Friday 1 June 1990

A VERY BRITISH SOCIALIST

Paul Anderson, review of Political Thoughts and Polemics by Bernard Crick (Edinburgh, £25), Tribune, 1 June 1990

Richard Hoggart's foreword describes Bernard Crick as "a very British type of socialist; a liberal socialist for whom the state's first duty is to make us free, not to try to make us virtuous according to its own model", and that's pretty accurate.

 Crick's socialism is not of the statist kind — he has no time for Leninism or any other dirigiste fantasy — but is by no means anarchist. "Liberal socialist" suits him well.

This collection of his political essays and journalistic polemics from the past decade-and-a-half is immensely readable: like George Orwell, of whom he has written the so-far definitive biography, Crick has a remarkable capacity for plain speaking against the cant of the day, for saying what no one else says but plenty feel. Unlike many academics, he can write without recourse to jargon.

He is merciless with hypocrisy and sloppy thinking wherever he finds them, but is particularly hard on the left — usually with justification. A 1986 essay from The Irish Review complains: "All my adult life I have found that my fellow English left-wing intellectuals are suckers for anybody else's nationalism and contemptuous of their own. Instead of being critical friends of liberation movements, occasionally asking whether one-party states always make the best decisions, whether autocracy is always efficient, whether bombs are always the best persuaders and terror always the best answer to terror, they tend almost to revel in justifying other people's violence."

Quite so, and there are similarly knockabout passages on left attitudes to "bourgeois" freedoms of expression, structuralist Marxism and a whole lot more besides.

Crick has long been a sceptical supporter of the Labour Party, but his most recent writings show a growing impatience at the vacuity of its leaders and their failure to grasp the nettle of constitutional reform. This is how he reacts to the reheated undergraduate political theory served up by Roy Hattersley in Labour's 1988 Aims and Values statement:

"The document has no core: it is a series of surface compromises between democratic socialism and social democracy. It has no sense of history. The party apparently has no paternity, or, if so, no pride in it. There is not even an evocative list of the party's great achievements, thinkers and heroes."

Since writing that, Crick has thrown in his lot with Charter 88, and there's plenty of intelligent commentary here on constitutional issues, from Northern Ireland through parliamentary sovereignty to electoral systems. I'm convinced by parts of his case, unconvinced by others — but that's hardly the point.

Crick is a great controversialist, and his arguments are always worth reading. If there were a few more mavericks like him, British politics would be a lot less tedious than they are today.