Politics on the Edge

Rory Stewart’s memoir Politics on the Edge has been a huge hit. Should you read it? What does it tell us about British politics? And what should we make of Stewart himself?

Rory Stewart is now 51. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he was a soldier (briefly), diplomat, and adventurer, and lectured at both Harvard and Yale. Then in 2010 he was elected as Tory MP for a large, beautiful rural seat, Penrith and the Borders. He looked forward to progressing to a ministerial role and eventually a Cabinet seat. 

But this was where things started to go wrong.

It’s all described in Politics on the Edge (Jonathan Cape, 2023), published in the US as How Not to be a Politician. In it, Stewart describes the horrible life of a backbench MP, the authoritarian party whipping, the mad way ministers are appointed, and the steamy horrors of the Brexit period – from which he emerged with honour, but with his political career in tatters.

The reviews for Politics on the Edge have been excellent. Writing in The Guardian, former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson compared it to “Orwell down the coal mine, Swift on religious excess. We should be grateful it was written.” In the US, Andrew Moravcsik in Foreign Affairs called it “the poignant tale of a genuinely decent human being …and …the revelation that the political hypocrisy and ignorance surrounding him will thwart his efforts.” The book quickly hit the No. 1 spot in the Sunday Times bestseller list; it’s now out in paperback and is still at No. 3 in Amazon UK’s non-fiction charts after eight months. 

It's helped that Stewart’s had a high profile since he left Parliament; The Rest is Politics, the politics podcast he co-presents with Alastair Campbell, has been very popular (and has been said, by Nick Duerden in The i,  to net him £70,000 a month). And Stewart is a frequent interviewee on TV, radio and the net; the more so since the book; in fact he has spread across the media like Japanese knotweed.

But the fact that critics think it a good book does not make it one. Is it?

The short answer is yes, absolutely; anyone who cares about the way Britain is run should read it. It is also well-written and engaging. But at times it did irritate, even anger, me. And it raises too many questions it doesn’t answer.

The honourable gentleman
At the start of the book, Stewart says he wanted to enter politics as a Conservative because he wanted to make a difference. (Everyone who’s been in politics says they wanted to ‘make a difference’.) He decides the best way to find a seat is to go and see the Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron. Told that Cameron will give him a short appointment, he flies back to Britain. He does meet Cameron, who is not encouraging. He finds a seat anyway, in the Border country. A few months later, he wins it in the 2010 General Election. It’s a safe Tory seat. But his enthusiasm for the Borders and the people seems very real, and he explores the constituency on foot, in winter.

Stewart’s introduction to Parliament, however, is jarring. It starts with the new intake being summoned to a meeting with the Chief Whip, who tells them they are lobby fodder and their job is to shut up and vote the way they are told. They might be called legislators, says the Chief Whip, but they shouldn’t regard debates as occasions for open discussion, and “are not intended to overly scrutinise legislation”. Although Stewart doesn’t say so, this is surely a contempt of Parliament. As the term progresses, Stewart feels increasingly tainted by the tawdry hypocrisies of life at Westminster; the craven text messages one sends to the PM to congratulate him on a speech, or to support a colleague who has been caught with their pants down. “We attended award ceremonies hosted by MPs who had been suspended for corruption; some continued to drink with MPs accused, and later convicted, of assault and rape.” He does like some of his fellow-MPs, but friendship is rare – and not without reason: “Too many of our private conversations seemed to get back to Number 10 and the whips.”

He is under pressure to vote for things he thinks are wrong. In particular, Cameron wants MPs to vote for initial legislation on Lords reform, something he doesn’t want himself but has promised his LibDem coalition partners. Stewart, deeply conservative with a small C, is against it. I think he was wrong about that. But he’s horribly right about something else – Afghanistan; Stewart knows the country and sees that the West’s nation-building efforts are deeply unwise, that you cannot tell a people what to be. This cuts no ice with Cameron. But Stewart will eventually be vindicated. He has since argued (in the influential American journal Foreign Affairs) that the West might have achieved more had it tried to do less. From my own experience (not in Afghanistan but elsewhere), I agree.

Border country: Stewart's constituency,
Penrith and the Borders

Stewart quickly realises that as a backbench MP he has no agency. But for a long time he isn’t offered a ministerial post, even a PPS, because Cameron does not like him. After the 2015 election, however, Cameron does give him a junior ministerial position at the Department of the Environment, working under Liz Truss. It is a frustrating experience. He finds it hard to get anything done. He also finds Truss asking him for a 25-year plan for the environment, insisting it be ready in a few days. He then finds she has quietly given the task to several other people as well. So they combine their drafts –which doesn’t please her. He finds Truss is interested in no-one’s view but her own, and has a brain that transmits, albeit erratically, but does not receive. Reading this, one is appalled that she ever held ministerial office at all, let alone the Premiership.

Later, under Theresa May, Stewart becomes the Minister of State at the Department for International Development (DfID) – later rising to Secretary of State for International Development and a Cabinet seat. This is appropriate, as unlike other MPs he has hands-on experience in development, in Afghanistan; but he finds the job frustrating and the civil servants obstructive. In between these two development posts he serves as Prisons Minister. Here he begins improvements to security and discipline and also renationalises the Probation Service, the privatisation of which was clearly a blunder. These steps are taken with support from his boss, Justice Minister and Lord Chancellor David Gauke. Stewart has praise for very few senior politicians but he does for Gauke (and for May herself, who he served loyally to the end). Still, Stewart finds ministerial office frustrating, and thinks the way ministers are moved around is arbitrary, frequent and not conducive to good government. I’m sure he’s right.

Posh boy makes good?
But there were moments in this book when Stewart did piss me off. Early on he goes to see Cameron and notes that the Tory leader is surrounded by floppy-haired old Etonians – but what the hell does he think he is? I can’t condemn Stewart for being born posh (besides, I went to the same school as him till age 13). But he can lack self-awareness. I also questioned his judgments about international development. This was my own field for many years. He has genuine experience of it from Afghanistan, but it is deep rather than broad and while I agree with some of his views, others seem sweeping. If, as he says, he had problems with his civil servants at DFiD, this may be why. (He also recently angered me with a slighting reference on his podcast to VSO, the British equivalent of the Peace Corps; I was a volunteer for five years.)

Moreover there is austerity – which Stewart, as a Tory MP, supported. I was struck by a recent New Yorker piece by Sam Knight (What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?, March 25 2024). “Between 2010 and 2018, funding for police forces in England fell by up to a quarter,” he says, “Officers stopped investigating burglaries. …Last fall, hundreds of school buildings had to be closed for emergency repairs, because the country’s school-construction budget had been cut by 46% between 2009 and 2022.” There is much more of this in the piece. No doubt Stewart, and other Tories from the time, would argue that the huge debts incurred in the 2008 bailout had given them little option. But this is also about who was made to pay the price. “Poorer communities [that vote Labour] …suffered disproportionately,” says Knight. “In Liverpool …spending, per head, fell more than in any other city in the country. Public-health spending in Blackpool, one of the poorest local authorities in England, was cut almost five times more, per person, than in the affluent county of Surrey, just south of London, whose eleven M.P.s are all Tories.”  In short, the rich brought down the system and the poor then picked up the bill. Stewart, and every other Tory MP of the time, was complicit in this. 

In fact it would be easy to dismiss Politics on the Edge as a self-justificatory memoir by yet another posh boy who somehow thinks he has succeeded on merit. (Russell Barnes in Civil Service World described it as “400-odd pages of how right Rory Stewart was at the time, and how history will prove him to be a visionary.”)

But that would be a pity, because this memoir really does lift the lid on Parliament and government. Other books have done this before (Caroline Lucas’s Honourable Friends; Roy Hattersley’s witty Who Goes Home; Martin Bell’s An Accidental MP; and many more). But for a vision of sheer dysfunction, few accounts beat this one. No-one can read this book and continue to believe that Britain is a fully functional democracy.

Moreover Stewart has earned a hearing. Unlike other posh boys (like Cameron), he didn’t swan out of Oxford into a job as a research assistant then progress smoothly into Parliament, rising without trace. He did a lot with his life before politics. His army service was brief, but he then spent some years as a diplomat, serving in Indonesia and later as British Representative in Montenegro. He also founded, and for three years ran, an NGO in Afghanistan, where he met his American wife, Shoshana. He has written a number of books, including The Prince of the Marshes (now relaunched as Occupational Hazards), in which he describes his stretch as deputy governor of an Iraqi province in the wake of the 2003 invasion. In 2000 he took leave from the Foreign Office to make an epic 18-month walk across Asia; The Places In Between (which is excellent) describes the Afghan section, but he has written little of the journey otherwise, and is sometimes said to have been a spy. This is a bit idle; of course he will have passed any useful information to the intelligence services – he was a serving diplomat. But it’s true he may have had much closer links with them; after all, his father Brian Stewart was a very senior spook. And in general, he’s less David Cameron, more Fitzroy Maclean – a man whose life and background were very like his own.

Stewart as a Foreign Office minister, at a conference on
endangered species in 2018 (Foreign and Commonwealth Office)

Beware the slithy Gove, my son
It’s also clear that Stewart cared about his ministerial briefs. But the Brexit-related chaos in 2016-2019 meant Ministers were shuffled around even more often than usual. Stewart held his junior ministerial posts for little more than a year at most, and his Cabinet post for less than three months. For some Ministers, every reshuffle will have been a career opportunity. But Stewart feels, rightly, that this was no way to run a country. You also sense his disgust at the tawdriness of some of his ‘colleagues’ (I wish Tories would not use that word). In particular, the duplicity of Michael Gove was breathtaking.

In the end, however, it’s Boris Johnson who emerges as the villain of this book. And Stewart confronts him. First he stands against him in the 2019 leadership contest; he was the only One Nation Tory to dare do so – and only because none of the others would, by his account. He doesn’t win, although he is probably the candidate best liked by voters as a whole. Then in September he is one of 21 Tory MPs, many of them former Cabinet ministers, who have the whip removed for voting against Johnson’s government on a Brexit-related motion. Some of the MPs later had the whip restored, but Stewart decides to resign from the Conservative Party altogether. He could contest his seat as an independent in the December election, but doesn’t; he may have felt he would not win, but in Politics on the Edge he says he didn’t want to campaign against people who once campaigned for him. If that was his reason, it was a decent one. Politics on the Edge ends there.

It has sold very well and must have earned Stewart a pretty penny. I can’t begrudge him that. Other senior Tories rolled over and played along with Boris Johnson although they knew perfectly well what sort of man he was. Stewart, at some personal cost, did not. Moreover he is an interesting man who has packed a lot into his 51 years. And Politics on the Edge is a good book – well-written, forthright, revealing and important. 

But there is something missing from the book: analysis. Stewart is an old-style conservative with a love of tradition and an innate distrust of too much change. This traditional style of British conservatism has deep roots, going right back to the French Revolution and the events that followed. It is not unreasonable. After all, since then radical utopians have likely killed at least as many people as conservatives. Yet change is needed. Britain’s government and parliament, as seen in Politics on the Edge, are sclerotic and in a way corrupt. And we’ve just had an election in which a party won one of the largest majorities in history with just 33.7% of the vote share – and that’s only of the votes cast; 40% of voters didn’t bother voting at all. This has been followed by serious civil disorder. If this had happened in some hapless African republic the Foreign Secretary would be wagging their finger at them and muttering about suspension from the Commonwealth. But we cannot see what is happening to us. 

Britain’s system is rotten and has run its course, at least in its present form. That is clear from the book; but at no point does Stewart really confront the implications or say how we should address it. I think he should have done. Politics on the Edge is one of the best political memoirs I have read and I strongly recommend it. But in that sense, at least, there is a void at its heart.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Attlee, Bevin and the New Jerusalem

The next UK government will inherit a mess, but not as bad as Clement Attlee did in 1945. Yet the Attlee government not only coped. It made Britain better. Meanwhile his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, played a key role in forging the Western security framework that has endured to this day. Who were these men, and what were they really like?

Attlee takes power in 1945 (Leslie Priest/AP)

When Labour came to power in July 1945, Britain was broke. Much of its gold reserves had been spent on the war, and the US had insisted, as part of its postwar loan agreement, that sterling be convertible within a few years. This was a huge financial bomb waiting to go off. Meanwhile the occupation of the British Zone of Germany was also costly; it was in a terrible state, not least because of Britain’s own bombing. 

At home, labour shortages in the mines restricted coal supplies and would immiserate everyone in the awful winter of 1947. There was a huge housing crisis; about 2 million houses had been destroyed or badly damaged across Britain, and an estimated 750,000 new houses were needed – quickly; according to the Royal British Legion, a staggering 4.2 million service personnel were to be demobilised by December 1946. Meanwhile there were about 400,000 German prisoners in Britain, and large numbers of Polish and other servicemen whose countries were about to come under Stalinist occupation. It was becoming clear that they would not be able to go home.

Abroad, India was ready to explode but the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, could not get Indian politicians to agree a path to independence. Britain was also still fighting in Greece, where left-wing forces could have taken the country into the Eastern bloc along with its neighbours. There was armed conflict in Palestine, which was still under the British mandate. In 1948 the emergency in Malaya would start.

Not all these problems would be solved. Some, especially Palestine, would leave a toxic legacy. The houses wouldn’t all be built. But in six years, Attlee would build a social democracy in which people’s basic needs mostly would be met. Abroad, despite some failures, his remarkable Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, would play a leading role in the postwar global order and in forging the Atlantic alliance. At home, he would guard Attlee’s back against rivals in Cabinet and keep it stable.

Who were these men?

***

Francis Beckett’s biography Clem Attlee was originally published in 1997 but reissued in an updated edition in 2015. It’s not alone; there are a number of well-regarded Attlee biographies, notably John Bew’s Citizen Clem and Michael Jago’s Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister. But I think for most people Beckett’s will be all the Attlee they need.

Attlee has been seen as an accidental Prime Minister who was in the right place at the right time. In the schism and electoral rout of 1931 many of Labour’s ablest people either crossed over to the National Government or lost their seats or both. Attlee was one of the few survivors. Otherwise, it’s said, he would never have been deputy Labour leader and would not have become leader when Lansbury stepped down in 1935.  Biographer Michael Jago thought this was nonsense. Beckett agrees. Attlee, he argues, rose to the top on his considerable political skills and the strength of his beliefs. He was anything but an accident. Reading Beckett’s biography, I partly, but only partly, agree with this. Throughout his leadership, rivals such as Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton would deride him as a grey man and insist Labour needed a more charismatic leader (e.g. them). Without the events of 1931, he might have been a capable Minister but never Prime Minister; the post would have been filled by one of his “charismatic” rivals. It is our good fortune that it wasn’t, for the grey man did rather well.

Clement Attlee was born into a large middle-class family in Putney in 1883. His father was a Liberal barrister and Attlee himself went into the law after Oxford. But it bored him. One night in 1906 his younger brother took him to visit a club for disadvantaged boys in Stepney, then a very poor part of London where he would not normally have gone. The visit transformed his life and he ended up living in the East End as a social worker and campaigner, becoming involved in left-wing politics. In 1914 he joined the army and served with some distinction in the Gallipoli campaign and in the Middle East. In the former, he caught dysentery and was almost the last Allied soldier to be evacuated. In the Middle East he was badly wounded. Beckett says he felt strongly that the army and navy had mismanaged the Gallipoli campaign but that Churchill’s strategy had been sound. This would matter in 1940, when Attlee would bring Labour into Churchill’s wartime coalition.

Beckett obviously covers Attlee’s part in the wartime coalition and his subsequent premiership. He takes a broad-brush approach. I don’t think that’s a bad thing; the minutiae of long-ago governments do not always tell us much. Beckett does show that Attlee played a crucial role from the beginning, backing Churchill against Chamberlain and Halifax, who wanted to negotiate with Hitler. He also demonstrates that Attlee could restrain or influence Churchill, and did – but tactfully; he would have ‘a word with the PM’, rather than row with him in Cabinet. Beckett quotes several examples, not least Attlee’s defence of de Gaulle, who Churchill and Roosevelt loathed – not always without reason. But Attlee realised they had no right to remove him. At the same time Attlee quietly chaired the main committees concerned with postwar reconstruction, which helped him set the agenda for the government he would soon lead.

He was not to regret his part in the coalition. He later acquired the original of Low’s famous 1940 cartoon (“All behind you, Winston!”) and according to Beckett it was on the wall of his living room when he died in 1967.

***

Beckett takes the same broad brush to the postwar government. Here a little more detail might have been welcome, and there are some omissions, or matters covered briefly. The latter include the fuel problems that beset Britain in the very bad winter of 1947, and the constant plotting of Attlee’s rivals for the leadership – they are there but not in depth. Beckett may be right not to get into the weeds. Still, he could have said more about the pension and social security reforms, which were to have a huge positive impact, and their prime mover the Minister of National Insurance, Jim Griffiths. A Welshman who had left school at 13, he is largely forgotten now. But his work in that Attlee government had a positive and lasting impact on millions. He seems also to have been a likeable and capable figure.

Ellen Wilkinson
(Bassano Ltd./National Portrait Gallery)

What Beckett does bring out is Attlee’s magnanimity in government. Besides leadership rivals like Morrison and Dalton, he also brought in Aneurin Bevan, who had been a fierce critic throughout the war years, and Ellen Wilkinson, who was apparently Morrison’s mistress and had been involved in multiple plots against her new boss. (Beckett says she had a Damascene conversion about Attlee as soon as she was in government.) These decisions have sometimes been seen as wily plots to neutralise opposition. The reality, according to Beckett, was that Attlee felt all the best people were needed in government whether he liked them or not. 

And for the most part they did well. This was especially true of Bevan, although he could be difficult; and of Wilkinson, who implemented the important 1944 Education Act. Beckett covers her role fairly well. But he says little about her death in office in 1947, possibly by her own hand but more likely of an accidental overdose. This was a poignant episode; a charismatic woman with a gift for friendship, she was mourned on both sides of the House. Morrison did not attend her funeral.

There is one episode of Attlee’s premiership that was very grave, and about which Beckett is perhaps a little generous to him. This was India.

By 1945 it was clear that Britain could not keep control in India much longer. There was a Secretary of State for India and Burma; this was a Cabinet-level position in its own right, occupied by Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, a long-time Labour figure. However, he was by then 76 and besides, Attlee seems largely to have directed India policy himself – a legacy perhaps of his service on the Simon Commission in India in the 1920s. Early in 1947 he sacked the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, who had tried hard but failed to get Indian politicians to agree with each other on the shape of the transition to independence. Attlee replaced him with Lord Mountbatten, telling him to get the British out quickly and leave India as a single nation if possible but if not possible, to partition it. Mountbatten was given plenipotentiary powers to this effect. He chose Partition, and brought the date forward to just six months hence.  Attlee let him do it. Should he have done? It led to a huge, unplanned exchange of populations – something that might have been predicted. This left a million dead and is a difficult part of Attlee’s legacy.

Beckett is with the defence. By 1947, it is argued, Britain could not keep order and any delay would make things worse. This might be true. But perhaps Attlee should have given the same authority to Wavell when he came to power two years earlier. Wavell’s diaries were published in the 1970s and they do suggest that, given the same freedom of action as Mountbatten, he might have negotiated an agreed path to a united India.

But history is full of what-ifs; in the end they take you nowhere, and maybe Attlee was right. His support of partition may have sprung from his realisation, decades before others, that the Western model of democracy could not always be exported. In May 1943 he had circulated a remarkable paper to Cabinet in which he argued that in certain situations – Palestine, Ireland, South Africa – two groups might so distrust each other that one would oppose governance by the other under any circumstances, at least without an outside referee. Perhaps Attlee believed that in such a scenario the two parties must go their separate ways altogether. If so, Partition was the logical step. But the price was high, and it was not the British who paid it.

***

Attlee shaped Britain as no other single person has in modern times. But what was he like?

He lived quietly – and modestly; when he went to the Palace to kiss hands in 1945 it was in an eight-year-old Hillman 14 driven by his wife Violet, and the couple used the same car in the 1950 election campaign. For 1951 they had upgraded to a Humber Hawk, but Beckett says this was still prewar (other sources do say it was new). His wife Violet usually drove him on his election campaigns. He was moderate in his personal habits. The family home was a semi in Stanmore, north-west London, and he returned there whenever he could during the war years. He had married at nearly 40; the marriage seems to have been a devoted one, and lasted until Violet’s death in 1964. They had four children.

Outside the home, Attlee was a quiet, undemonstrative man. He was also almost weirdly calm and self-controlled. His years in government, as deputy and later Prime Minister, were the most crisis-ridden in modern British history, but he seems to have been completely unflappable (even when chauffeured by Violet, which is said to have been terrifying). He was also quite able to detach himself when the day’s work was done however crisis-ridden it had been, and read a book or write letters. He was concise to the point of abruptness; he never used two words where one would do and never used one word when he could grunt instead. He had little small talk. Ministers who did not perform were dismissed perhaps not rudely, but certainly without ceremony. One imagines that Ministers and civil servants might have respected rather than loved him.

There was however a more jocular face to Attlee’s government. This was his closest ally: his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. He, too, is now the subject of an accessible and absorbing biography – by a more recent Labour minister, Lord Adonis.

***

Ernest Bevin was born in Somerset in 1881. His mother was a widow; his father’s identity has never been known (though Adonis has evidence he was a local farmer). His home was very poor but not unhappy; however, his mother died when he was eight and at 11 he left school and worked as a labourer. By the age of 13 he had had enough of this, and went to Bristol, where he became a drayman and, in time, a Baptist lay preacher and union organiser.

Bevin: a 1945 portrait by
Thomas Cantrell Dugdale

In the latter role he did well and his influence grew. He started to travel, building links with trade unionists in Europe and elsewhere. During the First World War he visited the USA, where he had a cordial meeting with the powerful labour leader Samuel Gompers, who had helped found the American Federation of Labor.  Eventually Bevin founded Britain’s own first ‘super-union’, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). By 1940 he had for some time been the country’s most important union figure. Distrustful of Labour intellectuals after 1931, he decided that Labour’s taciturn and business-like new Deputy Leader, Attlee, was the horse to back. The two men were a contrast; Attlee a silent ascetic to whom many found it hard to relate – and Bevin, big, bluff and sometimes a bully, forged in the furnace of labour negotiations and union politics. He was genial and ruthless.

In 1940 Attlee and Churchill found Bevin a seat and brought into the wartime coalition as Minister of Labour, believing this to be the best way of mobilising the workforce behind the war (wisely, they seem to have realised this was not a given). As wartime Minister of Labour, he played a key role in uniting the labour movement behind the war effort – something Churchill, no friend of the unions, could not have done without him. Finally, as Foreign Secretary from 1945, he was at least partly responsible for forging the US-European alliance against the USSR. Bevin was thus the father of the modern British union movement, a pillar of Attlee’s reforming government, and a key architect of the postwar global security settlement.

Given that these three legacies are now under threat, a new look at Bevin is timely. It arrived in 2021: Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill, by Andrew (Lord) Adonis, a strong New Labour figure and himself a Minister in the 200s. I have some reservations about this book (not least the title). But it is well worth reading. It isn’t the first Bevin biography; there are several, including Alan Bullock’s mighty three-volume account. For the casual reader, there’s Mark Stephens’s short book Ernest Bevin, written to mark Bevin’s centenary. However, Bullock’s would probably be too much for most readers. Stephens’s book is concise, but it was published by the T&G itself and is not especially critical (though it’s not a hagiography – and it is very well-written). Adonis’s book is short and lively enough to be readable. And it’s even-handed; Adonis clearly admires Bevin, but he is sometimes very critical, especially of Bevin’s period as Foreign Secretary.

The book is mostly not based on primary sources. Adonis draws heavily on the previous biographies (including Bullock’s) and other books germane to the period. I think that’s fine. He’s clearly trying to project a readable image of Bevin, not find out what he had for breakfast on a given day. Now and then he does rely rather heavily on one source. One chapter is partly an extract from the memoirs of Nicholas Henderson, who worked for Bevin at the Foreign Office and was later Ambassador to Washington. Adonis will certainly have sought permission for this, and it does add important background. But although he is scrupulous about quoting sources, they are sometimes hard to check as there is no reference list – an odd oversight.

Adonis credits Bevin with a great deal. The early parts of this book depict a determined man who was not expected, by background, to amount to much, but whose determination, occasional ruthlessness, showmanship and humour helped build a truly national trade union movement where none had existed. Then he became wartime Minister of Labour, and later the first postwar Foreign Secretary – both crucial roles at a time when things could have gone very wrong. In Bevin’s hands they mostly didn’t. Adonis also shows us someone who, although ruthless, could be very loyal. He always was to Attlee, and did much to buffer the rampant egotists in Cabinet who would have liked Attlee’s job – one which Bevin himself never sought. He must thus be credited at least in part with the stability and success of Attlee’s government, the more so as Attlee’s own personality sometimes did not help him.

Adonis also states that Bevin stiffened Western resistance to Stalin more or less alone, getting – he says – little help from a rather supine Truman administration. There is probably much truth in this. Truman’s Secretary of State was James F. Byrne, a Southern Democrat who had had a long and ambivalent career. He had been a segregationist in his native South Carolina but had also crossed swords with the Klu Klux Klan, and would do so again as the State’s Governor in the 1950s. He had also been a New Dealer and had opposed isolationism in the 1930s. But he was indeed ‘soft’ on Stalin; other sources also confirm this. In fact, Truman himself was worried about this, and sacked him in January 1947. Still, Adonis is very persuasive in arguing that Bevin helped forge a united Western front against Stalinism. He argues that Bevin’s background in union activism greatly influenced the way he saw Hitler in the 1930s and later saw Stalin, as his international union contacts meant he could see what fascist governments did to unionists in the 1930s. But was also keenly aware of communist tactics in the union movement, and loathed those as well.

I wonder if Bevin’s instant distrust of Stalin was also just native shrewdness. Bevin was no fool and knew a stinker when he met one. Also, Adonis doesn’t really discuss the poor relationship between the UK and the US immediately after the war and the US dislike and distrust of British imperialism. But they were important context for what happened in 1945-48. Even so, I think Adonis is on the money. Not all Labour MPs were happy with what they saw as Bevin’s warmongering, but his contribution to Western peace and security was immeasurable.

But Adonis is hard on Bevin in some respects, noting again that he did not like opposition. He is also very critical of some aspects of Bevin’s tenure at the Foreign Office. He takes a rather black-and-white view sometimes. Thus he is merciless in judging Bevin’s handling of Palestine. It is true that, on Bevin’s watch, Britain’s mandate over Palestine ended very badly. People in the region are still paying the price. But it is not always clear what Adonis thinks Bevin should have done. After all, the problem preceded Bevin and has not been solved since.

Adonis is also highly critical of Bevin’s imperialism. It’s true that Bevin regarded the colonies as an ongoing resource and neither he nor Attlee was interested in decolonisation. In Africa it would take a remarkable Conservative Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod, to force the pace some years later. Again, I think Adonis has a point here. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Arthur Creech-Jones, was a Cabinet minister in his own right and had a long-standing interest in colonial affairs. It may be that he would have liked to move faster and that Attlee and Bevin frustrated this.  (Bevin did not have responsibility for India.)

The Potsdam Conference, 1945; Attlee and Bevin had taken over
from Churchill and Eden during the conference itself.
Front row, Attlee, Truman and Stalin; at rear,
Truman's Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy; Bevin; Secretary of
State Byrne; and Stalin's Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov
(US National Archives/NationalMuseumof the US Navy) 

Last but not least, Adonis deprecates Bevin’s lack of interest in the nascent European Union, in the shape of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) formed in 1950. It is true that Bevin was negative towards British participation, partly because he wanted to protect Britain’s own coal and steel. 

But as he left the Foreign Office early in 1951 and died a few weeks later, he may be excused for not understanding just how consequential the ECSC would be. One could in fact argue that Britain’s absence from Europe was not culpable until its failure to attend the Messina Conference in 1955, a decision made by Anthony Eden’s Tory government, not by Bevin. And as Adonis himself records, Bevin had close contacts with European as well as American labour movements and travelled widely in Europe in the 1930s. But Adonis is right; Bevin failed to understand how Europe would develop and how important it was to be at its heart.

So did Attlee. He did not want Britain involved, then or later. Shortly before he died in 1967, he gave a brief speech in support of anti-Marketeer Douglas Jay. “The Common Market,” he said. “…Very recently this country spent a great deal of blood and treasure rescuing four of ’em from …the other two.” These attitudes were common in Britain then and have not disappeared. There is a contrast here with the graceful pragmatism and foresight shown by France and the Benelux countries, who understood the need to bury the hatchet forever. To be sure, Adonis – angry perhaps, like a lot of us, about Brexit – is judging Bevin from our own time; things looked different then. But his criticism is at least partly fair.

***

I would have liked Adonis to convey more of the private man. The chapter drawn from Henderson is quite vivid, and now and then Adonis does give us a glimpse into Bevin’s family life. We do learn that he lived for many years in suburban contentment in Golders Green – but didn’t mind a little luxury and some good booze. And Adonis quotes a splendid comment by a contemporary that Bevin, a very large man, both looked and dressed like an overstuffed sofa (pictures suggest this was accurate.) But something about the man is elusive here. His wife Flo appears in the book very little, although they had a long marriage. Neither do we really learn much about Bevin’s siblings, who like him were born working people and unlike him remained so. Still, Bevin came from a time when one’s private life was not on display, and maybe his remains hidden.

Adonis does tell us what Bevin was like to work with. His ally Attlee was decent to others but as we have seen he never dissembled, and used very few words, even in public; one imagines he could be a strain. Bevin, by contrast, was bluff, friendly and fun, fond of a good glass of wine and capable of great warmth and kindness. To be sure, he was ruthless with those who crossed him. But those who didn’t do so liked him, and his civil servants thought him a fine minister.

***

These books are both worth reading. They do contain some odd omissions, and Adonis is too swift to judge in some areas. But Beckett’s is a readable and thoughtful portrait of Attlee. He shows us clearly why Attlee succeeded where others might have failed. As for Adonis on Bevin, he provides an accessible picture of a remarkable man, and his book should be essential reading for anyone interested in Labour history.

And both books are a window into one of the most effective governments that Britain has ever had – one we should all try to understand. For all its flaws, it steered the country through one of the hardest periods in its modern history, played a key role in building postwar global institutions, and left the British with universal healthcare, social security and proper pensions for all. They had had none of these before. One of the most moving passages in Beckett’s comes in his discussion of Attlee’s Minister of Education, Ellen Wilkinson, who introduced free milk and school meals.

Before the war, private school children were noticeably taller, better built, healthier and stronger than state school children, because they were properly fed. …In the Fifties this was no longer the case, due to the provision of free school meals and school milk.

These were not perfect men, but they had the courage to make things better. It seems now we are too scared to try.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

An anthology of anger

The Anti-Austerity Anthology brings together some of the best active indie authors in a collection of original poetry, prose and more. It is an angry book. It should be

What does the word “austerity” mean to you? In its most generic form, of course, it just means plainness, simplicity, an absence of the superfluous. When I was younger, it had a more specific meaning; “austerity” clothes or furniture were those made during and especially after the war, when there was a scarcity of materials and skilled labour. Today, however, it has taken on another meaning – an economic policy that seeks to reduce budget deficits at all costs, through raising money and through not spending it. It’s a policy that has been widely adopted, especially in Britain, since the 2008 crash.

(Cover design by Chris Harrison)

On the face of it, this is reasonable. Every country has finite resources. But not everyone agrees that austerity is the way to conserve them. It’s not what Roosevelt did in the 1930s, when he raided the coffers in order to get men back to work; do that and they’ll pay taxes instead of being a charge on the public purse. Whether that’s a better idea than austerity is a big argument, and best left for another time. But the key point about austerity, for me, is that successive British governments have sought to reduce the deficit not by raising taxes from those who can afford to pay, but by cutting social support to the poor, the jobless and those who for health reasons cannot work.

The way this hits people was the subject of Ken Loach’s recent film, I, Daniel Blake. Loach was not joking. According to the food-bank charity the Trussell Trust, there were 1,332,952 emergency food supplies delivered by food bank charities to people in the UK between 1st April 2017 and 31st March 2018. Britain had the world’s 24th highest per capita income in 2017 (according to the World Bank; the IMF and the CIA World Factbook put it a little lower). So there’s no excuse for this. As Steve Topple writes in the Foreword to the The Anti-Austerity Anthology: “In reality, austerity is much more than just a policy and a word no one had really heard of until 2010. It’s a cover for an ideological position. One that has its roots in the very structures of society we see around us.” Yep.

Now we’ve gathered together some of the very best indie authors, in the Anthology. The proceeds will go to foodbank charities. It’s our way of fighting back.

*

I first heard of the Anthology back in 2016, when writer Rupert Dreyfus asked if I would like to contribute. I had come across Dreyfus the previous year, when I read and very much liked his debut novel Spark. In it, a young finance professional becomes disaffected and decides to use his IT skills to blow up the entire system. It’s a fast-moving little thriller, definitely political, but also very funny. It is especially memorable for Vinnie Sloan, one of the great comic creations of all time – a foul-mouthed posh git who makes his living from internet scams while ingesting unpleasant substances. In 2015 Dreyfus followed on with a satirical short-story collection, The Rebel’s Sketchbook, which I described in a review as one of the few books can make you laugh and vomit at the same time. His latest, Broke, a savage take on austerity, will be out soon. Dreyfus is a fiercely contemporary writer; his preoccupations are austerity, Trump, the NHS – in fact much of what’s in the news today. And yet he’s also part of a very English tradition of bawdy dissent that stretches back through Gillray, Hogarth, John Wilkes and into the stews of Elizabethan London.

George W. and Laura Bush meet food-bank volunteers in Washington

Dreyfus knows plenty of radical indie writers and poets, and the Anthology began to take shape. But it was a lot of work, and in 2017 he roped in Harry Whitewolf and myself as co-editors. He chose well in Whitewolf, who is a creative professional but also a startlingly original radical poet. He styles himself as a Beat poet but is actually something unique in his own right, writing repetitive, rhythmic, barbed poems that fall, every now and then, into unexpected humour or tenderness. He is a talented illustrator and cartoonist, and has also ventured into travel writing – with two books describing anarchic journeys of self-discovery, in Egypt and in South America. He’s certainly political, as seen in his poem Short and Long Division, from his collection Two Beat Newbie:

Me and my neighbour hated each other.
Our street hated the next street, so me and my
neighbour would then stick together.
...Our country hated another country, so our counties would then stick together.

Whitewolf has a wide frame of reference, citing influences as diverse as Milton, John Cooper Clarke and Baudelaire (another of his collections, New Beat Newbie, contains a short but elegant tribute to the last-named, Ragmen). But his style is very much his own.

*

I already knew, and liked, a number of the writers in this book. They included poets M.J. Black and Andy Carrington – like Whitewolf, they’re hard-hitting and political. Steve Topple is a frequent contributor to the online news site The Canary, where’s he’s called the Department of Work and Pensions to account for some of what they’ve done to people in the name of austerity. 

 Amongst the prose writers, I’m a fan of Rebecca Gransden, who is less overtly political and yet deeply subversive; her strange and beautiful books anemogram. (sic) and Rusticles strongly repay close reading. The one US contributor is Riya Anne Polcastro; I already knew her work but only slightly, and will now read more. Her piece here packs a serious punch. Ruth F. Hunt let us use a powerful extract from her 2015 novel The Single Feather, about austerity and disability. Mary Papastavrou, who contributed a dystopian short story, Maria Jumps, is also the author of a strange and compulsive novel of ideas, How to Sew Pieces of Cloud Together; like Gransden’s work, it rewards a close read and is very subversive. 

Come on, admit you want the job

Leo X. Robertson is the author of much short fiction with a horror bent, but also a couple of novels – one of which, the wonderful Findesferas, weaves together Paraguayan history, science fiction and Guaraní mythology to create a novel that, despite being quite short, has an epic quality. Jay Spencer Green contributed Green’s Vacuous Vacancies, a series of career opportunities that are scattered through the Anthology; do check them out (come on, you’ve always fancied a post as a Witchfinder, haven’t you?). He’s the author of several books, including the outrageous satire Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s. Last but not least, Dreyfus, Whitewolf and I have also contributed. In my case, it’s a preachy essay on the roots of austerity. The other two have deployed their satirical wit.

Other contributors I didn’t know. There’s a witty short story from Chris Harrison, for instance; he’s the author of a series of original vampire novels with a twist (the TotenUniverse). We owe him especial thanks as he also did the excellent cover for the Anthology. When not writing, he’s a landscape architect. Bradford Middleton is a poet and short-story writer who sometimes looks at the dark side of life; he’s published widely, and not just in Britain. So has Bristol-born writer Matthew Duggan, whose work has appeared in a number of periodicals; his first collection, Dystopia 38.10, was published in 2015. Guy Brewer is another new one on me; besides writing poetry, he also undertakes union work. (I especially liked his poem Choking Fumes and Smoke-Filled Skies). Connor Young, from Brighton, gave us a Poem for the Brighton Homeless (Ed gets his head kicked in as he sleeps/By pale blue shirted West Street creeps). Ford Dagenham is an unusual poet with a nice line on everyday hypocrisies – this comes out well in his contributions here.

We hope you like the Anti-Austerity Anthology. It was a lot of work by a lot of people. But the proceeds will be going to food banks. And anyway, this all matters. We can’t go on as we are. At the end of the book, we quote Plutarch, who wrote over 2,000 years ago that: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” Let’s not put that to the test.

You can buy the Anti-Austerity Anthology here (or in the US, here), as an ebook or paperback – or order the paperback from from any bookshop using the ISBN 978-1724577962.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies  was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops 

(ISBN 978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads