"Massa day done"

The New Statesman is a fixture of university libraries and the recycling bins of people still inexplicably members of the Labour Party. It features pullouts sponsored by Pfizer, the TUC and the Home Office, good arts coverage, and heartbreakingly unjournalistic interviews with New Labour ministers. Darcus Howe is a Trinidadian immigrant, and sometime mainstay of the British Black Panther Party and the Race Today Collective. The nephew of the Marxist writer and cricket theorist CLR James, he has devoted his time on our fair isle to unabashedly railing against white supremacy, capitalism and police brutality, getting hauled in front of a jury for riot and called "a cocoa shunter" by Chris Morris for his troubles.




From 1998 to 2008, Darcus Howe had a column in the New Statesman. While the New Stateman moved through avuncular advice to Blair, support for the Afghan War, lukewarm objection to the Iraq War, disillusionment with Blair, disbelief at Blair, hope in Brown, faith in Brown, disillusionment with Brown, and fixation on Clinton and Obama, Howe's column stood, seemingly immovable and utterly incongrouous. Though sometimes boastful, dumbly autobiographical, and solopsistic (he, or a subeditor, titled an article "Antigua: I am treated like a dog and given cold food", for fuck's sake) there is enough meat here to keep the devoted gnawing away.

A proper, old fashioned libertarian Marxist, with a focus on revolt from below, Howe takes obvious glee in puncturing the bubbles of idiotic grandees and professional shit-stirrers. He states the obvious with as much skill as Julie Burchill at her best, but uses his powers for good, not evil (well, sometimes 1/3rd evil). The rage he feels at the petty attempts of our leaders to control, to project and to patronise leads to an Enlightening blur - in his hand, the frequently spat aphorism "politicians are all the same", actually takes on a pleasing shape. Thus, Howe is the only person ever to compare bow-tie wearing wrong man Louis Farrakhan and war criminal/peace envoy Tony Blair, and with some success. Sometimes, it's actually laugh out loud funny the hate and scorn he pours on the featherweights who blunder into the race relations debate - I will never be able to look at arch-neo-con and cat-that-got-the-cream lookalike Denis McShane without imagining Muslim leaders, heeding his dog-whistle call for integration and praising the "beneficent bwana Denis McShane".

Sadly, Howe's column has gone, along with that of Mark Thomas, and although I didn't notice at the time, the New Statesman underwent something of a radical florish in the period when I was an enthusiastic reader. Now, it's a pitiful husk, with only John Pilger's prose-from-on-high, Owen Hatherley's art criticism and Rachel Cooke's reviews enlivening copy largely inspired by, but sometimes just nicked from government press releases. On top of this, the nearly century old bastion of the soft to hard left is facing a barrage of criticism for refusing to recognise trade unions. As long as it maintains its editorial coziness with the Labour Party, its fortunes are condemned run alongside those of the Labour Party, and right now, the prospects for the New Statesman and the Labour Party look terrible.