Magazines of the British left

...Which brings us naturally to Prospect, a new heavyweight monthly just ending its first year of publication...

...Job creation, training, investment, and retooling are looked down upon as drearily technical, though these are spheres that, unusually, Labour is pledged to spend money on in government...

...Somehow symbolic was the fact that Platt not only published the letters of Keith Flett, a Trotskyist who writes obsessively to all organs of the British press, but engaged with him in a jokey dialogue in the editorial pages...

...In this light, the journalistic moaning and gossiping about the machinations of Tony Blair's New Labour becomes comprehensible— writers don't much like Blair, but at least they do understand him...

...Britain also has unusually high levels of crime against property (although low levels of crime against the person...

...That would be getting too close to the masses...

...First, of course, there are those sections of the left intelligentsia that never wanted to be part of a popular front...

...Soundings has, however, had a bumpy start...

...In any case, does Soundings imagine that the "institutional and social base" for a revived socialism really exists and is simply being ignored by the Blairites in an old-fashioned act of class betrayal...

...Instead of airy articles on "national identity" (portrayed as a product of the London publishing houses) and "popular culture" (portrayed as a product of the London record companies), we might get inquests into family structure, crime on the streets, the education system, patterns of employment...

...The editor of Prospect says in his first anniversary issue that the magazine "gives voice to a liberal skepticism...

...But given the size of the Labour movement and the proximity of a progressive government, the results of all these efforts are surprisingly thin...

...And yet, getting closer to the masses is probably the most constructive thing the political press could do to puncture the sterile cycle of image-making and image-breaking in which politicians and journalists nowadays conspire, and help fill the ideological vacuum inside Tony Blair's "New Labour...

...The magazine is now slick and confident, packed with big-name writers, and pretty upper-crust in its appeal...

...In contrast, the New Statesman nowadays feels professional, well-funded, and in the thick of things...

...Little attention has been devoted to those public schools that do work, with a view to generalizing their experience and developing a policy that would heal rather than institutionalize social division...

...Comforting as that may be, it's not the way a free press should think, much less a reform-minded press: it should be a mirror on society, not on itself...

...Sadly, such a marriage is impossible in Britain's airless intellectual world...

...Did the intellectuals miss the boat...

...Where those choices are required, Soundings has been something short of trailblazing...

...Renewal feels amateurish, underresourced, marginal—a general staff without an army...

...There is nothing written from or on major cities like Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol, or—a city on the up— Newcastle...

...Just under ten years ago, a group of socialist and liberal intellectuals in London, fed up with the left-wing splits that had given Margaret Thatcher a hammerlock on power with barely 40 percent of the vote, got together to produce a little magazine entitled Samizdat...

...To start with, they could get out into the country and investigate a little more closely the condition of Britain...

...There is not much sign even of the number-crunching sociology of the American Prospect...

...George Walden's idea of reviving academic selection in public education to bring back the upper-middle classes—an idea that Londonbased journalists like because it will save them on school fees...

...Yet none of these magazines really points to the great intellectual renaissance that one might expect, or hope for, in a polity about to take a turn away from Thatcherism to a center-left government...

...One positive consequence is that the quality of political writing and analysis is now much higher, if breezy and insiderish...

...If it were possible to marry its savvy cleverness with Renewal's hopefulness and policy-wonkery, then we might have a magazine that could contribute to rather than merely anticipate a revival of the "center-left...

...More worrying, Renewal lacks weight...

...Its roots lie in the Labour Coordinating Committee, roughly speaking that portion of the old Labour party left that has made its peace with Blair...

...That portion of the New Left that is tentatively interested in a popular front with Labour is represented by Soundings, a weighty tri-annual (not dissimilar to Dissent in appearance) inaugurated in fall 1995...

...Historically the flagship of left journalism in Britain, the NS had in recent years fallen on hard times...

...But it needs to be pushed to restore much more local freedom of action, to permit a wealth of social-policy experiments, to revitalize local democracy, and to tailor policy to diverse local conditions...

...it is packed full of bulletpoints and bar charts...

...it wants painfully to contribute to the unfolding of Labour policy...

...This gulf was widened by the tendency of the less well-educated parts of the middle class to vote Conservative in the eighties...

...Prospect has some of the NS's cliqueyness, too—I suppose a new magazine must inevitably rely on the editor's friends at first—but it has a refreshing variety and iconoclasm, featuring a column on prison life written from within the walls and an unusual interest in the social impact of science...

...Calls for "fresh thinking" abound but only alongside familiar images of the Nicaraguan revolution and green feminists beating up fighter-jets with hammers...

...But surely skepticism is the one intellectual commodity not in short supply nowadays...

...Labour now proposes to give some autonomy to Scotland (and possibly Wales) and in practice might loosen the constraints on councils...

...This applies as much to the Tories as to Labour— Thatcher dismantled the metropolitan-area authorities (not only the Greater London Council) and her heirs have progressively reined in local councils' ability to set their own taxes...

...You'd think that even London academics and journalists had lost enough car radios by now to care...

...Answer came there none...

...Samizdat did not last long, intellectuals being notoriously fissiparous (and poor...

...Nor is there anything like the revealing slice-of-life stories in which the New Yorker now specializes (ironically, under British auspices...

...He's "one of us," to use Thatcher's famous phrase...

...Equally frosty about the popular front is Red Pepper, a monthly magazine of the green-red left, edited by Hilary Wainwright, who for twenty years has been trying to collect together the fragments deposited by the New Left of the 1960s...

...Their goal was to try to break down the tribal divisions that had long separated the Labour and Liberal parties and gently to build up solidarity among anti-Conservative writers of all stripes—to construct what they called "a popular front of the mind...

...it goes along with his project of "modernizing" the Labour party but insists that modernization must mean more than simply ditching socialism...

...It is working on building up contacts in the provinces— unusual in the London-centered political world—and an academic network called "Nexus...

...What does a brief survey of the intellectual left (or, to use the voguish phrase, "center-left") press reveal about the fate of the "popular front of the mind...

...Getting out into the country might not only redress the metropolitan imbalance...

...If this is the popular front, it's one with an unusual class base...

...Perhaps...

...Blairites, traditional Labourites, Liberals, and the odd open-minded Tory rub shoul104 • DISSENT Magazines ders easily (perhaps because they were all at Oxford together...

...That's one difficulty...

...Britain has an unusually underachieving and underfunded public education system, out of which better-off families opt if they can afford to...

...New Left Review continues to pump out its bimonthly ration of Marxist structuralism, if anything fortified by a purge of feminist and culturalist elements on its editorial board...

...For Soundings Blair's Labour party is more an appropriation of than an alternative to Thatcherism, but at least Soundings and Blair live in the same universe—the one we all live in, where the left is struggling not because of betrayals or false consciousness but because of powerful economic and cultural forces (some of which we might even approve of...

...Renewal sees its role as Blair's conscience...

...Reading the lead editorial in the Autumn 1996 issue, one is led to suspect that the base for which Soundings yearns is basically an Old Labour, which its editors never supported in their heyday, represented by trade union power and populist politicians like Harold Wilson, who should have lived to have seen himself called "creative" by his former adversaries on the New Left...

...American journalists understand better than the British the limits to what central government can and should do...

...Red Pepper is one of the livelier products of Wainwright's Long March and when launched a few years ago gained brief notoriety by signing up some celebrity artists disenchanted with the moderating Labour party: the playwrights Trevor Griffiths and Harold Pinter, the suspense writer Ruth Rendell, the actress Julie Christie...

...Prospect overlaps with the new NS in range, style, personnel (NS editor Ian Hargreaves is on its small editorial board) and to some extent in politics, but as befits a monthly (looking much like the old Encounter), its essays are longer, more thoughtful, more analytical, consciously countering the tabloidization of the rest of the press...

...It is striking how completely absorbed in the publishing and political life of London these journals are— they behave like those hacks who reported the Nicaraguan revolution from the single four-star hotel in Managua...

...Scotland has its own intellectual milieu and its own journals, increasingly nationalist...

...A genuinely open-minded, investigative, and properly national perspective might also yield a bonus in the form of a renewed appreciation for local government...

...How might it be treated...

...The "popular front" magazines like the NS or Prospect, better situated politically, still seem all too often stale and familiar: London-based, Oxford and Cambridge-educated, written for and by the conventional intellectual upper middle class...

...Extra-economic issues are more rarely discussed, though in actual fact class is as much a matter of culture as of economics...

...it could also interest the London intelligentsia in the lived experience of social change...

...It complains of New Labour's lack of a "project" resting on "a particular institutional and social base," but its own ideas for a "project" remain blurry and unformed, and its cultural studies orientation is better suited to picking apart "institutional and social bases" than to building upon them...

...Having accumulated a respectable circulation of twelve thousand in its first year, Prospect can probably aim higher, occupying as it does a unique marketing niche as a broad-based serious monthly...

...Under editor Steve Platt, and merged with the old social-policy weekly New Society, it had drifted into Red Pepper-land and struggled financially...

...But "community" can't be reconstructed until the sources of its breakdown, its contemporary condition and variety, are properly anatomized...

...What is this "more...

...Much of this criticism boils down to a want of genuine democratic conviction in British intellectual life...

...Prospect and Renewal both sound off regularly—and rightly—on the need to reinvent "community" in conditions SPRING • 1997 • 105 Magazines of globalization and economic decline...

...Columnists gossip breathily about Blair's entourage, chat about governesses and holiday plans...

...Those magazines deriving from New Left roots remain in a familiar oppositional mode, mourning the loss of their movement and seemingly unaware that, if they can't force themselves on Labour by dint of numbers, they had better offer instead some pretty powerful and accessible ideas...

...On the other hand, this same issue is the best yet, with a well-grounded section on "the Public Good" carrying arresting proposals on health policy and pensions and a meaty article on globalization...

...Articles on these subjects—like the poetry SPRING • 1997 • 10i Magazines and avant-garde photography rather self-consciously mixed in—do not require hard political choices...

...Intellectuals don't appear to like the rest of the population, or to understand them...

...Its preoccupations have too much reflected its founders' base in the cultural studies departments of grungy London universities: psychoanalysis, modern art, postmodern takes on popular culture...

...Attempts are made to retain portions of the old audience— with angry voices like John Pilger and Alexander Cockburn staying on—but overall the magazine looks remarkably like the Spectator, the Statesman's long-time right-wing rival, which in the Thatcher years made a name for itself with snobby, stylish, slashing prose...

...The British, partly due again to metropolitan bias, partly to a tradition of paternalist government, still feel all solutions must emanate from Parliament...

...If so, what is that base...

...Closer still is Renewal, a quarterly journal that has been circulating semiinvisibly among about one thousand subscribers for the last four years...

...Subsequently, however, Tony Blair has achieved much the same end in the political sphere by mercilessly tugging Labour to the center and dropping the historic baggage— trade union links, nationalization, high-tax policies— that divided Labour from the Liberals...

...Yet the only reform proposal that has been given an airing in the center-left press has been Tory M.P...

...It has a role to play as billboard for the host of single-issue activist groups, environmentalist and anti-corporate, that eschew party politics, but as yet it has shown no sign of gluing these fragments together into a force that impinges on the lives of millions, rather than hundreds...

...Even New Left academics seem to have only an aesthetic or anthropological appreciation of "the people...

...A dramatic transformation has been effected...

...With Soundings we have begun to approach popular front territory...

...It has plenty of earnestness...

...Although it continued to carry some lively columns and a reasonable arts and books section, it shifted the focus of its political coverage from the mainstream to agitations such as direct action by hippies against new highway projects...

...Still too many poems, though...

...Recently, however, the NS has been bought up by Geoffrey Robinson, a former auto industry executive and Blairite Labour Member of Parliament...

...The dirty details of social change and social policy remain largely terra incognita...

...Avowedly nonpolitical, Prospect still lies pretty clearly in the terrain of the "popular front": accepting of markets yet concerned for community, for Europe, above all opposing the extreme neoliberalism and nationalism of the Thatcherites...

...Is this a product of economic division or the culture of individualism or the fragmentation of communities...

...With Prospect we have reached the best of British political journalism and, so far as it goes, the closest thing to Samizdat's idea of a "popular front of the mind...

...Renewal has a genuine commitment to democracy and social justice, which it feels might just as well still be called "socialism," but it has no clearer idea than the rest of us how to translate those values into a twenty-first-century idiom...

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...Skepticism," he insists, "is not rootlessness...

...Prospect needs something to believe in...

...The extremes and failures of Thatcherism have reunited politically large sections of the population, working class and middle class, without really bonding them...

...There is a deal of fine writing and elegant, essayistic hand-waving, but little conviction...

...Reflecting the British left's historic preoccupation with class, jobs and welfare are given more space than other social questions, although even here the subject is treated as one of macroeconomic policy—the minimum wage, levels of taxes and benefits...

...This leaves the prospects for a rejuvenated social democracy to the tender mercies of Tony Blair, unassisted by a popular front of the mind...

...Its editors include Stuart Hall, whose writings in the now-defunct Marxism Today in the 1980s first encouraged British socialists to take seriously the globalization of capital and culture, to see Thatcherism as a coherent right-wing expression of these trends, and to try to imagine a left-wing alternative that inhabited the same world...

...It is as if this naturally centrist portion of the British intelligentsia had awakened from its Thatcherite episode and drifted back to a more comfortable liberalism, knowing power lies there, but not really knowing why or how...

...It comes as something of a shock to bump up against a report, in Renewal, on the integration of South Asians into the Labour party in Blackburn, a former textile center north of Manchester now with one of the largest ethnic minority communities in the country...