, poor-taxing, crony-bribe-swallowing shameless Labour Government.


And remember that when the USA asked the UK’s help in arming up for a potential war on another Middle Eastern country, this part-Liberal Democrat Government said no.

The Labour Party had a choice. The Liberal Democrats had a choice. So do you.

Labels: American Politics, British Politics, Iraq, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Things To Remember About Labour

Or, how do you solve a problem like Mark Littlewood? 2012 began with Liberal Democrat Voice criticised first because the shortlist for its “Liberal Voice of the Year” included only one woman, and then because someone many people didn’t like won. The two problems with this are that the shortlist emerged from nominations people submitted, with only one woman receiving enough from readers; and that the winner arose from votes cast on the site. So if you want a better nominations line-up, right now, this week only, is the time to tell LDV (and to then affect the winner, vote).

The other problem with the Liberal Voice of the Year award is that, of course, it’s designed to promote pluralism… And, as the rather unfortunate comment war when the last winner was announced demonstrates, nothing promotes tribalism like a call for pluralism. To be shortlisted, a person must not only receive at least a certain number of nominations from readers, showing at least some support to start with, but be a non-Lib Dem who’s advanced liberalism in the past 12 months. And if they’re not a Lib Dem (let alone if they are), by definition not everyone’s going to think they’re a Liberal. And complain. Mark’s win only provoked this in an exaggerated form, as he’s both a former Lib Dem and one associated with a particular branch of the Liberal family (some might say the mad aunt in the attic, but remember, there weren’t enough women nominations). Belated congratulations to Mark. I personally didn’t vote for him, but neither was I outraged by his victory, even if he has owed me money for more than two years now (if you’re reading, Mark, remember: you may have had a Pyrrhic victory, but a bet’s a bet).

So, What Can You Do?

If you want more women on the next shortlist, or more Liberals to your own sort of taste, or (ideally) both, nominations are only open this week (prompted via their readers’ survey, though I’m sure you can just email them). So think of some good candidates, and send them in. Then, if they’re shortlisted and you want them to win, why not spend the first two weeks of January – when the votes are a-clicking – writing promotional pieces to big up your candidate? Each year, a list appears, and plenty of people don’t know who they are until the missiles start firing when the ‘wrong’ one wins. Though, incidentally, as far as women candidates go, though this year’s shortlist didn’t promise much, in the previous four years two of the winners had been women, so the voters can share a little of the praise. Though I personally like 2012’s sole woman entrant, it looked like despite the complaints no-one was rallying round the sole woman, in theory a big advantage in a first-past-the-post election (and, LDV, that is in your gift to change, unlike the names or the result). She got just 4%.

It might even be an idea, if you have a brilliant nomination, to write a piece extolling their virtues today, and encourage everyone you know to nominate her or him, so they get to the starting gate this time.

Anyway, I didn’t join in the slanging match over Lib Dem Voice’s treatment of women this January, perhaps because this January I was too busy putting my head in my hands at Steven Moffat’s in Sherlock. Hurrah! An independent, sexually confident lesbian character! Plus, a faithfully non-villainous version of a famous character from the original stories who’s always traduced by every single ‘reimagining’ into an evil villain, because an independent, sexually confident woman who fascinates Sherlock must be evil. And, being a naturist, I wasn’t even going to complain about her being naked for extra Moffatitillation. That’s how happy I was until three-quarters of the way into A Scandal in Belgravia, when the non-villain was revealed as evil, and the lesbian fell for Sherlock, and the independent woman needed rescuing by our (male, if thankfully not butch) hero. Oh, Mr Moffat. If only all your writing was as honest and plausible as Lesbian Spank Inferno.

But I digress. I’ve already done the ‘chiding Lib Dem Voice over the Blogger of the Year Award’ thing, so this time I’m chiding you, dear reader. If you didn’t like last year’s choices, why not get your act together? Lib Dem Voice don’t rig the nominations or the vote. But you can, if you try! Be creative.

Personally, I’m good at writing an argument, but poor at choosing a hero. So I don’t have a whole series of ready-made nominations to start you off. I’ve racked my brain, and – having followed US politics obsessively for much of the year – here are, at least, two, for balance both women and both from a rather different branch of liberalism to Mark. What do you think of Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren, who was responsible for the only defeat of an incumbent Senator (rather than incumbent party) this year, and whose populist economic message in effect defined the whole Democratic campaign this time? Or Senator-elect Tammy Baldwin, the first out lesbian – or, indeed, the first out LGBT person of any description – ever elected to the US Senate? Can you do better? Get thinking.


The other alternative that springs to mind is, of course, one that on two counts is probably ineligible: a sister party of the Liberal Democrats, within the UK, with many members in common, and a group rather than an individual. But when, today, Liberals are under potentially deadly repeated physical attack from fascist thugs on the streets of the UK, they are Liberal heroes.

You can support them at the Alliance Party website.

Labels: American Politics, Bigotry, Blogs, British Politics, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Sherlock Holmes, Top Tips

A US political thriller from the early ’60s with Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton and Burgess Meredith, if you were watching BBC2 this time last week you’d have caught Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent. It’s a gripping film, but always blurs in my mind with Franklin Schaffner’s The Best Man from two years later (either side of the far more famous The Manchurian Candidate). While one was written by a conservative and the other by a liberal, they’re remarkably similar in outline: Henry Fonda wants to get a high position; a secret from his past; a dying President; and gay blackmail. Both are strong films, if not stunning – the former more interesting, more complex and shaded in its characters, the second more black and white (though they’re both, in fact, monochrome) but more coherent and driven. They were both unusual in their inclusion of homosexuality at the time – though as a shameful secret, of course – and in their political corruption, though both are more ‘moral’, more hopeful about the system, than the ’70s glum, paranoid conspiracy movies that Frankenheimer’s ’60s thrillers heralded.

Advise and Consent

“Fortunately, our country always manages to survive patriots like you.”

This is a tragedy of history; a dying President wants to secure his legacy by appointing a liberal intellectual Secretary of State who can negotiate for détente (before the term was in use) with the Soviets, but time is catching up with him and the history of everyone involved is creeping up on them. This one’s taken from a 1959 bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winner by Allen Drury, its title a reference to the US Senate’s role in confirming Presidential nominations, and the crucial candidate is Fonda’s Robert Leffingwell. The film’s key players, though, are really two wily old Senate hands, both from the same party (clearly the Democrats in both films, though unnamed in either, from the days when both parties were much broader churches though, as one old President confesses, still required to ‘talk Church’) but old opponents, the Majority Leader Walter Pidgeon and the cantankerous old conservative Charles Laughton, here in his final screen role, both of whom are willing to do rather more than make speeches to get their own way. Laughton’s Seab Cooley is a virulent anti-communist who sees Leffingwell as a fifth columnist and goes all-out to stop his appointment, both in fiery speeches and in far more dangerous gimlet-eyed observation and plotting. Pidgeon’s Majority Leader is an urbane fixer for his President with a more charming manner but no less ruthless an instinct. And the twin hand grenades tossing between them are the secrets that suddenly near exposure about Leffingwell and the idealistic junior Senator Brig Anderson, hand-picked to see the nomination go through but doing his job rather too conscientiously.

Burgess Meredith, always a terrifically watchable actor, later to find enduring fame as the ’60s Batman series’ Penguin, and aiding the film in muddying the novel’s more strident conservatism by his history as a leftist actor not long since Blacklisted, shows up at the nomination hearing here to explode Leffingwell’s past – testifying that, as young men, both were part of the same Communist cell. It’s a small but vital performance, jittery, passionate, lost; part sneak, part victim. And Leffingwell calmly blows him apart by proving each of his details wrong… Before confessing to the President that while the man may have misremembered names and places, his accusation was true. The President, though, is determined to wave this aside and keep pushing him, just as Cooley is now more determined than ever to push back. And, while from that point Fonda (in theory the focal point of the movie) fades curiously into the background, it’s after this that both push Senator Anderson too far.


Don Murray is excellent as Brig Anderson, a young, handsome, upright Mormon who has details of Leffingwell’s Communist past thrust on him… And is then blackmailed in turn for his love affair with another man back when he was in the army. There are some implications, perhaps to make him more favourable to the audience or the censor, that he was only ‘situationally homosexual’ – but it seems to me that there are more than enough hints about his “unexciting marriage” to suggest that he was merely doing what so many gay men did then, and some still do, particularly if seeking political office. This was the first US film to show a gay bar – seedy and shameful, of course, and his literally tossing his ex-lover into the gutter where he belongs! is hardly pro-gay, not to mention then following the traditional plotline for all fictional gays of the time, and yet Brig is handsome, honest and more moral than anyone else in the film, none of which are attributes commonly associated with the Hollywood homosexual (even today, if you can find any). He’s a remarkable contrast with the film’s boo-hiss character – not the Alger Hiss character, that’s Fonda’s – the slimy, blackmailing Left-McCarthy Senator Van Ackerman, who in an interesting choice comes over much more as the cowardly thin streak of nothing that characters coded as gay were portrayed as, while it’s sexy, hairy-chested gay Brig who’s the butch one (the poster, above, bizarrely airbrushes him into a plucked chicken).

Part of the appeal of this film is that it doesn’t pull its punches – but also that it’s more complicated than the headlines allow. The only really despicable character is Van Ackerman, and I suspect he’s the closest to Allen Drury’s original conception: on the one hand, he’s there to scream that people who want to do business with the commies are nasty, unprincipled, untrustworthy and probably misled; on the other, it’s not difficult to see the evil McCarthy figure being one of the far left as Drury protesting too much, while through Twenty-First Century eyes the liberal being the extreme gay-baiter brings a wry smile against a Republican field for which the entry fee is strident homophobia. Perhaps the film’s intriguing balance and layers of character and politics are down to director Preminger’s occasionally deflecting the original text, whether through casting or slight plot changes – and the gay character being a Mormon, too, suggests for US politics today a less black and white approach than many would want to believe (the real-life model, incidentally, was the blackmailing by his fellow Senators of Lester Hunt of Wyoming over his gay son). And if you want a few entertaining incidental details, watch out for the minor Senators – not least an ancient old man who was a real five-term Senator, and a sparkling young woman who, yes, really is Betty White…

The Best Man

“It’s not that I mind you being a bastard. It’s that you’re a stupid bastard.”

Franklin Schaffner’s film has less complicated morals, a much more clean-cut ending and the disadvantage of coming second to Advise and Consent, both on the big screen and in Gore Vidal’s original play coming a year after the former’s book; it’s difficult not to think that it must, at least, have been aware of the crossovers with its predecessor. And yet it still manages to play for bigger stakes – not a Secretary of State, but a potential President – and by choosing Henry Fonda again, it has the confidence to face its critics right down, just as it has more balls-out models in American politics of the day. The central question here is who would make the best President between two candidates, and rather as if caught in Captain Kirk’s infamous transporter accident, one is liberal, moral, but vacillating, the other sexy, confident and a sociopath. But, the film and its aged President say, you need both intelligence and the killer instinct, so could the worst man be, politically, the best? And is this really more about who is the worst?

Henry Fonda’s William Russell here is a far less compromised character than his Robert Leffingwell – and far more his own man than a counter to be moved around between bigger players. Notably, rather than having literally vanished by the end of the movie as an illustration of his powerlessness, here he’s called on to make the crucial decisions and, eventually, makes one. And he’s no ex-Communist – instead, his opponent has got wind of a long-ago nervous breakdown, in some ways still more of a taboo for a political figure today than being gay is (and one that would explode in two Presidential elections’ time after the film was made). And, like the charming Senate Majority Leader in the first film, he’s having an affair – several of them, it seems – though, of course, as long as it’s a woman not your wife you’re involved with the club doesn’t seem to mind in either film, while even the suggestion of a man not your husband (or, worse, that is your husband) would be guaranteed to send voters screaming for the hills. Not that either film has many women, nor any who make an impact on the central plots – I’d wonder if there’s a deliberate subtext about the similarly homosocial environments of politics and the army, but I suspect it’s merely that in the early ’60s no-one in Hollywood or Washington bothered to think that women might make the decisions. At least Russell’s wife has some clout to her, though the ‘What women don’t like in a First Lady’ nagging activist is there only for stereotype and comic relief (when a similarly themed film was made in 2000, with Joan Allen as The Contender, note that the ‘slut-shaming’ is still directed against women, as with gays, and never at straight men who shag around, and whether she did or not). But it’s all the men who do the real machinations, from the jumpy public relations chief to the sharply observed “progressive liberal” Southern governor.


The most mesmerising figure here, though, is Cliff Robertson’s Joe Cantwell, Russell’s rival for the nomination. Apparently Vidal based Russell largely on Adlai Stevenson and Cantwell on Nixon, but while the Russell’s ‘philandering’ suggests a subtext of Kennedy for him, Robertson’s looks and charisma (and hawkishness) suggest a subtext of Kennedy for him, too, throwing sparks into what is plainly a Democratic Party in-fight. You may have seen him in later years as Spiderman’s Fonda-role-alike Uncle Ben (as well as another Batman villain in between); here, he’s terrifying, and when old President Art Hockstader pretty much tells him that with great power comes great responsibility, you can tell that the younger Robertson role doesn’t believe a word of it. It’s ironic that it’s Russell who has the documented mental health issues, as the one with the evident problem here is confident, blazing-eyed, even, Joe Cantwell, whose sociopathic inability to listen to other people extends even to not noticing Lee Tracy’s star turn old President telling him he’s dying.

And the gay plot? Again, this film chooses a simpler path, though the one that might have been expected to turn some of the audience to Joe Cantwell’s side then would ironically turn more stomachs four decades later – again, there’s the ammunition to blackmail him with stories of men shagging together when deprived of women in the army. Can Russell use this against him? Not because it’s anti-gay, you understand, but that blackmail even of that sort of thing makes him wring his hands. Try it, says the terrifying Cantwell in a twist; I have an alibi. Yes, I was named in the investigation into all those gays at that army base… But I wasn’t one of them. I was the one who accused them all. Back then, perhaps Gore Vidal was both ducking the censor by not having any actual ho-mo-sexuals and subtly trying to position the most strident homophobe as the villain; today, the first makes me think the film’s not as confident as it thinks it is, but the second explodes into making you think, this man’s really repellent. What a piece of Santorum.

Labels: American Politics, Batman, Bigotry, Film, Gay, Pictures, Reviews

Tonight is “Super Tuesday” – when Republican voters have their uninspiring choice of Presidential candidate in more states than on any other day of the long and tortuous primary process. Several of the worst candidates have already dropped out. The rest of the worst candidates remain, along with one interesting one.

There’s Mitt Romney, the robocandidate backed by big money and the establishment, but for whom no-one on Earth has enthusiasm, a former moderate mechanically outflanking his opponents to the right on every issue to try and prove the impossible to the red-meat Republican faithful: that he really means it. There’s Newt Gingrich, disgraced former Speaker, bruiser, self-styled big thinker, for whom curiously next to zero of his former followers in Congress are willing to touch him with yours. There’s Rick Santorum, loathsome theocratic woman-gay-and-modernity-hating extremist from another age who last lost re-election by the largest margin on record for a sitting Senator, who’s spent the last week declaring how he’d like to be the second Catholic President because the first, JFK, made him vomit. Unbelievably, after Mitt’s money nuked all his other opponents into the ground, Santorum has been surging because there’s no other conservative left standing.

And then there’s Ron Paul.

Congressman Paul is old, small, a bit shabbily dressed and dismissive of almost all the Republican faithful’s hot-button topics. He’s the only one of the candidates not to have had a ‘surge’ for being not-Mitt – because on most issues he’s a recognisable libertarian conservative from most of the Twentieth Century, not the Republicans’ new taste for raging theocracy from the Thirteenth. Ironically, he’s the candidate with the most racist past – with hideously racist and homophobic newsletters having gone out in his name barely twenty years ago, for which he’s grumpily only half-apologised, and as he was then in his fifties, hardly a youthful indiscretion – and yet the only one who’s not been whipping up bigotry in this election, including even addressing the racial effect of the USA’s utter failure of a ‘war on drugs’. And the candidate in his late 70s is the only one who’s been gaining significant support among young people, independents and most of the other people that the rest of the Republicans are bordering-on-literally telling to go to Hell.

Not My Kind of Libertarian

Because Ron Paul declares himself a libertarian, quite a few Liberals are drawn to him. It’s understandable. He’s not a warmonger; he wants to rethink drug policy; he’s not batshit crazy about the gays. His rhetoric seems sane next to the other three, and his policies relatively so. And if I had no choice but one of those four as President, obviously he’s not as bad as the rest. Fortunately, the Republicans are not the only show in town. Their economic policies are insanity that would drive up the deficit while massively redistributing from poor to rich; his look like they would simply tank the economy completely. And he’s less a peacemonger than an isolationist. But still.

For anyone who thinks Congressman Paul is a libertarian by UK standards, well, I think he’d fit right into one of the relatively libertarian tribes, but not one I’d vote for. Because the simplest way to understand Ron Paul is that he’s a Eurosceptic. Except that, rather than targeting his scepticism against an imaginary federal United States of Europe, his is against the existing federal United States of America. The libertarians I have some sympathy for would devolve power down to the individual, and let everyone make all their own choices. That’s rarely Congressman Paul’s approach. He simply wants to pass all power down to the individual states on most issues. So they can be as authoritarian as they like – as long as it’s not the federal government doing it.

If you’ve ever heard a British Eurosceptic arguing for all power to the nation state, dragging decisions not just down from Europe but up from regions and councils and Britain’s constituent nations, you may find this awfully familiar.

I’m a Liberal, and I start with the individual. I don’t have hang-ups about which is the best level for individuals to combine to make decisions. For some issues, it’s best at the local, or regional, or national, or British, or European, or even UN level, depending on how big the decision, how many people it affects and how practical the effect will be. And I’d like a hell of a lot more decisions made by the individual, thank you very much, too.

What Ron Paul and Eurosceptics have in common that appeals is that, yes, the level they criticise is often too centralised, too bureaucratic, too unresponsive, and meddles in things that could really be sorted out much better at a more local level. What they have in common that repels is that they fetishise one level that should have all the power instead, rather than power being dispersed to many levels depending on what best suits the individuals they’re supposed to serve.

And, ironically, while a great many Eurosceptics are Atlanticists, and many of those are likely to be fans of Ron Paul, he’s an isolationist who’d rather America got out of as much of international politics as it possibly can. So the Atlanticists’ favourite candidate is the one most likely not even to leave flowers when he dumps the special relationship.

Labels: American Politics, Bigotry, European Politics, Ideas, Nationalism, Religion

Of all many incarnations of Batman, one of the best-known, best-loved, but most impossible to buy is the camp mid-’60s TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. While the spin-off movie’s available on DVD, you can’t buy any of the 120 episodes of the series itself (legal tangles? Embarrassment? Who knows). So if you ever want to get hold of it, right now’s the time to start. ITV4 is showing the whole lot daily, two episodes at a time, at 4ish in the afternoon and again at 10ish the next morning, from today. And some of it’s pretty good…

In the way of mostly-repeat TV stations, ITV4 finished showing the lot this morning with the rather fabulous penultimate episode and a slightly inadequate finale, so without any particular fanfare they’ve wound straight back to the beginning this afternoon. Last time they started the series, though, I was paying attention and have to admit that I’ve watched almost the full set, from the inspired to the drably repetitive. And to get you in the mood, their trailer makes me laugh.

The Dark Knight Re-Runs!

Now, I’m not a massive Batman fan, much less expert, though the character’s always been intriguing – from Adam West’s deadpan do-gooder to the near-psychotic, neo-fascist vigilante of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (well, at least he knows he’s a fascist; Superman just thinks he’s God). If you want detailed facts about comics and graphic novels, try Wikipedia and its references; if you want in-depth analysis, ask the brilliant Andrew Hickey (or, as my beloved suggests, try both at Hickeypedia! He’s auditioning to be the new Bat-Announcer). But this was one of the two Batman series I loved as a boy in late ’70s repeats, and though almost every iteration of Batman since then has been trying to get away from it and back to dark psychology, I still have a soft spot for it, and mainly, of course, the performances. Well, some of the performances…

Batman – The TV Series

Batman ran from 1966 to 1968 as an amazingly camp Pop Art comedy, and though it was so expensive that it was rapidly cancelled when it stopped being a hit, it was such a hit that it was remembered for decades, and spoofed in its turn (from The Avengers’ genius postmodern The Winged Avenger to The High Life’s Dunk, though Jon Pertwee’s Doctor inexplicably lacked the big exclamation billboards for his fight scenes).

Its incredibly formulaic nature was surely behind both its memorability and people getting tired of it: a teaser scene with helpless Commissioner Gordon ringing the Batphone, butler Alfred answering at Stately Wayne Manor and our heroes diving for the Batpoles; that horribly irresistible theme tune; the Caped Crusaders zooming to Police Headquarters from the Batmobile’s hidden entrance and instantly working out the clues that had stumped Gordon and improbably dense Oirish-utterancing Chief O’Hara; tracking the villains to their lair (usually a very large space with very big props and not much detail, getting increasingly Expressionist – or cheap – as the series went on); indulging in a fist-fight thrillingly punctuated by musical stings and impact-words only to be overcome by trickery and finish the episode hanging above the giant meat grinder, at which point the hysterical Bat-Announcer would tell us that “The worst is yet to come!” and to tune in again,

“Same Bat-Time! Same Bat-Channel!”

The second episode would follow much the same format, only starting with Batman brilliantly escaping certain doom (usually with the aid of a suspiciously relevant Grinder-Neutralising-Bat-Pellet from his Utility Belt) and closing with a fist-fight that isn’t overcome by trickery and a return to Stately Wayne Manor by the unfrocked Bruce and Dick to explain to Aunt Harriet exactly where they’ve been. Occasional triple-episode stories and the third season’s single episodes (closing not in an explicit “Next Time…” trailer but with one contained in the narrative, such as ‘Well, the Penguin will no doubt serve many years in gaol and the citizens of Gotham are safe once more… But look out of the window! Isn’t that the Joker crossing the street with a giant inflatable marmoset?’) followed much the same pattern at only varying length.

And, yes, when you put it like that, it could be said to lack diversity. But two things save it. A lot of it is very funny, aided by many of the lines, Alan Napier’s endearing Alfred (it’s always better when he suddenly gets a bigger role, not least impersonating Batman), and particularly Adam West, whose utter deadpan playing of the utter nonsense he gets to say is… Utterly sublime. He remains amazingly watchable. And while his grey bodystocking was much mocked, these days I find the benippled rubber queens of the later movies far more difficult to take seriously: comic-book costumes always look so much more stylish in comic books.

The other thing that saves the series is, of course, the villains, who supply almost all of its variety. There’s an almost total absence of character development: the third and final series introduces Batgirl, who’s at times a brilliant feminist move and at times, er, not, especially when listening to her special signature tune:

“Are you a chick who fell in from Outer Space?
“Or are you real, with a tender warm embrace?
“Yeah, whose baby are you, Batgirl, Batgirl?”

Somebody shoot them. But, as far as progress goes, that’s it. Ironically, the very first story stretches the format as far as it ever goes – hilariously for a series crammed with deadpan exposition, there’s no introduction nor concessions to anyone who’s never heard of Batman (save a brief mention by Bruce Wayne of his dead parents), and it dives straight in with everything established even down to Chief O’Hara’s endlessly repeatable:

“What idiots we are! Now, why couldn’t we have worked that out?”

The main business of this opening episode, Hey Diddle Riddle (concluded in Smack in the Middle, with most of the titles being inadequately punning rhyming couplets), is not a crime or heist of the sort that drives most of them, but a plot against Batman himself such as you’d have expected to find much later in the series: the Riddler tricks our hero into an unjustified attack; this Batman is so utterly square and law-abiding it hurts; these two elements crash together in a putative court case that Bruce Wayne will feel compelled to attend and blow his secret identity, lampshading the impossibility of uptight, upright vigilantism so that the subject need never come up again. “How I’ve waited for this,” the Riddler even gloats implausibly, knowing the audience will be as familiar with Batman as he is. And the episode goes straight to the nearest the series will get to a ‘bad’ Batman, as his drink is spiked and he dances the Batusi with naughty Jill St John before staggering towards the Batmobile and being prevented from driving after poor, kidnapped Robin by police officers who pronounce him “In no condition to drive” and don’t mention the Bat-Signal beaming from the roof of City Hall – “In his shape? Kinder not to tell him.” Even the Superman movies waited until Superman III, but by going as far as this on the first time out, the Batman series is telling us that it’s never going to go any further.

Who To Catch?

Frank Gorshin’s the Riddler gets the series off to a terrific start with his puzzles, manic giggle and eel-like physicality, and all the others pretty much have to match up to him. Many don’t. So if you’re only tuning in for random episodes, his are among the ones to look out for – he comes back several times in the first season, then briefly in the third (substituted once in between by The Addams Family’s John Astin; great Gomez, lousy Riddler).

Now, I’ve read very few Batman comics or graphic novels, and I know which villain obviously stood out in those – but in this TV series, the Batvillain’s crown goes to someone else. For me, you just can’t beat Burgess Meredith as the Penguin. Charm, humour, viciousness, that fabulously imitable squawk, his brilliant schemes to sail just within the law (The Penguin Goes Straight / Not Yet, He Ain’t)… Penguin is far and away the best Batvillain of the ’60s series. And though sometimes, as always, his material’s not up to it – his sudden murderous grudge against Batgirl leaves a nasty taste in the mouth – the story that strikes me as a particular favourite is the second season’s political parody Hizzonner the Penguin / Dizzoner the Penguin, in which he runs for Mayor. Not only did this clearly inspire the second of the ’80s / ’90s Batman movies (however much they tried to get away from the TV series, they kept coming back to it: Penguin for Mayor in Batman Returns; the Batman-Theme-themed Batdance in Batman; the sheer campery of two blatant gay couples with opposing fetishes of Batman Forever… You can keep Batman and Robin in the ’90s, though), but Penguin’s political chicanery is mercilessly funny, and he’s a much better campaigner than Mayor Linseed, Governor Stonefellow or relentlessly stiff Batman, to say nothing of poor Harry Goldwinner down at 2%. And that’s without the inspired mudslinging – ask yourself: who do you always see Penguin pictured with? Our fine, upstanding police officers. And Batman? Always with criminals! The multiple telephone offers in the tag scene always make me laugh, too. You might also look out for Penguin’s splendidly ridiculous extended intrigue involving a fake film, Batman’s kiss-in with Carolyn Jones’ Marsha, Queen of Diamonds (not to mention her ludicrous witch mother) and a tank made out of solid gold.

No-one tops Burgess Meredith; Frank Gorshin’s brilliant; but there are at least two strong runners-up. Victor Buono as King Tut is a huge performance in every sense, a mild-mannered Professor of Egyptology at Yale who becomes a megalomaniac Pharaoh every time he’s hit on the head, and deserves a special award as the only Batvillain to twice discover Batman’s secret identity (the scene in Commissioner Gordon’s office after the first time, when no-one believes Tut as he rolls his eyes and postmodernly says all the things the viewers do about how obvious it is, is priceless). The other is Catwoman, unquestionably the strongest of many strong female opponents, though slightly hampered by being the most prominent recasting among the Batvillains: mostly Julie Newmar; Lee Meriwether in the movie; Eartha Kitt at the end. All are fabulous, but Julie Newmar seems both genuinely dangerous and the most feline – well, excluding Eartha Kitt’s irresistible purr – with a compelling capriciousness and an erotic charge with Adam West that racist ’60s sponsors were not going to allow with Eartha Kitt (despite Batman slipping in a few under-the-Bat-Radar mentions to Robin of how attractive she is, in her absence).

Others to look out for include Joan Collins’ Siren, much of whose episodes appear to have been left on the cutting-room floor, and Vincent Price’s delightful, mercurial Egghead, as well as the lead villain from the penultimate episode, the eponymous The Entrancing Dr Cassandra. Ida Lupino’s Cassandra Spellcraft has a brilliant alchemical scheme to mount a mass escape from the “Arch Criminals Only” wing of Gotham State Penitentiary (warning: may not contain real Batvillains). The extras pretending to be the big villains and trying to avoid us seeing their faces are a scream, especially the one who really gets into playing Victor Buono. It’s a far more appropriate finale than the rather limp actual last episode of mind-reading at a health spa, despite that story’s guest villain Zsa Zsa Gabor. You get the feeling she’d have been better-employed as a “Batclimb” cameo in the previous year, sticking her head out of her hotel window to see the Dynamic Duo scaling the wall as the likes of Lurch, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Edward G. Robinson had done.

Who To Leave In the Care of Liberal Warden Crichton of Gotham State Penitentiary?

Cesar Romero as the Joker. Now, I know he’s the iconic Batvillain, and some of his episodes are very entertaining (if others are frightful), and Cesar Romero isn’t that bad, but… He’s just never good enough. The few Batman comics I’ve read – or Heath Ledger on film, or Mark Hamill in the more prestigious animated series – capture a seriously deranged, compelling match for Batman; this isn’t it. I mentioned two Batman series I loved as a boy, and the other reunited Adam West and Burt Ward in the animated The New Adventures of Batman (usually paired with the equally exciting Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle). A hasty viewing of a few YouTube clips tell me I should leave the series to my cheating memory (though I have to admit I’d still like to get hold of Tarzan), but its Joker firmly grabbed my attention as a cackling spectre in vivid white and green and with unnaturally pointed features. A, ah, mature man with a rather full face upon which – unforgivably, when I was a boy and still spotted it a mile off – he’s applied an acre of make-up to inadequately conceal his moustache, scampering around with nothing of the threat of Penguin or Catwoman… No. Heretical, I know, but simply not up to the job.

One particular low point for Cesar Romero’s Joker sticks in my mind (and throat) because it perfectly illustrates something the series tried several times and each time got toe-curlingly wrong – ’60s youth culture. Surf’s Up! Joker’s Under! features the Joker’s attempt to become surfing champion of Gotham City and so control all the young people. Words fail me (and effects fail them), though there’s a little fun to be had with Joker talking into his hotdog and Batman straight-facedly inviting him into the locker room. But it’s terrible, and though my learned friend Andrew will (as with everything in this article) know better, wasn’t it a little late to be trying to cash in on the Beach Boys? Milton Berle’s Louie the Lilac, too, was an OK performance and had a memorably grisly end (…or is it?), but another middle-aged (to be generous) man attempting to become the pin-up for Gotham’s youth, this time to dominate the flower people, was a major misjudgement. The only remotely plausible counterculture idol is Catwoman rabble-rousing the student population in Catwoman Goes to College (but absolutely not when she kit-naps the voices of a popular beat combo and has a kitty apprentice who sings, played by the producer’s niece in hope of a pop career. Oh, dear me, no). You can’t help thinking that, while studio executives wanted to cash in on the youth happening, they both misunderstood and feared it, always portraying rebellious or even remotely unconventional young people as wannabe patsies to some evil but more intelligent adult in repeated and wearisome exposés of the frightening commie truth behind hippies. See also Star Trek’s The Way to Eden, in which the young space hippies (communists) are manipulated by an evil intellectual (communist) and wind up dying (after rightly being warned off by the clean-cut, caring military) on the planet they imagine to be Eden because, subtly, the grass is acid (and fruits are deadly) – or, embarrassingly, the UK’s very own Carry On Camping, in which the team inexplicably stop cocking a snook at authority and become the grumpy old establishment killing off anyone’s fun. At least at the same time Doctor Who’s The Krotons may have said that student rebellion doesn’t work, but that they had much to rebel against, and the Doctor saves the day by dropping acid.

Getting one ’60s movement badly wrong brings me inexorably to Nora Clavicle and the Ladies’ Crime Club, in which Barbara Rush’s Nora Clavicle uses her push for women’s rights to remove all male crime-fighters and replace them with women police – who will spend all their time talking about lipstick and be terrified of her mechanical mice, leaving the city open. No, it wasn’t a horrible dream. Oh, the number of times Doctor Who nearly did the ‘Imagine how frightful it would be if the girlies were in charge?’ story and managed to pull back at the last minute… It seems almost every ’60s series somehow thought ‘The frightening truth behind women’s liberation’ would be hilarious (or terrifying). Even The Avengers succumbed, once. Don’t go there.

Two unimpressive Batvillains it’s easier to forgive are the simply dull Colonel Gumm and his fake stamp factory, even if he is played by Roger C. Carmel; he was probably designed not to take attention from heroic guest stars the Green Hornet and Kato (Bruce Lee!). At least, that’s a halfway plausible excuse. Similarly, with Frank Gorshin having left the series and before they tried (and failed) to recast the Riddler, Maurice Evans starred as the Puzzler (no relation, I’m legally obliged to say). A fine actor whether disturbing as Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes, camping it up in Bewitched or not-Winston-Churchill-honestly in my favourite The Man From U.N.C.L.E. film (I wish they’d release that on DVD, too; I don’t have a copy of One of Our Spies is Missing), he’s lost here as producers try to camouflage his Riddler-clone status by rolling dice on their table of villainous attributes and adding to his love of riddles puzzles the bonus character traits of ‘obsession with Shakespeare’ and with, er, ‘airplanes’. Which go together so well.

I won’t forgive Lord Marmaduke Ffogg of the three-part story visibly set in South California The Londinium Larcenies, The Foggiest Notion and Isn’t It Bloody Finished The Bloody Tower. Swinging London? The only swinging to hope for here is at Tyburn, as Dick Van Dyke runs past holding a Batsign reading, ‘See? I wasn’t so bad after all’. Though I’ll grant you that renaming “Fleet Street” as “Bleat Street” raised a momentary and unwilling smile. At least Art Carney’s execrable Archer was an affectation. Even Murder She Wrote in the pea-souper was better than this. With so many British actors on the show, what were they thinking in getting Rudy Vallee to mutilate his accent? Still less in inexplicably casting urbane George Sanders, of one of the most gorgeous voices in the world, as heavily Mittel-European Mr Freeze. No wonder he didn’t come back – Freeze was the only villain recast twice on the TV series, and never worked, whether a misused Sanders, Otto Preminger, or Eli Wallach (who at least looked like he was having fun. Maybe it was the cheque). And I’ve not even sneered at David Wayne, whose Mad Hatter and worse accent turned Batman’s cowl pink.


But I’m telling you the plot. Why not tune in, Bat-Channel ITV4, Bat-Time 4ish in the afternoon or 10ish in the morning on weekdays to enjoy them for yourself, and discover all the other villains I’ve not even mentioned? It’s just a shame it’ll take you three months to record your own home-made equivalent of a DVD box set.

Labels: American Politics, Batman, Bigotry, Carry On, Comedy, Comics, Patrick Troughton, Reviews, Star Trek, The Avengers

Have you heard of Mitt Romney? Herman Cain? Rick Perry? Almost certainly not Jon Huntsman? Or other damp squibs for Bonfire Night (though a fanatic who wants to blow up the legislature and install a theocracy isn’t a million miles from some of the contenders)? Yes, it’s the exciting world of the US Republican Party, and after studying the race, I can announce a winner. Not of the nomination, naturally, or (I hope) against President Obama. Step forward, instead, Texas Governor Perry, whose brand new “simple” tax plan is surely the most brain-meltingly stupid in the history of the world.

The Republican Frontrunners – More Halloween Than Bonfire Night

If you’ve not been following the race for the Republican Presidential nomination, the most consistently popular contender is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney; but when I say “most consistently popular”, I mean he’s been bumping along at about 25% in the polls for the last year, while several other contenders have shot up, sometimes shot past him, and then fizzled out. It’s almost as if Republicans don’t actually want their ‘front-runner’, and are looking for anyone – almost anyone at all, as long as they’re ‘more conservative’ – to replace him. Romney is relatively competent, doesn’t mess up in debates, and almost completely uninspiring: famously, he’s changed his mind on almost every policy position and then denied it (as a slew of flip-flopping attack ads are now reminding people); he’s not ideologically batshit-crazy conservative (not least in that he was, following the previous point, against most conservative positions before he was for them); his Massachusetts healthcare initiative was the model for Obamacare (the number one evil for Republicans, whose support for life ends at birth); and perhaps most of all, because he’s a Mormon, and so automatically excluded from the swivel-eyed Christianist theocracy that has captured much of the Republican Party. He also has a 59-point plan for the economy, which is at least fifty-six points longer than Republican voters are going to read. On the other hand, he has a lot of money, tends not to self-destruct, and has the support of a lot of Republican grandees who are scared to death that the grassroots will pick someone who’s as nutty as a fruitbat.

So who are the main challengers to Romney? At least until tomorrow? For the last few weeks, they’ve been the macho conservative Governor of Texas – always a happy sign – Rick Perry, and business mogul Herman Cain. Depending on whether you think being US President is more like being a state governor or being a pizza boss, you may feel one of them has more relevant experience. Governor Perry was the last candidate so far to enter the race, sparking off over the summer to zoom high over the polls until he crashed to earth with a pitiful performance in his first TV debate. And again in his second. And by the time he slightly improved for his third, everyone was watching another spectacle, the amazing high-flying business saviour with a memorable policy plan where Rick Perry has a vacuum, while at the same time untainted by any actual political experience. So Mr Cain is, at the moment, still soaring in the polls while Governor Perry has mostly fizzled out – until the last week, during which both have exploded. The press have found details of Mr Cain expensively paying off several woman in his business empire who claimed sexual harassment by him; Mr Cain has fired off in all directions, the press, the liberal elite trying to lynch him for daring to be a black Republican, feminists – all of this playing well with the Republican base – but then, most dangerously, blaming the Perry campaign, who have of course strenuously denied this. Massive intra-conservative explosions followed. So the two leading Not-Mitt-Romney candidates are currently in the middle of making Mitt Romney look much safer (and saintlier).

Call 999 For Herman Cain

There are many elements behind Herman Cain’s sudden success, but the most policy-based is his patent “999 Plan” to reform America’s tax system (and bear in mind that “999” does not have the same connotations in America of ‘Call Mr Cain an ambulance’). Unlike Mr Romney’s 59-point plan for the economy, Mr Cain’s is short, simple and memorable: strip federal taxes to a 9% corporate tax rate, a 9% personal income tax rate and a 9% national sales tax. Problems with this include that it wouldn’t raise nearly enough to cover spending (but no Republicans are going to worry about that); that it would massively slash taxes on business and the very rich, leaving 90% of the population to pick up the tab (but not many Republicans are worrying about that either); and that there isn’t currently a federal sales tax at all. This last one is where he’s being attacked by other Republicans (wild-eyed Tea-Partier Michele Bachmann, a spent firebrand from earlier in the year, suggesting it’s a 666 plan. Yes, the Christian Right are always subtle). You see, it doesn’t matter if there are huge tax cuts elsewhere, or much bigger spending cuts on top – Republicans now regard any tax increase at all as original sin. So the other contenders are running around telling every state with its own sales tax that Mr Cain wants to double their VAT on top, and every state without that HE WANTS A NEW TAX AND MUST BE THE DEVIL! Yet still, the simplicity and apparent low levels of the “999 Plan” remain looking popular in the polls. So Rick Perry, desperate to get back off the ground, belatedly tried last week to come up with a tax policy of his own, his reliance on nothing but his winning personality having come unstuck.

The Republican debate a week and a half ago might well have laid the charges for the big explosion between Cain and Perry this week. Mr Cain, formerly so self-assured, looked distinctly rattled when his sudden front-runner status brought all the attacks that his previous also-ran rank hadn’t, stuck spouting that any criticism of his catchy gimmick was “comparing apples and oranges” (yes, Herman, we know your new sales tax will increase the price of fruit). But with Michele Bachmann hinting in her subtle way that he may be the antichrist, the attack that turned my stomach wasn’t the ridiculous one from the extremist (well, one of them) but the snake-oil slick from the please-can-I-be-the-frontrunner-again Governor: “Herman, I love you, brother, but…” Oh, Perry, please. Does anyone actually fall for that schtick? It’s a simple stratagem: get right behind your beloved brother; stab him in the back with praise for his naivety; unveil your own boldly unrealistic tax plan and hoover up all your beloved brother’s votes! And it was at the last point, of course, that Rick Perry’s own plan blew up in his face.

The Problem With Tax Plans

There’s only one sort of new tax plan that’s ever a brilliant, total success. That’s when you announce it from in government at a time of high growth, and with luck that means any losers will be lifted naturally and don’t notice it. This hardly ever happens, and pretending that it does goes some way to explain why, for at least the last thirty years, UK governments have been living beyond their real means.

Any tax plan – any at all – that you come up with in opposition will be open to one of two attacks (and usually both).

• Some people will lose money!

• Your sums don’t add up!

The first of these is invariably true, and the more you try to avoid it, the more the second will become true as a result.

Anyone involved in British politics can remember tax disasters both by government and opposition parties. I was a member of the Liberal Democrats’ Federal Policy Committee for many years, and tax proposals were always the policies were got to discuss last – usually after a Treasury Spokesperson had been dragged kicking and screaming into the room with bloodcurdling vows that the Party’s democratic policy-making process wouldn’t change a single penny of their grand design – and usually with the aid of numbered papers to be collected in at the end of the meeting. Because nothing can be more unpopular than taxing people more.

Tax has long been a particular problem for the Liberal Democrats for two simple reasons: for nearly two decades, we’ve been the only party that’s had all its policies costed so that election manifestos add up; and we’ve aimed to make the tax system fairer, which means those at the bottom paying less and those at the top paying more. Put those together, and what do you get? That some people are going to lose money, and that we’re going to tell them about it. Which is why, even though all our tax proposals for as long as you can remember have had far more gainers than losers, all the shrieking attention is usually on who’s going to pay more. Liberal Democrats plan to raise income tax thresholds so that the vast majority of low and medium earners will be better off, we said at the last election (and are now delivering in government). Of course, if you have to pay extra tax on the worth of your house above a couple of million pounds, that’s going to hit the very, very poorest, who haven’t a widow’s crotchet to rub together in their two million pound mansion! If you’re getting masses of cash from capital gains that Labour taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary working income and suddenly that rate rises to something almost fair, that’s going to destroy business, because how can bosses be expected to pay anything like the share that their employees do! And so on, as you probably remember. Or, most famously, Charles Kennedy came a cropper trying to explain how our council tax replacement plans stacked up in 2005 – change it to ability to pay and, corks, it turns out the people who are able to pay would have to. What is the world coming to? Even the council tax itself, replacing the poll tax, the most unpopular tax in living memory, was only swallowed because central government whopped in a massive subsidy with it (taking local government more under its control as it did so).

And so, used to running my beady eyes along the small print that tax planners hope you won’t notice, Herman Cain’s plan is… Well, laughable. It’s impossible to take seriously, and it would never have stood up for five seconds in a Liberal Democrat Policy Committee meeting. It doesn’t bring in nearly enough money to pay for the taxes it would replace. It gives a massive, massive tax cut to the very richest. And it brings in a great big additional tax hike that permanently increases prices for everyone else (remember the crappy VAT rise here? Under the “999 Plan”, it would have been nearly four times bigger). There are, though, three relatively good things to say about it. First, it would slightly simplify the Byzantine US tax system, and that’s a good thing. Second, it looks good on a leaflet, bollocks though it is to anyone who has a clue. And third… Third, it’s nowhere near as dumb as Rick Perry’s alternative.

Rick Perry’s Tax Plan – The Massively More Complicated Side of Simple

Mesmerised by the simplicity and popularity of the “999 Plan”, Rick Perry sat down with his crayons and, only months later and weeks after he’d already blown his best chance at the Republican nomination, he came up with his own “simplification” of the tax code. It’s a 20% flat tax.

In its favour, the good thing about a flat tax is that it’s simple (and the simpler a tax system is, the harder it is to dodge). Remember that.

OK, first problem. A flat tax. These are beloved of conservatives because they sound fair, but actually mean – by demolishing a progressive tax code in which you pay a larger share the more you earn – that, if you’re bringing in the same amount of money overall, the wealthiest get a massive tax cut and everyone else gets a massive tax rise. Still, ‘everyone should be treated the same’ has a ring to it – compare it to the Liberal Democrat ‘(almost) everyone gets the same increase in what they can hang onto before they pay any tax’, and they sound much the same. They’re actually almost exact opposites. Everyone paying the same percentage means the lowest earners get very little actual money and the richest get a fortune; everyone being able to keep the same actual money makes a great difference to the lowest earners and is barely noticed by the richest. And in this case, it would be a 20% flat tax on personal and corporate income but, here’s a thing, not on investments – Rick Perry would abolish the various wealth taxes altogether (great if you’re a mega-rich investor. Shame if you’re an ordinary Jo who has to pick up the shortfall).

But still, the one good thing in theory about a flat tax is that it’s simple, even if it’s not fair.

So, a flat tax is regressive. But it also has a lot of losers, if you’re going to set it at a rate that actually brings in the same amount as the various different rates currently do. And Rick Perry is a Twenty-first Century Republican running for the Presidential nomination in an ultra-conservative Tea Party atmosphere: increasing taxes, even on ordinary people, is unforgiveable evil. So he has a pathological fear (not least having seen his own attacks on Herman Cain’s extra sales tax) of people who’d lose out.

The answer is simple. Forget economic facts, and just set your tax rate well below what anyone could object to – 20%. This isn’t just below the rate at which he’d balance the books (in the UK, a flat tax would have to be at least 40%; even in the US, 20% is absurd, and that’s for current spending, ignoring the trillions of dollars of debts). This is ludicrously below the rate at which he’d balance the books. The technical term for it is ‘totally made up’. But, phew, never mind reality: it’s passed the first part of the ‘Republicans won’t call you Satan’ test, which is the most important one.

Yet even a 20% rate would mean not just cutting the rate for the richest in half, but increasing tax on the lowest earners – so, to his credit (and, under this plan, the US Government would need to run up a lot of credit), as well as the conservative dream of giving billionaires more billions, he’s followed the Liberal Democrat idea of a steep increase in tax thresholds to benefit low and middle earners. Of course, this would mean that a tax rate that already wouldn’t bring in anywhere near enough money would bring in much, much less than that. But so what? It’s only pretend, after all, not revenue-neutral or a plausible plan for government.

And, you still remember, it might not pay for what you’re actually spending, so you can’t begin to reduce your deficit (which Governor Perry’s promised to do, but that’s too absurd a claim even to start on), and that means you can’t even think about paying off your debts, but on the bright side, at least a flat tax should be simple.

But then Governor Perry hit on another problem. Because the US tax system is so complicated – almost as much as the UK’s after a decade of Gordon Brown knitting it – that it’s not just the headline tax rate that determines how much people pay. There are exceptions, and exemptions, and allowances. People get money back, or don’t pay it, or circle it around a bit, if they’re paying mortgages, or charitable donations, investments and so on. Now, Governor Perry’s plan wants to get rid of all tax on wealthy investments, so that’s nice and simple for the very rich, but ordinary people still have mortgages, and those poor billionaires might even have several. And if a flat tax is a proper, straightforward, simple flat tax that simplifies the tax code into one simple rate – remember, the big advantage is how simple it is – then suddenly people might have to pay more on all those sorts of things. People… might… have to… pay… more…‽‽ Oh, Governor Perry! Say it ain’t so (or be damned forever)! So he had another bright idea. All those exceptions, and exemptions, and allowances? They can stay.

Oh. Well… Um, the thing is, it might still need thousands of pages of tax code, oh dear, sorry, and lawyers, and accountants, and Congresspeople putting in loopholes, but at least the rate of the flat tax is still simple. That’s one thing. At least you know you only need pay at one rate. Er, that is it, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, at that point Governor Perry’s advisors found one more problem. It turns out that even with a tax rate so low that no-one can believe it, and a much bigger threshold, and keeping all the allowances and exemptions – even then, they found that there would still be losers. A lot of losers. Mostly from those pesky low-and-middle-earners. So what to do?

Because Governor Perry had told them that simplicity is nice, but the one thing that his tax plan must never, never, ever have is losers. Because he doesn’t have a teaspoon the political courage of a Liberal Democrat, not even one person should have to pay more, and only then would he be anointed the true [made-up] Republican messiah.

So his tax plan has one more idea to make it a brilliant, total success.

And that is…

If you don’t do better under the new tax system, you can file under the old one instead.

And that was the point at which Rick Perry became the undoubted winner of the Mr Shit-For-Brains-Maddest-Tax-Plan-Of-All-Time Award.

The one advantage – the one big reward that even a redistributionist like me can agree on – to a flat tax is that the sodding thing is flat. It’s simple.

Under Rick Perry’s plan, not only would the rich get a massive tax cut (and a more massive one through the genuinely flat 0% investments rate), not only would you still have to calculate all the same exemptions and extras that you do today, but you would have to do all your taxes twice. Just to check which version comes out best.

This is the only “flat tax” proposal in history which increases bureaucracy, increases complexity, and increases the time it takes to fill out your tax returns. All for the sake of a simple headline. Governor Perry appears to have confused simple with “simple”.

Rick Perry’s promise when setting out his tax plan was that Americans would be able to fill out their tax returns on a postcard.

Only if their writing is as small as his own microscopic brain.

The Other One

Incidentally, there’s one Republican in the race who has a solidly successful and fiscally conservative record as a governor, has been an ambassador, has no flip-flops, has his own tax plan and can string three words together without tripping over them. Unfortunately for the health of the Republican Party, Jon Huntsman is bumping along at the margin of error of nothing, so you can safely assume the sane sort of conservatism isn’t getting a look-in this year. Mainstream in every way save being a Mormon (ironically the least anti-gay candidate despite that), he might do well in a proper election, but by Republicans, for Republicans, he’s toast. He believes in science and climate change, he has a grasp of economics, he doesn’t pander to Christianist conservatism, he speaks Mandarin Chinese… He may as well be on a different planet to Planet Republican. Though as the ‘not nutty’ candidate he may have blown it himself by lacking the balls to stand apart from the pack at crucial moments of decision (putting his hand up with all the rest to the economic insanity of refusing deficit reduction by even one part tax rise to ten spending cuts; staying silent as the Republican audience booed a gay soldier). So I don’t spare him that much sympathy.



Update after the next GOP debate, night of 9th November: It turns out that I was badly underestimating Rick Perry’s problem with numbers. If only he hadn’t scrapped Education (arithmetic) and Commerce (numbers) first, he might have been able to count to three.

It surely can’t be long now before he withdraws from running for President of the United States of… of… Oops! I was sure there was a third word…

Labels: American Politics, Coalition, FPC, Liberal Democrats, Religion, Stupid Ideas, Tax

Continuing my series on what the Liberal Democrats stand for, today’s instalment is the heart of Love and Liberty, a 1999 booklet exploring my own Liberalism. It was born out of a political trip to the USA back in 1998 and three separate things that struck me there – a museum, an interview and a terrible event – which together rekindled my rather burnt-out political determination of the time. It sets out just why I think love as important a political standard as liberty, and why Liberal ‘family values’ should be nothing like the narrow, exclusive conservative claim to them…

Love: One Person, One Value

The first speech I ever gave on political philosophy started off by asking whether my audience of fellow students wanted to hear standard “Liberal Democrat rhetoric” or “hippy shit”. They opted for the latter; the speech was not an unqualified success. Since then, I’ve steered clear of using the word “love” in a political context, though I’ve always been keen on thinking about, writing about and talking about Liberal philosophy. Instead, terms like ‘equal dignity’, ‘equal respect’ or the terminally uninspiring ‘equal treatment’ tend to be thrown around, bound together by ties of ‘duty’. This time, I’m not going to be shy.

Love is better than ‘equal dignity’, because it means more; it sounds less mechanical. It goes straight to many people’s basic beliefs in a way that the often colder, more technocratic language of politics doesn’t. Perhaps people would feel less dismissive of politics if it sounded more often that it came from the heart, from what really matters to them – and love chimes with many humanist and many religious perspectives in seeing each person as of unique worth. It implies ties of duty and mutual respect through common humanity. Every single individual has their own intrinsic value. It doesn’t have to imply liking: when I was younger, I sat through a great many sermons and very few lingered, yet I still vividly remember hearing a sermon on love where it was defined as still being there even when you’re feeling “Right now I can’t stand this bloody person, I’m really pissed off with them, but I still love them.” It’s about commitment. Treat people on that basis, as part of a family, and you can never dismiss or dehumanise them. It’s probably easier for Liberals to see everyone on these terms, as we tend to be less hung up on exclusive definitions of what a family entails.

This notion was brought forcefully home to me while in the United States last Autumn – particularly as I was there in a group of “young political leaders” from all parties in the UK and Ireland, aimed at making a small contribution to the peace process. Within the space of a few days, I was moved by the national Holocaust Museum, inspired by catching an interview with the American liberal Mario Cuomo, saying “Treat each other as brother and sister, even if you don’t like each other, to make it work,” and horrified by the death of Matthew Shepard… a 21-year-old gay man battered and left to die because of others’ hatred of his sexuality. It felt like a political wake-up call, and it’s that feeling that gave me the heart of this essay.

Liberal Family Values Are Wider

The most appalling actions are only possible for most people by stunting their own thoughts and perceptions, a practice Liberals are uniquely placed to overcome. Quakers did not fight slavery only to free slaves, but also to fight its effect on slavers and ‘owners’. Hatred in politics and society and everything along the road to Auschwitz are made possible by dehumanising individuals into faceless members of an alien ‘group’. Liberalism, based on individuals rather than groups, cannot afford hatred. Instead, it should be underpinned by love for every member of the human family.

So why love and liberty? Because Liberalism is about freedom – but it’s built on certain assumptions. They’re not the same as freedom, but they’re necessary to make it work. Liberalism is a living, practical philosophy, so it isn’t just about an abstract concept of liberty in isolation from people’s lives. Surely the only Liberalism that works is social Liberalism, a human Liberalism that relies on love for every unique, precious individual to make liberty real. Love implies duties which we all share; not in the fashionable, crass understanding that every right should be tied to a specific responsibility (you don’t have to sign up to something for not having homophobic attacks made on you in the street) – we all need rights to make our own decisions about our own lives, but we have a duty to ensure those same rights are there for everyone else. We can't be out just for ourselves and let the rest go hang, whether in this country, across the world or for future generations. To do so would deny our humanity.

You can find the evolving links to the whole of Love and Liberty with an introduction here. Over the following days, I’ll be expanding on the consequences of putting love at the heart of my Liberalism – check back to that contents list and watch for those links to spring into life. Oh, and don’t forget to give your opinion on whether #LibDemHeart or #LibDemValues makes the better tag!


Back to I

Forward to III

Labels: American Politics, Blogs, Books, Gay, Ideas, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Personal, What the Lib Dems Stand For