There is no alternative to becoming Leadbeater

Nick Cohen

• Living on Thin Air: The New Economy by Charles Leadbeater
  Viking, 244 pp, £17.99, July 1999, ISBN 0 670 87669 0

A few years ago, in the mid-Nineties, the Independent attempted to halt its decline with a bold stroke. For the first time in the history of journalism a national newspaper sold itself as a think tank pamphlet. Two of those hired to fill senior editorial positions, Charles Leadbeater and Martin Jacques, were ex-Communists who had wound up their party and formed Demos, a research centre aligned to Tony Blair’s New Labour project. Geoff Mulgan, a former Trotskyist and director of Demos, became a contributor to the paper’s opinion pages, as did a strange young man who had changed his name from Keith Ashworth to Perri 6. Hacks have a strong craft consciousness: they regard all senior editors who have not proved they are tough enough to cover hard news as effete and overpaid timewasters who will bring ruin on a newspaper. To make matters worse for the leftish reporters on the Independent, our new masters’ ideas, in so far as they could be understood, appeared to be as reactionary as those of the right-wing press. Yet however hard we tried to oppose, our hostility was muted and unsatisfactory. The Demos crowd didn’t talk like Tories. They appeared to care about inequality and rejected accusations of complicity with Thatcherism with bewildered impatience. The very notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ were dead, we were told. In their place was a modern paradigm which lay in the tiger economies of the East, much celebrated for a couple of years – until they had the bad manners to collapse. In the end, it was the tone of voice, rather than what was said, that jarred. Leadbeater and the rest had lost their faith in socialism, but in their conversation you could still hear the sharp accents of Marxist teleology. The gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ was hardly worth arguing about. History was moving down the tracks; questioning the inevitable was pointless. After being given a long lecture in this vein, an old hand staggered out of an editorial conference. ‘These people used to go to Moscow and say, “I’ve seen the future – and It Works!” ’ he bellowed. ‘Now they go to Singapore and cry: “I’ve seen the future – and Gosh!” ’