Standing for Something

by Mark Seddon, Martin Rowson (Illustrator)

Mark Seddon joined the Labour Party aged 15. He was editor of TRIBUNE for thirteen years, and an elected member of the LP ruling National Executive for eight years, becoming the focal point for grass roots resistance to Tony Blair, and the war in Iraq. Far from another memoir by a Labour insider, detailing adnauseam, the tiffs and tantrums of Messrs Blair, Brown and Mandelson, STANDING FOR SOMETHING is a deeply personal account of how the author's youthful attachment to principle survived well into adulthood and how an abiding naivete about the real nature of power and the corruption of power blinded him to the baser motives of many of those who had grabbed it. Often humorous and passionate, this is an account of a political journey and the fight for principles against the new generation of professional politicians and cheerleading hacks, many of whom delight in the parochialism and trivia that has helped stifle democratic discourse in this country and who attempt to crush those who don't tow the party line. STANDING FOR SOMETHING is not your standard piece of hackery, re-hashing intrigues and irrelevances of the Blair/Brown years. Rather it is a considered, poignant and deeply personal account of Britain under New Labour from the point of view of a glorious outsider.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2011

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I delayed reviewing this book for over a decade because Mark Seddon can be counted as a friend. Reviewing a book by a friend can be a cause of difficulty - a bad review and you might lose the friend while a good review might not be trusted because of friendship.

Still, integrity demands that the book not be ignored (which can be considered equally rude). A review now fits in with part of my general reviewing strategy - taking a view on a book long after publication in order to see how it stands up in the light of history.

I need not have worried. 'Standing for Something' may have its peculiarities but it is an entertaining account of the adventures, told in an anecdotal non-chronological set of short essays that fit Mark's style as a journalist, of an honest and likeable dissenting voice.

In fact, unlike so many pompous political memoirs, there is no masking here. The author of the book is recognisably the man in the flesh, a character (in every sense) who makes genuine friendships easily, has a strong moral base and who observes his own travails without bitterness.

I may be one of the very few people (although we are opposites in very many ways) who understands the peculiar mix of high-flying international affairs engagement and involvement in the murky depths of the Labour Party's dark and dodgy underworld.

He experienced the first as ethical activist, at Al-Jazeera and in New York in and around the United Nations and the second as student activist, as long time Labour loyalist, in frequently failed candidate selections and in his election to the NEC where he was a thorn in the side of New Labour.

His perceptions are those of a journalist skimming the surfaces (as journalists must) of tragedy and ineptitude and of a political intellectual darting and dodging his way through the immensely morally corrupt world of British left-wing politics.

(By contrast, I saw international affairs through the lens of silent fixing and British politics through backroom organising where, in both cases, my tasks involved avoiding the attention of journalists like Mark. We intersected (another story) in the failed attempt to salvage the old Left).

The net result of his adventures might be seen as 'failure' but it is not. It is not failure not to have ended up another lick-spittle lobby fodder Labour MP nor to have become an equally lick-spittle Editor of some capitalist rag. Mark is, in fact, an enormous success as a human being.

Anecdotal (very occasionally with small repetitions that might have been edited out) in around 40 short items that fit the length of the average journalistic feature, this is not an autobiography nor even a traditional memoire but an impressionistic series of 'incidents'.

The first half is dominated by international affairs with two highly memorable essays on visits to North Korea as the high point. The last two thirds are mostly about British politics with my high point a devastating critique (previously unpublished) of the Labour rotten borough of Ogmore.

There are anecdotes about many world leaders and odd interventions in history for future scholars but the book will be of most value to students of the moral and organisational collapse of Labour as the twentieth century became the twenty-first. It is a gloss on Ann Black's NEC reports.

Mark can be a bit of a sentimentalist about Labour. This may come from him being a convert (you get the same with Catholic converts) at an early age. For we who were born 'into the Red' and can trace our roots in it to the 1900s, a pragmatic world-weary tribal cynicism comes more easily.

But even my world-weary cynicism (which made me avoid student radicals when I was a student like the proverbial plague) was not ready for the hollowing out of the Party and narcissism of its leadership cadre that emerged in the 1990s. It was this that may have made us friends in dissent.

His sentimentalism is perhaps best expressed in his eulogies for the late Michael Foot - who, incidentally, was the only politician ever (I mean ever) who actually thanked me for a service rendered and who thanked me personally and warmly as the lovely and educated man he was.

I also chuckled at his first meeting in Tony Benn's basement which mirrored almost exactly my own experience with the patronising old egoist. Still, Benn could be very right about many things, not least British democracy and the European issue.

I am not sure the political judgements of the book are always quite right - we disagree on past liberal internationalist military interventions whose fruit became neo-conservative warfare (which he fully opposed) and the final frustrations of Russia that led to the current war.

Similarly he tries to be kind to the lesser evils of New Labour such as Ed Milliband whereas I would consign them to the colder and lower circles of Dante's Inferno, reserving the coldest and lowest for the greater evils. He is also too kind to self-defeating complicit Labour loyalists - Boxers.

But these 'faults' (just differences of opinion down to me having a harder personality perhaps derived from the plotting that takes place outside the sight of journalists) are the faults of decency, compassion and kindness. I would rather in general he had had power than I was granted it.

There is also great humour in the book - I laughed out loud a few times and I am notorious for my lack of a sense of humour. There is also sadness at the fate of working class communities and insights into just how feckless, nasty and frankly stupid New Labour could be.

For Mark one of the markers for Labour Movement integrity has been whether a Labour politician slinks away from or attends the Durham Miners' Gala which continues as a festival of the working class Left despite there being no deep mines left in the county. New Labour has slunk away.

After our time working together on CLGA and Tribune matters, we found ourselves later engaged in the Brexit debate as part of the battered minority of Old Left eurosceptics who were outplayed by both the madcap liberal Remainers who captured the Left and the Faragists.

This, of course, will have taken place after the closure of the book in 2011. Despite the touching hope that Ed Milliband might restore the Labour Party (well, we know what happened next), much of Mark's analysis of our hollowed out media and political system seems prescient.

I suspect we now both share a disillusion with the Party I was born into and he once joined with youthful enthusiasm although never with the 'movement' which had made the Party possible and which was betrayed and is being betrayed by it. This has soured neither of us.

He quotes that hoary old cliche from Chou En Lai about the French Revolution. Chou En'Lai was right. Human lives are short. History is long. Confucius, Christ, Buddha and probably Marx will survive long after warlords and cabinet members are gone. Integrity can win out in the end.

There is an inherent optimism here that will always mark out the personality of the Leftist with integrity no matter how much he or she is battered by events in contrast to the pessimism of the conservative mind and their desire (inherent in New Labour) to manipulate humanity into order.

Mark is also a bon viveur in his way whose socialism remains that of the late and lamented Gay Hussar. It is Danton rather than Robespierre. It is a socialism that acts as a value system that does not need to rely on a corrupted party machine for its existence. It is a tradition of decency.

Although the book is perhaps mostly for political nerds, I like it as an expression of 'another way' than the third way - perhaps naive at times and so destined to be on the losing side but still a standard bearer for basic values that should not be allowed to die.

Or rather an attitude that can still smile as the men in uniformity drag you off to the metaphorical camp or firing squad. Mark makes a very good point that modern centrist liberal democracy silences its dissidents just as effectively as authoritarian dictatorships through marginalisation.

Biteback Publishing should be commended for publishing the book but there are a little too many literals (which is ironic in a book written by an Editor). The small repetitions should also have been seen and dealt with by the publishers.

An added bonus lies in the amazing and sometimes brutal cartoons by Martin Rowson, the finest caricaturist in Britain today, whose internal rage offsets Mark to provide some sense of what we may all think of men like Blair in our heart of hearts. A shadow side, if you like.

Rowson will, in my view, one day be seen as being as central to our image of the New Labour era and its flaccid Tory successors as Gillray and Rowlandson or Low or Scarfe are to our images of their eras. The ten or so cartoons in this book are worth the price in themselves.

[John Peat · Rating 2 out of 5]

The material is great - the sentiments I wholeheartedly agree with but the style of writing varies from "broadsheet political diary' to 'backslapper's biography' and stuff gets repeated as-if you're reading three books knocked-into one!