D.D. Guttenplan | The Nation

Manchester—Is the United Kingdom ready for its first Jewish Prime Minister? The last time Labour held its annual Conference in this northern metropolis the question would have seemed not just parochial but preposterous. I remember watching Former Nation intern Ed Miliband looking distinctly uncomfortable at a Labour Friends of Israel reception just a few days after his come-from-behind 2010 victory as party leader. Despite the kvelling, there was still a palpable reluctance to embrace this newly-anointed Jacob so soon after he’d elbowed aside brother David’s embittered Esau. But then the whole Labour party seemed too consumed by internal anguish to notice that behind the mask of coalition and compromise the Conservatives were pushing forward an aggressive program of cuts and privatization that no one had voted for.

Part of the problem was that during a disastrous election campaign Labour, too, had embraced a version of the austerity narrative that became the coalition government’s founding myth. For months after their defeat Labour remained too obsessed with fiscal rectitude—and fratricidal drama—to offer any real alternatives.

All of which made this year’s Conference seem like Ed Miliband’s coming out party. Although never one to deny his heritage, Miliband is a thoroughly secular Jew. But having decided to use his leader’s speech this year to tell the nation “Who I am. What I believe. And why I have a deep conviction that together we can change this country,” he needed to get up close and personal, outing himself not just as a Jew, but as the son of immigrants—even an unabashed intellectual.

Speaking without notes or teleprompter, Miliband told the delegates he was “a person of faith, not a religious faith but a faith nonetheless”—going on to use the f-word a total of 12 times in his remarks. The only concept that got more of an airing was a piece of deft borrowing from another speech in Manchester, given 140 years earlier by Benjamin Disraeli, in which the leader of the Conservative Party called for a “One Nation” Toryism.

In tracing a line from Disraeli, the Victorian Prime minister whose Reform Act gave British working men the vote, through the victory over fascism in the Second World War to the postwar Labour government of Clement Atlee, which created the National Health Service and the modern welfare state, Miliband was doing more than just stealing the clothes of David Cameron’s now discarded compassionate conservatism. By reminding his own party of their duty to build a country “where prosperity is fairly shared” he finally put a stake through the heart of New Labour. Yet in reaching across the aisle to Disraeli he also rejected the narrow tribalism of those who yearn for a return to old Labour.

Instead of the politics of nostalgia, or neo-liberal accommodation with the machinations of finance capital, Miliband’s “One Nation” Labour offered a left populism that embraced both economic justice and what Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher who spoke to a huge, and occasionally bemused audience here two days before Miliband, referred to as “what money can’t buy.” But the choice of Disraeli, born a Jew but baptized at the age of 12, was also a way of turning his own “otherness” into a source of strength rather than shame.

“I think he cracked it,” Sally Gimson, a Labour councillor from Highgate in London, told me afterwards. Judging by the rapturous applause most of the other delegates agreed. Even the national press, which has long derided Miliband’s adenoidal accent and geekish tendencies, called the speech a “game changer.”

My own verdict is a little more restrained. As an orator Ed Miliband, on his best day, is no Bill Clinton—or even Tony Blair. The few times he had to stop for applause came not in response to policy proposals or personal revelations but after blistering attacks on an “incompetent, hopeless, out of touch, u-turning, pledge-breaking, make it up as you go along, back of the envelope, miserable … Prime Minister.”

With the next election not expected until 2015, political debate here often seems more a matter of symbol than of substance. So when Ed Balls, Labour’s shadow chancellor, said that if his party were in power today he would take £2.5 billion due from the sale of 4G mobile phone licenses and use it not to pay off the national debt—as Gordon Brown did with the proceeds of the 3G auction—but instead to finance the construction of 100,000 affordable homes, critics hastened to point out that Labour isn’t in power, and even if they win the next election the money will already be gone.

But symbolism sometimes wins elections. Whatever chancellor George Osborne actually does with the 4G windfall will now be compared with those shiny new—if entirely imaginary—houses. Lately the symbols have been running Labour’s way. Tory chief whip Andrew Mitchell’s fracas last month, in which he cursed at police officers and called them “plebs” after they refused to let him cycle through the gates at 10 Downing Street, confirmed an image of his party as sneering snobs. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s comment last week that abortion ought to only be legal up to 12 weeks was promptly disavowed by David Cameron—but the impression of a party who want to turn back the clock was not easily dispelled.

As mood music, Miliband’s invocation of “One Nation Labour” is already a hit. But Maurice Glasman, a Saul Alinsky-style community organizer who was the new Labour leader’s first appointment to the House of Lords, hopes for a more substantial change of tune. “Capitalism cannot be regulated at arms length,” he has written. “It needs to be domesticated at source.... The redistribution of power is as important as the redistribution of wealth.” The architect of “Blue Labour”—a strategy sometimes described as a blend of economic radicalism and social conservatism—Glasman, like Jon Cruddas, the MP in charge of Labour’s policy review, is neither an old fashioned statist nor a neo-liberal preaching accommodation to market values.

Instead Glasman, who describes his own politics as “Bundist”—a nod to the Yiddish socialist rival to communism—has long called for the kind of synthesis suggested by Miliband’s “One Nation” vision. “It’s about strengthing and supporting associations and institutions that aren’t defined by the market,” he told me. “That isn’t how liberals see it. They efficiency, choice, progress. But Labour politics is rooted in the democratic resistance to the commodification of human beings.”

At ground level that means forging links between trade unions and religious groups. It means campaigning for a living wage so that cleaners and cooks and security guards can earn enough to support their families without having to work two jobs—or to rely on state benefits. And it means acknowledging that working class fears about immigrants undercutting wages have some basis in reality.

In his speech Miliband admitted “the last Labour government didn’t do enough to address these concerns.” But he went to explain that his own approach would not be to demonize migrants, but to crack down on employers who refused to pay the minimum wage, or recruitment agencies who only hire overseas—a neat left-hand turn on an issue that his predecessors seemed afraid to grapple with.

On the night after Miliband’s speech there was a panel devoted to the American election, where a packed room received a brief induction into “swing states” and the mysteries of the electoral college. Ronald Reagan admired Margaret Thatcher, but on the left the intellectual current across the Atlantic has lately been west-to-east. Ed Miliband spent a summer at the Nation and three semesters teaching at Harvard. But if he can manage to flesh out the sketchy, if seductive, parameters of his “One Nation” speech into a politics that genuinely redistributes power along with wealth, and does so while offering an economic policy that goes beyond “austerity lite,” it will mark more than just a turn in the intellectual tide. And that really would be something to kvell about.

London
 
Does it matter who wins today’s election for mayor of London? To the candidates, certainly. If Labour’s Ken Livingstone loses his bid to return to the office he held from 2000 to 2008, that will probably mean the end of a political career that began in the Greater London Council, where Livingstone proved such a thorn in the side of Margaret Thatcher that she abolished municipal government all across Britain just to get rid of him. When Tony Blair returned self-government to London, Livingstone returned to the political stage, proving just as annoying to Blair.

Livingstone was a brilliant mayor. It wasn’t just getting through the congestion charge (a toll on cars entering central London)—something Mike Bloomberg and all his billions couldn’t manage in Manhattan. Or the successful introduction of the Oyster travelcards. Or his opposition to Blair and his successor Gordon Brown’s idiotic (and ruinously expensive) devotion to Public-Private Partnerships to finance capital projects. Or the brilliant redesign of Trafalgar Square from death-spiral traffic island to one of the world’s great public stages. Or even the truly statesmanlike way he kept the city together in the wake of the July 7, 2005, bomb attacks. Livingstone understood, more than any other British politician, the way cities worked, what they needed to grow and prosper and why people came to live in them—sometimes at great cost and across enormous distances.

Livingstone was a genius at leveraging the minimal powers granted the office—chiefly over public transport, urban planning and police numbers. He pushed through the congestion charge, he once told The Nation, because it was his only chance for revenue that didn’t depend on Whitehall’s largesse.

But like Ed Koch, the urban politician he resembled in so many ways (apart from their actual politics, which were poles apart), his abrasiveness eventually cost him re-election. Boris Johnson, the American-born, Eton-educated Tory who replaced him four years ago had the great advantage of not being taken seriously. When Livingstone called a Jewish reporter “a concentration camp guard” you could hear the wailing from Westminster to the Upper West Side. When it emerged that Johnson had written an article describing the Queen being greeted by “flag-waving piccaninnies,” everyone just said “Oh, that’s just Boris.”

Yet Johnson’s term has been far from the expected disaster. His self-appointed role as tribune of the plutocrats can be galling, and Londoners who depend on public transport have had to pay more than they might under Livingstone, but as a cyclist I’ve been glad to see the end of the notorious “bendy busses”—sixty-foot-long juggernauts perfect for Amsterdam’s segregated transit lanes but terrifying on London’s narrow streets. Johnson has also proved willing to defy his party on immigration and housing policies that would force the poor to leave London.

Brian Paddick, the gay former assistant police commissioner running on the Liberal Democrat line, managed just under 10 percent of the vote last time around—before his party got into bed with the Tories. This time he’s expected to finish barely ahead of the right-wing fringe UK Independence Party and the Greens.

The result has been a two-man race that has been compared, all too appropriately, with a pair of drunks at a wedding. Although only one of us can vote here, The Nation’s London bureau is divided on which would be worse—four more years of Boris braying on behalf of Britain’s oppressed bankers or four more years of Ken’s overweening arrogance. It wasn’t just the way Ken talked out of one side of his mouth about “rich bastards” who avoid paying their fair share of taxes—and then turned out to funnel his own considerable media earnings through a corporate shell. There was also his long track record of high-handed contempt for even constructive criticism—as borne out most recently, and most painfully, in his disastrous meeting with Jewish Labour supporters desperate for a few encouraging words.

Livingstone’s proposals to cut bus and Tube fares, buy energy in bulk (and pass the savings on to Londoners) and build affordable housing are all clearly preferable to Boris Johnson’s platform of trickle-down economics in which a supposedly resurgent financial sector serves as the engine of prosperity for the whole country. But elections are about more than policy choices—particularly mayoral elections.

For me the Jewish Question proved decisive. I just can’t support a candidate who views me and my kind with contempt—or even calculated disregard. Besides, if Boris does win, the politician with most to fear would be David Cameron.

But the bureau’s British member held her nose and voted for Livingstone, saying she couldn’t bear to help re-elect a Tory mayor. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

London

Does Elizabeth Murdoch know how to make gnocchi? Because this was the week when it became blindingly obvious that whoever was scripting Rupert Murdoch’s moves—personally flying in to London to open a new Sun on Sunday to replace the toxic News of the World; tweeting a defense of his fallen favorite, Rebekah Brooks, when it emerged that in addition to presiding over a paper that paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in bribes to policemen she’d also been loaned a police horse to ride; stripping his son James of his power over News International, the subsidiary that runs the News Corp.’s British newspapers and packing him off to work with Moe Greene in Las Vegas (Surely that should be “with Chase Carey in New York”?—ed.)—the swelling soundtrack had to be by Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone.

We still have a long wait for the box set—and the next installment, Murdoch in America: Judgment Day, won’t be released until prosecutors at the Department of Justice decide whether the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is designed to prevent the payment of bribes to foreign officials by US corporations in order to gain unfair advantage, applies to what Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers told the Leveson Inquiry was “the delivery of regular, frequent and sometimes significant sums of money to small numbers of public officials by journalists” in order to gain exclusive access to “salacious gossip” which the Sun, Murdoch’s flagship British tabloid, could then splash all over the front page. Which presumably helped the paper sell more copies than its less-wired competitors.

Akers’s clear, detailed and devastating testimony on Monday meant that the Murdoch organization’s brief counter-attack against Brian Leveson’s investigation into British press corruption, which culminated in Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun’s former political editor and hatchet-man, whining about a “witch hunt,” was now sleeping with the fishes. Indeed if you were looking for the moment when the phone hacking probe turned from scandal to soap opera you could hardly better Kavanagh’s complaint that Murdoch’s “journalists are being treated like members of an organized crime gang.” Just how far that fall from grace is measured was shown on Thursday, when John Yates, the former assistant police commissioner who resigned over the summer, and who in 2009 decided there was no reason to reopen the phone hacking investigation—and who refused to tell deputy prime minister John Prescott his phone had been hacked—was quizzed about his habit of sharing a relaxing glass—or bottle—of champagne, or a meal at the Ivy, with his good friends at News International.

Earlier in the week the Welsh singer Charlotte Church settled her phone hacking claim against Murdoch for £ 650,000. “You are fighting a massive corporation with endless resources, a phenomenal amount of power, and it is just made really difficult,” said Church, who told the Guardian the News of the World “published a story about an affair her father had had and approached [Charlotte’s mother] Maria Church to tell her they had a “part two” of the story which they promised they would withdraw if she gave a first-hand account of her suicide attempt. They also asked to take photographs of her arms.” In November Church told the Leveson Inquiry that as a 13-year-old girl she’d been pressured into waiving her £100,000 fee to sing at Rupert Murdoch’s wedding to Wendi Deng in exchange for favorable treatment in his newspapers. (In case you were wondering, the statute of limitations for extortion under New York law is five years.)

Even in such a busy week it is worth taking a minute to reflect on what amounts to the firing of James Murdoch by his father. And here, tempting as it is to wallow in the family saga, the real action is taking place far from public view. Sidelining James may make for dramatic headlines, but what Murdoch is clearly trying to avoid is not the “Sicilian Vespers”—the baptismal bloodbath at the end of Godfather Part 1—but, to change metaphors, a Saturday Night Massacre. As older readers will recall, that was when a besieged and paranoid Richard Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, which in turn triggered the resignation of Attorney General Elliot Richardson, ultimately hastening Nixon’s resignation. The casting is straightforward: Murdoch as Nixon and Joel Klein, the former Justice Department trust-buster now heading News Corp’s Management and Standards Committee, as Cox. And in a post-modern masterstroke, the part of Roger Ailes, Nixon’s media strategist and the author of “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News” will be played by… Roger Ailes, Murdoch’s American muscle and president of Fox News.

In the past few weeks Klein’s committee has been desperately throwing underlings overboard in an attempt to protect the Murdochs. So far the strategy has worked—at least in terms of arrests. Certainly sending James to New York makes it unlikely his sleep will be disturbed by Scotland Yard.

But there is still the risk that at some point Murdoch himself will tell Klein’s committee they have done enough to help the British police. Or that—and this is made far more complicated by US election year politics—Klein’s former colleagues at the Justice Department will start issuing subpoenas. When that happens perhaps Klein—and certainly James Murdoch—might want to brush up on the Code Corleone: “Fredo, you’re my older brother, and I love you, but don’t ever side with anyone against the family again.”

London

If corporations really were people, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation would be breaking rocks. That’s the take-away from yesterday’s astonishing ruling by Geoffrey Vos, the judge presiding over the phone-hacking civil trial here. In agreeing to settle with thirty-seven victims yesterday the company clearly hoped to be able to draw a line under the scandal, which has already seen the closure of the world’s best-selling English language tabloid, The News of the World, and both Rupert Murdoch and his son James forced to give evidence before a Parliamentary select committee. With the trial scheduled to begin on February 13, the Murdochs must have hoped that if they could make the case go away by paying off the plaintiffs then the steady drip of information about News Corp.’s criminal activities—which include phone hacking, payments to police and breaking into e-mail accounts—might stop before it lead higher up the corporate chain of command.

The company’s first problem is that the thirty-seven victims who agreed to settle include many of the most famous boldface names—actor Jude Law, who had his phone messages hacked and was himself the target of physical surveillance by Murdoch’s men for a period of years received £130,000 (over $200,000); his ex-wife Sadie Frost got £50,000 (over $77,000); last May Law’s ex-girlfriend, Sienna Miller, was paid £100,000 (over $150,000) to settle her claim—it didn’t include all of them. Singer Charlotte Church, for example has yet to settle. So far just over half of those victims who have actually filed suit have agreed to settle. And there are literally hundreds of additional victims whose names have not yet been made public.

But a much bigger problem is that the documents already disclosed because of the civil suit suggest that in addition to routine invasions of privacy and bribery, Murdoch executives may also have been guilty of destroying evidence in order to cover up the company’s crimes. And as Richard Nixon and his henchman learned the hard way, it’s the cover-up that gets you in the end.

When News Corp.’s lawyer, Dinah Rose, told the judge, “There comes a point when we’re three weeks away from trial and…we can say enough is enough,” arguing the company had already turned over sufficient evidence to the plaintiffs, she sounded like any corporate lawyer used to getting her way. But Vos wasn’t buying. In ordering News Corporation to turn over three of their executives’ laptops and six desktop computers he said News Group, Murdoch’s British newspaper arm, “are to be treated as deliberate destroyers of evidence.”

“I have been shown a number of emails,” he said, “which show a rather startling approach to the email record.” Three days after Sienna Miller’s lawyers wrote to News Group asking the company to preserve any emails relating to phone hacking, “a previously conceived plan to conceal evidence was put in train by [News Group] managers,” the judge said.

Even as they apologized for the violations of privacy that led to yesterday’s settlements News Corporation’s lawyers were careful not to make any further admission of guilt. The corporation told the judge he could approve levels of compensation “as if senior employees and directors of [News Group] knew about the wrongdoing and sought to conceal it by deliberately deceiving investigators and destroying evidence.”

Take just a minute to think about what the company might have meant by using the word “director” there. Andy Coulson, the former editor of News of the World who later served as David Cameron’s spin doctor wasn’t a company director. Nor was Clive Goodman, the “rogue reporter” whose arrest started the whole scandal. But Rebekah Brooks, the Murdoch favorite who went from editing the Sun to running News of the World to running both papers’ parent company, was a director. And so was James Murdoch.

The idea behind News Corporation’s non-denial denial was to get the settlements approved quickly without actually admitting anything. But Vos’s ruling was crystal clear: “The day you can say ‘that’s enough’ is the day I give judgement—although you can’t even say it then because of the number of other cases waiting in the wings.”

A year ago I’d have said the Murdochs stood a good chance of shutting this whole thing down with a wave of the checkbook. Yesterday’s ruling made it pretty clear that isn’t going to happen. And while it would still be a reckless man who’d bet against Rupert Murdoch, the odds against James Murdoch taking a fall just got a little shorter.