Distant Voices Read online

  Last July, the miners’ parliamentary group – all of them ex-miners – met the board of British Coal. Their secretary, Dennis Skinner, asked each board member to answer one question: ‘If this industry is privatised, will you give a guarantee that you personally will not benefit from the new set-up?’

  ‘I got an immediate response from the deputy chairman, Ken Moses,’ Skinner told me. ‘He shouted that he wouldn’t give any bloody guarantee. “Not me, Skinner!” he said. After that the chairman, Neil Clarke, said, “Nobody must answer that question,” and he led them out the door.’

  According to Arthur Scargill, if all the 31 pits eventually go, the number of unemployed in those industries tied to coal will be 70,000. ‘If there is anyone who thinks that this is about the mining industry,’ he has said repeatedly, ‘then they don’t understand the nature of the struggle.’ But a great many people do understand now; and Scargill, who was right a long time ago, is respectfully listened to. His warning that the Government would reprieve enough pits to satisfy its rebellious backbenchers, then ‘quietly’ close them down one by one, when the public fire had faded, is proving correct.

  In the Colliery Inn, the miners’ pub, John Cummings, now the local MP, sits with his little dog Grit (who appeared in his campaign pictures). His aunt, Helen Abbott, wrote the pit’s obituary before she died: ‘The end of a pit; the end of a world; all too final in its premature end of a people.’ Her Requiem for a Dead Stalwart appears as a preface to column upon column of names of miners killed in the pit, including one James Crewe and his four sons, who died in separate accidents. John has a nice turn of irony. ‘To Thatcher,’ he says, ‘we were the enemy within.’ He lists the establishment honours bestowed upon Murton, including a Victoria Cross, a Military Cross, Distinguished Flying Crosses and Medals, OBEs, MBEs, and so on.

  Geordie Maitland, whom I met in 1974, seems as chipper as then. He tells me matter of factly that, days after I saw him, he was dragged along a conveyor belt into machinery and his foot was crushed. It has since been crushed again. ‘Where’s Bill Williams?’ I asked. ‘The bloke who took me down, who chewed tobacco.’ Bill is dead. And Ron Sugden, who had the Dust? He is alive: indestructible is Ron. ‘None of the lads you’ve known ever scabbed,’ someone says. ‘Good lads.’ Scabs are not allowed in the Colliery Inn.

  The mood in the town is strange and uneasy. Some call it apathy; others say it is tinged with guilt, because perhaps a third of the men who transferred to other pits, like Easington, want to take redundancy. They are exhausted. They also know that even if they wanted to fight openly, they would lose their redundancies. Above all, they know they cannot stand alone again; and neither should they be expected to do so.

  The women put this well. Mary Parry, who with Jan Smith carried the banner on the return to work in 1985, says the rest of the country has to lead now. ‘We’ll be there,’ she says, ‘but it’s only fair we’re with others . . .’ In their 24-hour vigils the Women Against Pit Closures exemplify the spirit that has seen scorned and brutalised working-class organisations re-establish basic liberties in Britain: from Peterloo in 1819 to the turn-of-the-century struggle against laws hostile to trade union rights.

  On the bitter March morning in 1985 when the Murton miners went back to the pit, their prize brass band emerged from the mist with the women marching first. This had not happened before. What their long and heroic action meant, at the very least, was that ordinary men and women had once again stood and fought back. And that, for me, is Britain at its best. The shadow that has since lengthened over them – that of the centralised state progressively shorn of all countervailing power – is now the shadow over most of us.

  January 30, 1993

  WAITING FOR ARMAGEDDON

  ON THE DAY Prince Charles made a speech on ‘declining standards’ in education, there was another news item. It was a report warning that nuclear warheads for British Polaris and Trident submarines and for RAF bombs were unsafe and could explode accidentally, dispersing radioactive material over a wide area, and putting cities at risk. Glasgow, especially, is vulnerable. The report’s authors, the authoritative British American Security Information Council (BASIC), called on the Government to halt ‘the handling and transportation of all UK nuclear weapons until a full safety review is carried out, overseen by an independent panel’.48

  What is most alarming about the report’s conclusions is that they are drawn mainly from an official study commissioned by the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. Known as the ‘Drell Report’, this warned that certain nuclear weapons could explode if involved in an accident or exposed to fire. ‘For a while we were worried that these things might go off if they fell off the back of a truck,’ a Pentagon official was quoted as saying in the Washington Post, whose investigation and disclosures triggered the committee’s inquiry.49

  The Pentagon has since hastily withdrawn two types of nuclear weapons from deployment. One is the SRAM-A air-launched missile, which was fitted to Fill and B52 bombers; the other is the W79 nuclear artillery shell, which has been in Europe since the mid-1980s and apparently could go off if struck ‘in the wrong place’.

  According to the BASIC report, the American concern arose ‘as a result of more powerful computer modelling techniques recently developed’. That is to say, computers are now able to simulate almost precisely the causes and conditions of nuclear accidents. This has led to enhanced safety provision in the United States; but there are no equivalent measures in this country, leaving certain British nuclear weapons without up-to-date safety features. The British WE177 ‘tactical freefall bomb’, deployed by the RAF for the past twenty-five years, fails the new tests completely.

  ‘These are not academic concerns,’ says the BASIC report. These bombs are ‘regularly transported around the UK’. The authors estimate that there is, on average, approximately one convoy carrying these warheads on Britain’s roads every week; one left RAF Honington in Suffolk on Monday of last week. Convoys carrying WE177s have been involved in two known traffic accidents.

  The British Polaris/Chevaline programme, a legacy of the Callaghan years, was developed in such secrecy that the Cabinet meetings at which it was discussed were not numbered. Drawing on an American design that, says the BASIC report, had ‘serious corrosion problems’, Chevaline was ‘a system produced under pressure . . . that far outstretched British knowledge and technology’. Chevaline also fails to meet the new safety criteria. Chevaline’s warheads are transported by road between Coulport in Scotland and the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield in Berkshire, a journey of more than 600 miles.

  The American study is sharply critical of the warheads fitted to D5 Trident submarines. Britain has ordered four Tridents at a cost of more than £9 billion. Using the new computer techniques, it has been discovered that the design of the Trident missiles’ W88 warheads – which are shaped to surround the propellant – makes them vulnerable to detonation if the missile is involved in collision or it literally falls off the back of a lorry.

  The US Navy is now studying a complete redesign of the Trident warhead. Hitherto unpublished Ministry of Defence evidence to the Commons Defence Select Committee has confirmed that the British warhead is the same as the American, and that a redesign has been rejected as ‘too expensive’.

  The Ministry of Defence has ‘dismissed Trident fears’, according to the Guardian’s defence correspondent, David Fairhall. He wrote that officials ‘point out that the [Trident] missiles are never moved around with the warheads inside, so the proximity of the propellant only affects their safety while on board the submarine’.50

  This is not so. Polaris missiles are moved, with their warheads, from the jetty at Coulport up a winding road to their bunkers. Trident’s missiles will be stored on top of the hill, for which special armoured carriers are being designed so that the missiles, with their warheads, do not slip off the back of their particular lorry. Glasgow is just thirty miles away as the wind blows.

 
; The official ‘dismissal’ makes no mention of the other British weapons referred to in the report as unsafe. The armed services minister, Archie Hamilton, gave assurances to Parliament that British nuclear weapons were constantly safety-tested and scrutinised with ‘the most sophisticated computer modelling’. William Peden, principal author of the BASIC report, told me, ‘There are only certain ways you can use the computer. The question is: how could the minister not be aware of the American findings?’

  There seem to be two pressing issues here. The first is the public’s absolute right to know about potential catastrophe, no matter how ‘infinitesimal’ the danger. The widely held view in Whitehall, and the media, that people are not concerned with such matters was addressed in a Gallup poll commissioned by BASIC. The results were offered to several Sunday newspapers, but appeared in none. They are: 58 per cent of the British people believe all transporting of nuclear weapons should stop immediately; 79 per cent believe Parliament should have the same access to information on nuclear weapons as the US Congress.

  The second issue is the policy of the Opposition. Rather, what Opposition? Labour is for Trident; but what is Trident for? It is not a defensive weapon. So at whom is it aimed? Baghdad? Tripoli? The £10.5 billion cost is the ‘official’ figure. This takes no account of construction and operational costs, as well as the running of the weapons factory at Aldermaston. According to a Greenpeace study, the Government has underestimated the total cost of the Trident programme by £22,567 million.51 What this money would otherwise buy requires just a little imagination. Here’s a scribbled shopping list:

  Ending homelessness and restoring a national housing programme: £3.8 billion

  Restoring the transport system: £2.4 billion

  Stopping the haemorrhage of teachers from our schools by raising salaries in education to a decent level: £1.5 billion

  Paying every outstanding bill in the National Health Service and ensuring that people no longer die waiting for operations or because of the scarcity of equipment: £7 billion

  Research and development that would catch up with the best in Europe: £3 billion52

  Spread over twenty years, this would still leave billions of pounds in the Exchequer. No Labour leader, let alone a prime minister, has ever laid out these choices to the British people, who are constantly said to be ‘pro-nuclear’. During the election campaign the ‘peace dividend’, like so much else, was not an issue and the Trident farce was hardly mentioned. Yet less than a third of the public say they want to keep Trident.53

  ‘They who put out the people’s eyes’, wrote Milton, ‘reproach them of their blindness’. Yes; but it’s not the people who have been blinded.

  April 1991 to May 1992

  II

  DISTANT VOICES OF DISSENT

  ORGANISED FORGETTING

  TRIUMPHANT CLICHÉS THAT the ‘West has won’ in Eastern Europe are incessant in the British media. They echo Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement that ‘our values’ have been adopted: a theme ordained by liberal commentators as received truth. With honourable exceptions, the coverage of Europe’s upheaval has been so beset by jingoism, from the bellicose to the insidious, that the nature of change, and the emerging hopes and alternatives, have been obscured.

  Czechoslovakia is a case in point. In 1977 I interviewed many of the Charter 77 people shortly after their organisation was forced underground. I was much moved by their political and intellectual courage in seeking democratic forms of their own. They were adamant in rejecting, as one of them put it, ‘the way of Washington, Germany, London’.

  They knew that, just as socialism had been subverted in their own country, so democracy had been devalued and often degraded in the West. I attended a secret meeting in Prague in which speaker after speaker warned of the dangers of adopting the ‘values’ embodied in NATO, an organisation which had legitimised the Brezhnev Doctrine and thereby reinforced their own oppression.

  They also understood – unlike many of us in the West – that state power in the democracies is enforced not with tanks but with illusions, notably that of free expression: in which the voice of the people is heard but what it says is subject to a rich variety of controls. Writing in the 1920s, the American sage Walter Lippmann called this the ‘manufacture of consent’ (i.e. brainwashing). ‘The common interests’, he wrote, ‘very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class’. The public is to be ‘put in its place’ as ‘interested spectators’.1 In this way, illusions of ‘consensus’ are created, rendering a free society passive and obedient.

  In 1977 the banned Czech writer Zdener Urbanak told me, ‘You in the West have a problem. You are unsure when you are being lied to, when you are being tricked. We do not suffer from this; and unlike you, we have acquired the skill of reading between the lines.’2

  In Britain today we need to develop this skill urgently, for as freedom is gained in former communist Europe, it is being lost here. Our ‘new age’ is to be an information society, the product of a ‘communications revolution’, as Rupert Murdoch likes to call it. But this is a fraud. We are in danger of mistaking media for information, of being led into a media society in which unrestricted information is unwelcome, even a threat.

  The narrowness of the British media, our primary source of information, is a national disgrace. This is not to say the Sun, the ‘market leader’, is a mere comic; on the contrary, it is intensely ideological with a coherent world view of our ‘new age’ society: one in which you stand on your own two feet, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and trust nobody; one in which money is what matters – the ‘bottom line’ – not to mention voyeurism: looking on at misfortune and violence. Objectors to this are ‘loony’. Mrs Thatcher has said as much.

  The damage runs deep. Racism, for example, is all but acceptable. ‘The Press’, says a Runnymede Trust report, ‘plays a very significant role in maintaining and strengthening and justifying racism at all levels of society, providing a cover for racist activity, especially racist violence . . .’3

  The ‘quality press’ is very different from the Sun and its pale shadows, but there are common strands. Censorship by omission is one; and I wonder if younger journalists on the serious newspapers are aware of the subtle influences of Murdochism on their own work, notably the cynicism. When in recent times have the now voluminous Sunday quality papers published anything that might pose a sustained challenge to the status quo? Salman Rushdie’s brilliant defence of his work in the Independent on Sunday was an exception.4

  Increasingly, languid commentary and tombstones of vacuous stylism, owing much to the language of advertising, occupy the space of keen writing and provocative journalism. In the Observer a recently hired columnist, who on his first day wondered who he was and what he stood for, still apparently wonders. In the same pages Clive James is brought back from television to continue his self-celebration and empty repertoire. Perhaps this is meant as parody; certainly it is a metaphor.5

  Most of the quality press shares the same triumphalism as the Sun. The ‘new age’ corporate truth is upon us; there is nothing to challenge and scant need of a second opinion, except as a token, because everyone is agreed: ‘we’ have won.

  On Eastern Europe, a genteel McCarthyism is evident. Communists are ‘on the run’ or slinking away from the ‘irrefutable’ truth that the free-market system ‘works’. Such simplistic nonsense, however decorous in word and display, remains simplistic nonsense. Let there be a free-ranging critique of communism, whatever communism may mean, but let there also be an equally rigorous review of ‘liberal capitalism’. For these days it is barely mentioned that a world war is being fought by ‘the system that works’ against the majority of humanity: a war over foreign debt which has interest as its main weapon, a war whose victims are millions of malnourished and dying children.

  Television news, from which most people learn about the world, is a moving belt of headlines, caricatures and buzzwords, with pretensions that
it is otherwise. In this way the Russian threat pervaded the nightly Cold War saga of good guys and bad guys; and the habit is hard to break. The bad guys may have slipped from view, but the principal good guys cannot be deserted.

  ‘It’s up to the United States,’ we are told, ‘to sort out its Central American backyard.’ The coverage of the American invasion of Panama was not quite as bad as in the United States. There were dissenting voices in the British media, but they were not well-informed and so served to legitimise the Accredited Truth: that the whole fiasco was a cowboys-and-Indians pursuit of Old Pineapple Face.

  Noriega, of course, had precious little to do with it. George Bush ran the CIA when Noriega was their man; and drugs have long been a CIA currency. The aim was to put Panama, its canal and its US base under direct American sovereignty, managed by other Noriegas. The Panamanian police chief appointed by Washington, Juan Guizado, is the same thug whose troops attacked the presidential candidates last May.

  Consider how our perspective is shaped. It now seems certain that more than 2,000 Panamanians were killed in the American bombardment: more than died at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing last June. And which victims do we remember, I wonder, and the politicians honour? Not those in Panama, to be sure. Thus, our ‘manufactured consent’ allows the British Government to give its obsequious support to the American invasion, having condemned for a decade the Vietnamese expulsion of the genocidal Pol Pot.

  In his book McCarthy and the Press, Edwin P. Baley, a distinguished American reporter of the 1950s, reveals how he and his colleagues became the tools of McCarthyism by reporting ‘objectively’ propaganda and seldom challenging its assumptions.7

  In Britain today, the ‘free market and a strong State’ doctrine belongs to another ‘ism’, but many of its effects are no less menacing and its dangers no less great, not least the process of indoctrination itself.