Andy Beckett's Blog, page 24

Daily Mail backs campaign to remain in Europe ... in 1975

Forty years ago, Britain held its first national referendum - on membership of the EEC. This is how events unfolded

On 20 May 1975, midway through the UK’s last referendum on Europe, the Daily Mail published an article about how life would be if voters chose to leave the EEC. “No Coffee, Wine, Beans Or Bananas, Until Further Notice” read the headline. The country would become “Siege Britain”.

Forty-one years ago most of the press, many voters and many Westminster politicians talked and thought about the EEC in ways that are startling now.

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And the Sun Shines Now by Adrian Tempany review – a Hillsborough survivor on the modern game

From ‘slum sport’ to domineering cultural force – a brave and deeply personal history of how the disaster has shaped football

In 1985, four years before the Hillsborough disaster, an editorial in the Sunday Times, then as now a pretty reliable guide to the mindset of its proprietor Rupert Murdoch and much of rightwing Britain, described British football as “a slum sport played in slum stadiums, and increasingly watched by slum people who deter decent folk from turning up”.

Last year, Murdoch’s television conglomerate Sky paid £4.18bn to broadcast fewer than half the games from a single English and Welsh football competition, the Premier League, over the next three years. Rights deals with other British and foreign broadcasters covering the same period are estimated to have earned the Premier League as much again – confirming it as, in Adrian Tempany’s both awestruck and aghast words, easily “the world’s most valuable sporting brand”. So money-driven and globalised is the Premier League that even its current, supposedly underdog champions, Leicester City, are owned by a Thai billionaire, as Tempany tellingly points out; and even this newspaper recently printed the clubs’ predicted income from television and prize money alongside their points tallies in the league table.

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How London became a Labour city – and what it means for British politics

Sadiq Khan’s crushing victory in the mayoral election has confirmed the party’s dominance in the capital. Is it time to stop treating London’s political stance as a weird anomaly?

The constituency office of Emily Thornberry, Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, is a low, workaday building with barred windows. In a part of London that has been gentrifying for half a century, it looks out of place. Many of the tall Georgian terraces on the street have been expensively restored and extended. Most of the cars are BMWs. Bankers eat duck in the pub down the road.

The first time Thornberry stood for the seat, in 2005, Labour was in the early stages of an electoral decline that has continued in most parts of Britain ever since. She won by a flimsy 484 votes. As the 2010 election approached, it was widely assumed that she was doomed. “A lot of my activists went to bookies up and down the [nearby] Holloway Road,” she remembers, “because the odds you could get on me winning were so good.”

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Militant by Michael Crick review – Britain’s successful leftwing sect

The press and the Labour’s right wing are often in a froth about the party being taken over by radical leftists. So is this addictive study of Militant a gift for Corbyn-bashers?

Panics about infiltrators are a Labour tradition. In a party made up of disparate elements from the start, in a country where the legitimacy of leftwing radicalism is rarely accepted by the media and wider establishment, it is hardly surprising that subversives, real and imagined, have regularly been spotted burrowing their way into Labour’s loose structures. During the 20s, the party struggled to purge itself of communists, whom Lenin instructed to support Labour “as a rope supports the hanged”. Nowadays, the party’s right wing and its many press allies are in an almost perpetual froth about Labour being “taken over” by left-wingers, whether they are activists of the large new pressure group Momentum or even Jeremy Corbyn himself.

The troublemaking political journalist Michael Crick first published Militant in 1984, when the still-infamous leftwing sect was approaching the peak of its notoriety. In 1986 he produced an updated version, with the reds-under-the-bed title The March of Militant. Thirty years on, he has updated it again, with a foreword and afterword that seek to connect the sometimes startling, often caricatured history of Militant to Corbyn, both back in the 80s and now.

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The most potent, permanent and elusive figure in British politics

His enemies call him the ‘PM’s puppet-master’. Blair, Brown and Cameron all found him invaluable. He’s been at the heart of the most controversial political episodes of recent times. Just who is Jeremy Heywood?

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Is Britain full? Home truths about the population panic

There are 65 million people in the UK and the number is rising fast. Doom-mongers warn that schools, hospitals, roads and housing are overstretched. But are they right – and should we worry?

The northern ticket hall of King’s Cross St Pancras tube station is supposed to be a wonder of the London underground, with its expanses of gleaming floor and high-ceilinged walkways that would be wide enough for cars. In 2008, the tube’s then managing director, Tim O’Toole, assured the London Evening Standard that, with the new hall, which cost £395m, “the underground station complex will ... be capable of handling all the extra demand predicted for years ahead”.

It has not worked out like that. In the morning rush hour, the pedestrian tunnels are packed. Every few months, the whole complex becomes so congested that it has to be evacuated.

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The most potent, permanent and elusive figure in British politics | Andy Beckett

His enemies call him the ‘PM’s puppet-master’. Blair, Brown and Cameron all found him invaluable. He’s been at the heart of the most controversial political episodes of recent times. Just who is Jeremy Heywood?

It is easy to miss the Cabinet Office on Whitehall in central London. To the uninitiated, it is just another bone-coloured, net-curtained facade in the unreadable heartland of British government. Seemingly the only noteworthy thing about the building is that its Victorian bulk stands directly between 10 Downing Street and the outside world. Most visitors to the prime minister have to get past the Cabinet Office first.

Since 2012, the head of this department, the cabinet secretary, has been Sir Jeremy Heywood. In the historian Peter Hennessy’s book Whitehall, one of few successful attempts to explain Britain’s labyrinthine and unusually dominant central government, the Cabinet Office, set up exactly a hundred years ago, is described as the “coordinating brain for the whole system”.

Jeremy’s like a drug. People get addicted to him quite quickly

He’d get stopped at airports because he looked like a druggy. [Cameron] thought he was … the cleverest guy he’d ever met

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Unfriendly fire: would a Corbyn government lead to a military revolt?

The Labour leader is opposed to Trident, wants talks with Argentina over the Falklands and voted against intervention in Syria. His stance has put him on a collision course with military chiefs, who have always been wary of political meddling

The Army Rumour Service, which calls itself “the British Army’s busiest and best online community”, or Arrse for short, is not somewhere for civilians of a delicate disposition. On the discussion threads of this unofficial website for anonymous serving and former soldiers, anti-capitalist protesters, for example, are described as “hypocritical, unemployable, leeching and parasitic”. “This scum needs a good dose … kicked into them,” concludes a typical post from November. “There is no happiness without order.”

Politicians are written about with contempt, especially leftwing ones – and none more so than Jeremy Corbyn, the least militaristic person since the 30s to command a major British party. He is “an anti-British, not very educated, ageing communist agitating class war zealot”, “an idiot … wannabe radical”.

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Last Futures by Douglas Murphy review – utopian architecture, from space colonies to ziggurats

How the shining architectural optimism of the 1960s and 70s has ultimately produced buildings such as supermarkets, open-plan offices and other spaces of control

During the anxious early 1970s, when the west was spooked by the oil crisis and economic stagnation, by the first widespread fears for the environment and predictions of global overpopulation, a giddy alternative to it all began to seize the imaginations of some Americans: space colonies. “Large cylinders, potentially over a kilometre long,” Douglas Murphy writes in Last Futures, “would spin at a constant rate to recreate the effects of gravity … [and] would be partially glazed to allow for sunlight … while large shades and baffles would protect the inhabitants from glare and cosmic rays … with water features, trees, animals and people all sheltered within this artificial environment, and outside the blank vacuum of space”.

For several years the space colony craze spread, from the most speculative edges of academia to the more intellectually active parts of the counterculture, to the American government itself. Murphy records that Gerard O’Neill, a Princeton University particle physicist and space colony advocate, “gave evidence to the US Senate on the prospect … and Nasa began to publicise the idea”. It was not until the late 70s that funding cuts ended this official interest, and condemned the artists’ impressions of space colonies produced by Nasa to be remembered, if at all, as science fiction kitsch.

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The great Tory power grab: how they plan to rule for ever

Since the Conservatives’ narrow election victory, they have been quietly reshaping the political system to give them a permanent advantage. Will any other party be able to challenge their dominance in future?

Two months ago, the chancellor and would-be prime minister George Osborne invited an unusual visitor to Downing Street. Robert Caro, the American biographer of Lyndon Johnson, US president half a century ago, had dinner and answered questions from Osborne and selected Conservative MPs.

Johnson was a Democrat, and one of America’s most left-leaning leaders. But he was also famously ruthless. “I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me,” Caro’s biography quotes him saying. “I know where to look for it, and how to use it.”

The cut in 'Short money' could make a huge difference to the capacity of opposition parties to operate

Related: Osborne accused of ‘despicable’ attempt to cut opposition party funding

I think the Conservatives are rigging the system massively

The Tory expectation is that evening up the constituencies will improve their advantage over Labour by up to 30 seats

Related: The Guardian view on English votes for English laws: the problem of Evel | Editorial

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