Dennis Skinner MP: Incorruptible and Unapologetic

Dennis Skinner, the veteran 79-year-old backbench Labour MP, was in trademark form as he was overheard talking about plans to publish members' expenses online. "I'm not going to be putting my expenses on the internet," he complained emphatically to friends. "I wouldn't know how. I've never sent an email and don't intend to start now."

A member of parliament since 1970, the so-called "Beast of Bolsover" is one of a dying breed of working-class MPs. Born in 1932 to a Derbyshire mining family, Skinner was the third of nine children and an exceptionally bright youngster. Passing the 11-plus at nine-and-a-half, he went to grammar school aged 10 before turning down the chance of a university education to work down the pit - first at the Parkhouse colliery near Clay Cross then at Glapwell colliery near Chesterfield.

Dennis Skinner's upbringing is the stuff of a Ken Loach novel: a childhood spent playing on the coal heaps of Derbyshire while at home his trade-unionist father Edward versed him in the politics of the class struggle. Skinner senior, a miner, was sacked during the strike of 1926 before being re-employed in the late Thirties when war was in the offing. He was sacked again in the Fifties when, as the miners' delegate, he told the manager "a few things" the workers felt about his stewardship of the pit. He was issued an ultimatum to apologise or face the sack. "Apologise?" Edward Skinner replied, "It would be like putting me head in t'oven."

Not long afterwards Dennis was elected miners' delegate in place of his father. In 1964, aged 33, he became the youngest ever president of Derbyshire National Union of Miners. Had things turned out differently it could have been Skinner, rather than Author Scargill, who led the miners' strike against Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

Instead, in 1969 the miners decided they wanted Skinner as Labour Party candidate for the rock solid seat of Bolsover. "I never put my name forward," Skinner says, making it clear it was them who made the decision and not him. On being elected to parliament in 1970, however, Skinner continued turning up every morning to work at the pit. "I didn't know when Parliament started to pay my wages," he was later reported as saying.

One of Dennis Skinner's defining characteristics is his abrasive manner with those on the opposite side of the House. Never one to pull punches, he has a reputation among some MPs as a showman or "a knockabout turn," as one Labour MP disparagingly put it. He has also been known to overstep the mark at times with his jibes - resulting in several expulsions from the House; in 2005 he was asked to leave the chamber after accusing George Osborne of doing cocaine.

Many MPs like to drink and socialise together in the House of Commons bar after debates. Skinner has little time for such niceties with the Tories and their "pathetic liberal" allies. He makes the irrefutable point that if a miner can't drink and work, nor should an MP. Skinner himself has an assiduous attendance record in the House of Commons. The only time he has failed to attend in all his years as an MP was when he was in hospital having triple heart bypass surgery in 2003.

Regularly referred to as "incorruptible", Skinner was accused by the Sunday Telegraph in 2009 of making false expenses claims. Recalling how he got a call from the Telegraph's office asking probing questions, he explained. "I told them I had the lowest expenses in the House and the best voting record, but they wanted to know about £3,500 for alterations to my bathroom and kitchen and £800 for a sofa bed." Dennis was cleared of any wrong doing after it emerged that alterations to his flat had been carried out on doctor's orders after his heart bypass. "I've bought my flat myself and never charged a penny of it to the taxpayers," he said. "I have worked out that I am living in London on £27 a day while David Cameron is claiming a damn sight more for his big house in Oxford."

Still a crowd puller, like Tony Benn before him Dennis Skinner is one of the few MPs people will still bother turning out to see. The problem is that like Benn he also risks becoming something of a national treasure - and being liked was never something his politics were about. Unapologetic about his treatment of Tories in the Commons, he once told a reporter to "forget it" when asked if he would ever change his abrasive ways. "There are only so many things you can do in life," he said. "And if you think I'm going to spend my waking hours thinking about some decency in some Tory or other, you can forget it."

Visiting a corner shop in a quiet suburb of Bolsover about six months ago, I asked some local workmen on their lunch break what they thought of the veteran MP. "I disagree with Skinner on virtually everything under the sun," said one of the men. "But politics is a better place with people like him involved". The shop's owner also piped in. "He's very popular in Bolsover. I've lived here for 20-odd years and he will only stop being MP for the area when he steps down or dies," he said. "There is absolutely no chance of him ever losing an election."

When he does eventually leave the House of Commons the entire chamber will be worse off without this worker's son made good - perched in his trademark tweed jacket on the front corner of the Labour benches, belligerently arguing a point when others have long given up the ghost. In an age when the integrity of MPs is repeatedly called into question, even those who loathe the politics of Dennis Skinner will admit, grudgingly of course, that he possesses the stuff in droves.

 

Why single Tony Blair out for protest?

Tony Blair made a tentative return to politics last week as an advisor to the Labour Party. For a number of people on the left, including your humble servant, this did not sit particularly well. Many of us had hoped that under the stewardship of Ed Miliband the Labour Party would move beyond the privatisation and political cowardice of the “triangulation” years to a more confidently social democratic outlook. The political rehabilitation of a man whose politics many have dubbed ‘Thatcherism-light’ left a number of us with a palpable sense of unease.

Much of the anger directed at Mr Blair, however, has focused not on his domestic record but on the foreign policy of his government. “He should have no place in British politics and should be tried as a war criminal”, the national officer of the Stop the War Coalition John Rees told Press TV at a protest outside a Labour fundraising event last week. Mr Rees added that those protesting “want to make it clear that somebody who took this country into war that cost hundreds of thousands of deaths , that wasted billions of pounds illegally, should have no place in British politics.”

To be fair to Mr Rees, the human cost of the war in Iraq has been so high that a degree of anger is more than justified. While Iraqis now have a political system which is more democratic (not to mention much less dangerous) than anything that existed under Saddam Hussein, to get to that point the country has been through nothing short of a bloodbath. Since the intervention in 2003 the Arab Spring has also offered a political lesson to those constitutionally incapable of believing that people can overthrow tyrants without outside help. One of the lessons of Iraq, Pascal Bruckner says in his book The Tyranny of Guilt, is that “People who hope to see local versions of the Parliament in Westminster established in Kabul, Riyadh, Algiers, and Moscow will have to be patient and learn to accept necessity.” Dictators can be overthrown using force quite easily, but bringing functioning democracy to a country is another matter altogether.

The point missed by those who follow Mr Blair around demanding he be tried for war crimes is that whether one supported the war in Iraq or not one was still wrong. Some of you may need to read that sentence again: There was no right answer to the question of whether or not Britain should have gone to war with Iraq. Just as those who favoured military action calculated that a certain number of civilian losses would be “worth it” if it brought democracy to the country, so the anti-war crowds that took to the streets in February 2003 were unwittingly calling for the prolongation of one of the worst dictatorships in the Middle East. Simply reeling off the casualties of war without considering the possible consequences of not going to war shows little more than a desire not to follow one’s thoughts beyond the point at which they are politically useful.

It is worth for a moment contrasting the level of vitriol directed at Mr Blair with the general indifference shown towards former Conservative Prime Minister John Major. Mr Major was the leader of the Conservative Government at the time of the infamous Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s worst war crime since 1945. During the Bosnian war, 8,000 Bosnian Muslims from the town of Srebrenica were rounded up and killed by the Bosnian Serb army under the command of Ratko Mladic. In classifying the massacre as an act of genocide, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia described the events as follows:

“They [members of the Bosnian Serb army] stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity.”

Nato did eventually intervene in Bosnia, but not until a good deal of blood had already been spilled. Robert Hunter, the US ambassador to Nato from 1993 to 1998, believes the government of John Major was partly to blame for the massacre for obstructing intervention by the UN or Nato. “The failure of Nato to reach agreement on serious military action,” Mr Hunter says, “can be attributed to the efforts of one allied nation: Great Britain.”

“Britain,” he adds, “has a huge burden of responsibility for what happened at Srebrenica.”

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Defence Secretary under the Major government until July 1995 and thereafter Foreign Secretary, was one of the architects of Britain’s disastrous policy in Bosnia. Responding to a proposal by the US Senator Bob Dole to lift the arms embargo and allow the Bosnian government to defend itself, Mr Rifkind told him that “You Americans don’t know the horrors of war”, not realising Dole had fought in the Second World War and been left permanently disabled.

As far as I am aware, none of the events that Mr Major has attended as a prestigious after-dinner speaker have ever been besieged by placard-waving anti-war protesters. The first question which strikes you then is: is war only bad when the Americans and the British intervene? That certainly appears to be the position of the Stop the War Coalition, who forget a lesson most of us learned in the school playground as children: inaction is often the same as intervention on the side of the aggressor and against the victim.

Getting this point across to anyone who considers a bullet from a British or American gun to be the world’s greatest abomination will undoubtedly be like trying to fill with water a bucket that has a hole in it. But then it is quite possible that a concern for human life is not the main motivation for those screeching obscenities at Tony Blair anyway, in which case an argument like this will always be one that is wasted.

Originally published @the Independent (Photo: the Independent)

It’s time to stop using the term ‘islamophobia’

Anyone who has ever had dealings with a marketing or PR department will probably have experienced at the time feelings similar to when they first encountered a foreign language. “Our new line of streamlined products will enhance our client-focused approach”, was how it was put to me a few days ago by a particularly polished “blue skies thinking” sort of person. What was being conveyed to me I have no idea; but I do know that impenetrable phrases were unloaded on me like machine gun fire with the intention of bamboozling me into parting with either my cash or my judgement.

It’s not hard to discern why large corporations talk like this. They are often either trying to conceal something from their workers or trying to sell something to the rest of us. The easiest way to fool a person is, after all, by making it impossible to grasp what on earth it is you are talking about. As George Orwell put it many years before the advent of the modern PR department, “When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink”. 

Political language too contains its fair share of semantic bucklers. Almost every politician today is in some sense an advocate of the mysterious “progressive consensus”. And a large number of our representatives are quite keen to stress their party’s courageous plan to “modernise” British institutions – what modernisation means, however, is never quite made clear. Nothing perhaps epitomises the entrance of jargon into the political vernacular, however, as much as the term “islamophobia”, which has become a standard rebuttal in the armoury of the anti-racist movement in the last decade. 

The description of a person or an opinion as “islamophobic” has gained popularity in the last 10 years or so for understandable reasons. In the hope of capitalising on a widespread fear of Islamist terror on the back of 9/11, propagandists of the far-right sought to foster the impression that all Muslims were potential terrorists who constituted a threat to the survival of British society. Encouragingly, the progress made in this country in terms of race relations forced the hand of the far-right to some degree. Today it is overwhelmingly frowned upon to be openly racist or antisemitic, and therefore extremist groups looking to build a following must drop talk of the “inequality of the races” and adopt more subtle language that stresses the supposed incompatibility of foreign and native cultures. Any goose-stepping and talk of racial purity must be saved strictly for the backrooms of pubs on dodgy estates.

There has, however, been an unfortunate consequence of all of this. It is now possible to shut down almost any contemporary political debate by blurring the distinction between legitimate criticism of Islam and the anti-Muslim prejudice of the far-right. This is perhaps best expressed by the appearance on the scene of terms like “islamophobic racism” – a further extension of the concept of islamophobia -, which conflate the idea of “race” (the way a person is born) with religion (a set of ideas passed on in the home, the school and the community).

Interestingly, the French feminist writer Caroline Fourest makes the claim that the word islamophobia was originally popularised by the Mullahs during the Iranian revolution, where the term was employed to describe those women who bravely refused to wear the hijab. Also telling is the fact that in 2006 a motion was introduced at the United Nations by the organisation of the Islamic conference which sought to prohibit the defaming of prophets and freedom of expression in the area of religious symbols under the guise of “anti-islamophobia”. 

Something more appears to be going on here that straightforward anti-racism.

For those of us who are averse to religion and abhor prejudice (it is possible, I assure you), it is both insulting as well as dishonest to have it implied that our criticism of monotheism is the equivalent of colour prejudice. As Pascal Bruckner puts it in his book The Tyranny of Guilt, “To speak of islamophobia is to maintain the crudest confusion between a religion, a specific system of belief, and the faithful who adhere to it…Must we then speak of anticapitalist, antiliberal, antisocialist, and anti-Marxist racism?”.

The correct definition for the bigotry of the far-right (although I’m open to snappier alternatives) is anti-Muslim bigotry. This will not of course be satisfactory to those who wish to introduce blasphemy laws by the back door, but trying to please such people should never be a major concern for those who value free enquiry anyway. What a change in the terminology would do, however, is provide a clearer distinction between legitimate criticism of so-called revealed truths and the crude prejudices of the far-right. No idea should be off limits when it comes to criticism, and real prejudice should not be confused with the perfectly legitimate examination of doctrine. It would be far better, I think, to leave the abuse of language to big capital and its political representatives.