Prison doesn’t work, so Labour must now become the

party of penal reform, argues David Wilson

How we can escape

the prison mindset

Our prisons are in crisis. The prison population soared to an all-time high of almost 84,000 in 2008 – more than doubling since 1992 – and overcrowding continues to reach record levels. We now have more elderly, children, women and life-sentenced prisoners in our jails than ever before. And we lock up a greater proportion of our population than the French, Germans, Italians, Turks, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians and virtually ever other European nation – even though the English are no more tending towards criminality than our continental neighbours.

Somehow this Labour Government – in power for more than a decade – has presided over a trajectory that is taking us ever closer to the nightmare of mass incarceration and social breakdown that has blighted the United States, where one in every 100 of the population is in jail. In fact, one in every 31 adults – 7.3 million Americans – is either in prison, on parole or under some form of correctional supervision.

We should worry because penal expansionism is corrosive to society. Prisons are not tools to be deployed lightly. Often they fracture family life permanently and they can shred the very fabric of communities. When used to excess, as they are in America, prisons create an underclass with little or no investment in law-abiding society. Generations of the poor and disadvantaged become used to spells behind bars and that is the limit of their horizons. Already in England and Wales prisons have become the surrogate for a health and welfare system which is failing the most vulnerable, becoming little more than warehouses for the dumping of people whose problems society has failed to deal with: those with mental health needs, histories of neglect and abuse, and drug and alcohol addictions.

And despite all this, the dramatic increase in the use of imprisonment has only encouraged a more fearful and insecure population and has raised unrealistic expectations about the role prison can play in securing a safer society. It certainly doesn’t seem to be winning the Government any votes.

What has caused this crisis? Given the long-term trends of falling crime, it is penal policy and the criminal justice system itself that has driven up numbers, rather than any upsurge in crime. Sentences have got steadily longer, while more and more individuals have been recalled to prison for breach of licence. The crisis has also been fuelled by legislation – and fuelled with abandon. Consider this: in the 1980s, there were seven law-and-order-related acts for the entire decade. In the 1990s, there were 11. Since 2000, there have been an astonishing 31 pieces of legislation related to law and order passing through Parliament. More than 3,000 new offences have been created since 1997, around half of which can carry a sentence of imprisonment. In the meantime, we now spend more on law and order as a proportion of gross domestic product than any other country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

In 2007, the Howard League for Penal Reform set up the Commission on English Prisons Today to investigate the crisis in our prisons and come up with a blueprint for a penal system that is fit for the 21st century. I was asked to chair the commission. We have spent the past two years speaking to leading experts and visiting other countries, including the United States and Scandinavia, to gather what lessons we can. Chief among these is that it is perfectly possible to have less crime, safer communities and fewer people in prison.

We decided early on that a key theme of our report would be “excess” and its counter, “moderation”. We saw excess in the ever-soaring prison population, in terms of law and order spending and excess in terms of legislative hyperactivity.

As the commission conducted its inquiries, we saw another crisis of excess hit our society in the form of the credit crunch and the downfall of the banks. And there are very clear parallels between the current financial crisis and the crisis facing this country’s penal policy and practice. Just as the banking sector has squandered and gambled with the finances of ordinary investors in pursuit of short-term gain, so has penal policy been driven by unregulated expansion and initiatives designed to win media headlines rather than do any lasting public good.

It is time to take stock. Expansionism in criminal justice was driven in a period of economic affluence. Many mistakes were made simply because we could afford them. Other errors were the result of electoral cynicism, although pandering to public fears and stoking an obsession with crime is ultimately self-defeating. An unregulated appetite for punishment will always outstrip a government’s capacity to legislate or ability to fund yet more prison cells. Ultimately, the criminal justice system is a blunt tool that cannot hope to solve the underlying causes of crime, which are rooted in social exclusion and inequality.

And that is the point. If the Labour Party was founded for anything, it was to challenge and bring an end to social exclusion and inequality. Penal reform is in the soul of Labour. What is progressive about choosing to go down the road towards mass incarceration? What is progressive about choosing to throw money at prisons that, in the long run, only exacerbate the social problems that lead to crime? What is progressive about choosing to build a prison, rather than a hospital or a school? In a time of recession, and global uncertainty, we shall need to make our choices more carefully. Only if Labour rediscovers its values – in penal reform, as with many other aspects of social policy – will its choices be the right ones.  l

David Wilson is professor of criminology at Birmingham City University and chair of the Commission on English Prisons Today

It was as though politics – and Labour politics at that – had made a sudden comeback. The main thrust of Gordon Brown’s statement on the Government’s policy relaunch was a sound recognition of the values, principles and aspirations of the party on whose shoulders he stands.

Accompanied by the effective ditching of compulsory national identity cards, questions over the future of Trident, the ditching of centralised control of schools, the apparent keenness to move swiftly to nationalise National Express’ East Coast franchise, the announcement of a review of the demerits of the Private Finance Initiative in the health service all add up to a new deportment across government.

The fact that some of the moves have been determined by events – public spending shortages in the case of Trident, a flawed business model with rail – should not detract from the significance of the change. In a sense it is a fulfilment of Mr Brown’s affirmation that the Labour Party is “best when we are boldest…best when we are Labour”.

The replacement of producer targets with consumer “entitlements” might at first glance appear to be yet another of those tricky managerial spins of which we have seen too much in recent years and which have done more harm than good to patients and users of public services. If prosecuted as outlined, however, it marks a symbolic shift with the “new” Labour mantra of targets, which disengaged patients, pupils and parents from the service. Entitlements return the public service ethic to a place that is much closer to Labour’s vision, placing power in the hands of users and frontline managers in a way that should drive improvements across the health and education services.

The trebling of funding for affordable housing is to be applauded at long last after so many years of foot-dragging opposition from successive ministers shackled to the Treasury’s reticence. The sop to newly-converted British National Party voters in the announcement that local authorities will be given the power to give “local people” priority on housing lists adds dangerous credence to the propaganda that white people face systemic discrimination is the housing queue while doing nothing to tackle the underlying problem.

It would be encouraging to think that the commendable core proposals of this unveiling of the next Queen’s Speech were a  reflection, perhaps even a liberation, of Mr Brown’s innate connection with the Labour Party. It may be. If it is liberation, it is conversion, too, –  from the market-dominated mechanisms with which both the public services and Government thinking have been hamstrung for too many years of this Labour administration.

With the Tories maintaining a convincing  poll lead and the economy facing a potentially catastrophic “double dip” turndown, there is a certain amount of political expediency in the package, brought on by the mood of Labour MP and, to their credit, the determination of a few wise advisors to persuade the Prime Minister of the right course to steer. At the very least, it might prove that he has found a way to listen. So, we have fresh set of aspirations, many of which by necessity would uproot much of what has been laid down in the past decade. It will take a great determination to deliver them within a timescale that is simply not available to Mr Brown and his Government.

Council housing

Up to 300,000 council homes could be built in next decade

by René Lavanchy

Councils will be given more money and freedom to build council homes than at any stage since Margaret Thatcher came to power, under the Government’s review of council housing finance released this week. Local government representatives say the new funding system could see 300,000 new homes built by 2020.

Housing minister John Healey said he would “want to see councils building more new homes”, as he announced a consultation on how to give local authorities the right to keep all rent from council housing, as well as revenue from house sales.

The plans – first indicated by Mr Healey’s predecessor Margaret Beckett in January – are the first shake-up of the council housing system since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister and will put councils on a more equal financial footing to housing associations – a move resisted by the Government since 1997.

The announcement came a day after Mr Brown pledged to build 3,000 new council homes in 2009-11 as part of the “Building Britain’s Future” plan, just two months after the Budget allocated spending to build only 900. About 375 council homes were built last year.

In total, the Government now promises 110,000 affordable homes for sale or rent by 2011, an increase of 20,000 over previous targets.

Mr Healey said he would bring in legislation to dismantle the housing revenue account system, under which central government collects housing revenue and redistributes it: “This would provide councils with a financial framework in which they could plan and manage for the long term in the same way we expect of other social housing providers. It would give councils a greater capacity and more freedom to respond to local needs”. He added that he was excluding all new council homes from the HRA with immediate effect.

Campaigning group Defend Council Housing has long criticised the funding system as a “robbery”, and says that the Government keeps over £1 billion annually in housing revenue more than it gives back in funding. The right to retain rents and sale profits has long been called for by unions, campaigners and MPs in the House of Commons Council Housing Group.

Mr Healey also announced that, for the first time, councils would be able to access the social housing grant, which subsidises new affordable home building and which has previously only been available to housing associations – another key demand of council housing campaigners.

The Local Government Association welcomed the plans. Paul Bettison, the LGA’s environment chair, said: “The increased spending on council house building is a major victory for town halls. Councils want to build homes to cut waiting lists and get people into their own homes.

“It is also good news that the Government will consult on major reform of council house finance. We have campaigned hard for town halls to keep control of proceeds from council house rents and sales that could deliver 300,000 new homes in the next decade.”

Health service

Darzi signals PFI rethink

by René Lavanchy

Ministers are set to consider scrapping the Private Finance Initiative as a way of funding hospitals and health centres, health minister Lord Darzi has suggested.

In an interview with British Medical Association newspaper BMA News, Lord Darzi said: “I believe PFIs have served the NHS very well… but I have no doubt that the department will be appraising whether it is still the model for the future or whether there are other, better models.”

Unions and the BMA welcomed the comments. Karen Reay, Unite’s national officer for health, said: “We hope he means that the PFI experiment is abandoned, and not that the whole sorry process should be accelerated. We shall be seeking clarification from government on this point.” l

Defence

Pressure mounts to scrap Trident

by Keith Richmond

The Government is under increasing pressure to review its controversial commitment to spend £20 billion to replace Britain’s ageing Trident nuclear missile system.

The decision to spend such a large sum of money on a single project has never been popular – not with those on the left, who have long been opposed to nuclear weapons, nor with those service chiefs – of the Army and Royal Air Force – who, unlike the Royal Navy, don’t get to play with these “toys”.

Now two more issues have been concentrating minds at the Ministry of Defence.

The first is the fear that an enormous chunk of the defence budget is about to be swallowed by a weapon which will never be used. Meanwhile, British servicemen on active duty in Afghanistan and Iraq – and before that in the Balkans – are stretched for equipment which the MoD cannot afford.

The second issue is the recession which is forcing both Labour and the Conservatives to examine where they can make cuts in public spending. It is not clear how, in the current economic climate and with budgets set to be cut throughout Whitehall, the Government is going to be able to justify spending £20 billion on nuclear-armed submarines.

Critics of Trident have been given a boost by a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research – its authors include the former Defence Secretary George Robertson and ex-Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown – which contends that Britain cannot afford much of the defence equipment it plans to buy and should revisit plans to renew its independent nuclear deterrent. It suggests considering possible alternatives to Trident or extending the life of the current system.

Lord Ashdown argued: “We can no longer afford to maintain museum Cold War armaments.”

Lord Robertson said: “In the post 9/11, post financial crisis world, we must be smarter and more ruthless in targeting national resources at the real security risks.”

A spokesperson for CND said: “With the UK facing its biggest economic crisis in decades, there is no case for wasting billions of pounds replacing the Trident nuclear weapons system.”

But the Government, which has to agree an initial contract for the design of the submarines in September, insists it is still committed to renewing Trident. This policy is backed by the Tories, but opposed by the Lib Dems and many Labour backbenchers.

Postal services

Postal privatisation on the back burner

by Cary Gee

Campaigners against Royal Mail privatisation have welcomed comments made by Business Secretary Lord Mandelson earlier this week which indicated that the controversial Postal Services Bill, which seeks increased private investment in the postal service, will not now be heard in the current parliamentary session.

However Billy Hayes, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, stressed that the delay must be used to modernise the postal service while ensuring it remains in public ownership.

Mr Hayes said: “The Government must now consider alternative legislation by the autumn, to allow for a new form of regulation of the industry and the removal of the pensions deficit.”

Modernisation within the public sector has long been at the forefront of the CWU’s strategy in fighting a partial sell-off of the most profitable parts of the business. Campaigners argue that would leave a weakened service unable to compete with the private sector.

Dave Ward, deputy general secretary of the CWU with responsibility for postal services, insisted that co-operation with Royal Mail employees was the only realistic way forward in trying to improve the existing service.

He said: “We have offered management a three-month moratorium on industrial and executive action in order to achieve a modernisation agreement. With the Government’s new position, management must take this opportunity to respond positively to the workforce’s concerns.”

So far, Royal Mail managers have not responded to the offer, putting customers at risk of severe disruption of deliveries. A CWU spokesman confirmed that the union has received many requests for strike action from its members throughout the country who are struggling to cope with the demands placed on them.

He said: “Our workers are angry and feeling the pressure”, but insisted that the union offer remains on the table.

Working conditions

Report shames Tesco’s workplace practices

by Keith Richmond

A shock new report revealing the secret practices of the supermarket giant Tesco concludes that the company’s employment practices in Thailand, South Korea and the United States fall well short of the firm’s published principles.

In Thailand, employees are required to work two shifts (18 hours) or even three (24 hours) back to back; coerced into working unpaid overtime; and sacked for trying to join a trade union.

In South Korea, the company employs contract workers on lower pay and allowances than permanent employees doing the same hours on the same job and forces employees to work up to 20 hours a week unpaid “voluntary” overtime.

And in the US, the company employs part-time rather than-full time workers and refuses to meet unions to discuss them organising among employees. It rejected out of hand a legitimate recognition request from the majority of workers at one store in California.

The report is the work of Union Network International, which represents 900 trade unions and 20 million workers worldwide, and which last year set up the Tesco Global Union Alliance to represent Tesco workers in 12 countries around the world including Britain, Ireland, China, Japan and the US. It was published just before the supermarket gave evidence to the House of Commons select committee’s inquiry into local government and the way it is funded.

Phil Bowyer, deputy general secretary of the UNI Global Union, said: “We want to talk to Tesco about this research which found inconsistencies between its own global principles and local practices. We ask Tesco to take remedial action.”

Tories’ new Euro group gets off to shaky start

by Kate Holman

Following last month’s European elections, the centre-right European People’s Party has retained its position as the largest political group in the European Parliament.

When the Parliament convenes for its first Strasbourg session on July 14, Britain will be the only country in the European Union not represented on the EPP, which has some 80 seats more than its left-of-centre rival.

David Cameron’s promise to pull the Tories out of the EPP and follow an aggressively Eurosceptic line means Britain is absent from the Parliament’s most powerful grouping– which has automatic access to key committee and delegation positions.

In the meantime, the Tories’ new group, the European Conservatives and Reformists, has got off to a shaky start. With 55 MEPs from eight member states, it just scrapes past the minimum threshold for formal recognition. However, more than 90 per cent of its members come from just three countries: Britain, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Only last week, Hannu Takkula from the Finnish Centre Party pulled out after party leaders strong-armed him into joining his two other MEP colleagues in the liberal ALDE group. Fortunately for the ECR, his place was taken by Waldemar Tomaszewski, leader of the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania party, which attracts just 4 per cent of Lithuanian voters.

The largest group in the ECR, after the 26 Tories, is made up of 15 members of the hard-right Polish Law and Justice party (PiS): a virulently homophobic organisation with racist activists.

Next in line are nine members of the ODS of Mirek Topolánek, the former Czech Prime Minister photographed naked at a party at Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s villa. ODS founder Vaclav Klaus describes global warming as a “false myth”.

The rest of the group comprises one MEP each from the Dutch Christian Union, the nationalist Flemish Lijst Dedecker (an ally of the far-right Vlaams Belang), the Latvian National Independence Movement, which honours Latvian soldiers in the Waffen SS, and the Hungarian Democratic Forum.

With little in common but Euroscepticism, the group could have its work cut out agreeing a programme.

Single-MEP delegations are also likely to demand key positions in return for their loyalty, giving them a disproportionate influence and potentially marginalising Conservative MEPs even further.

Hungarian Lajos Bokros is already expected to quit his seat to return to national politics within the next few months. It would take only one more defection to wreck the whole

group. l

Executive pay

Union fury over Network Rail bonuses

by Cary Gee

ASLEF general secretary Keith Norman has reacted angrily to news that Network Rail bosses are set to pocket more than £1.2 million in bonuses.

Chief executive Ian Coucher is due to receive an “incentive payment” in excess of £150,000, while directors Peter Henderson and Ron Henderson will each get more than £300,000.

Mr Norman said: “The world has gone mad. It was only last month that Network Rail’s performance, especially over the West Coast mainline, was heavily criticised by the rail regulator.

“If the performance of our members sank to these levels, they would be on a discipline charge, not a gravy train. At a time when profits are down and debt is increasing, putting our members at real risk of redundancy, these bonuses are an affront.” l

Lindsey dispute

Contractor accused over refinery strikes

by René Lavanchy

Wildcat strikes at the Lindsey Oil Refinery were deliberately caused by a contractor “screwing the clients”, it was alleged this week. Union officials said Jacobs Engineering was to blame for triggering walkouts by mismanaging contracts and arguments with client firm Total.

The allegations came as workers at Lindsey returned to work this week, following the reinstatement of nearly 650 workers sacked for striking unofficially.

Unite regional officer Bernard McAuley said: “These companies are screwing the clients and they use the men as a barometer. When there are disagreements over contractual arrangements they’re out for two to three days and that takes the heat off the contractor and they renegotiate the contract.”

The Lindsey project is now about three months behind schedule. “Jacobs and their sub-contractor Shaws were spending their time on internal fighting”, he said.

He added that another contractor firm, Amec, had a better record after taking over another building site from Jacobs. “There was one day’s industrial action there, on a very tight contract.”

Tom Hardacre, Unite’s national officer for construction, said: “Some of those contractors, when they appear to go wrong, appear to blame the workforce in some way.”

Business Secretary Lord Mandelson has launched an inquiry into productivity on engineering construction sites. Mr Hardacre said he had told the inquiry committee that arguments over contracts could impact on the workforce.

Jacobs were unavailable for comment.

Fraught relations at Lindsey have led Unite to second a full-time official, Michael Gaskell, to oversee the site until the project is completed.

The Guardian called Naji al-Ali: “The nearest thing there is to an Arab public opinion.” For 30 years his cartoons provided an incisive commentary on Arab politics until his career was cut short when he was shot outside the offices of the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Qabas in 1987. “No one knows who killed him. Everyone had a reason.”

He was born in 1938 in the Palestinian village of Al-Shajara which is now part of Israel. In 1948 his family were exiled to Lebanon and in 1960 al-Ali was imprisoned for political reasons. A year later, his first cartoons appeared in the Arab Nationalist Movement’s mouthpiece al-Hurriya. The UK enjoys a long tradition of free expression through political cartoons. Satire has become – perhaps like democracy itself – something we take for granted. We share a collective assurance in our right to dissent, expressed in the gleeful savagery of Gerald Scarfe or the sly deconstructionism of Steve Bell. Not so in the Arab world. It is less easy to make light of a regime that comes after you with a gun.

Naji al-Ali’s parodies were tempered with profound entreaties for change. He observed the Palestinian conflict through the eyes of a child: Hanthala. This destitute 10 year old boy with his hands clasped behind his back as he surveys the horrors of the Middle East has become an iconic figure. Al-Ali explained that he was ten when he left Palestine, and that Hanthala would not grow up until he was able to return.

This collection is divided into five chapters on Palestine; human rights; US dominance, oil and Arab collusion; the peace process; and resistance, with notes by Abdul Hadi Ayyad and perceptive captions by Dr Mahmoud al-Hindi. The cartoons reward the reader, not with biting humour but with expressions of heartfelt hope. They abound with icons of doves and olive branches, of the steadfast Palestinian with keys instead of feet, marching through a landscape of keyholes toward the realization of his goals of freedom, return and justice. A Child In Palestine is a poignant and remarkable document.

Earlier this month, Martin Rowson wrote in Tribune that one way of empowering people is through the ballot box but that “another equally effective method is through ridicule”. Naji al-Ali demonstrated how the latter could flourish without the former. But when freedom falters, when people are left homeless, stateless and limbless by brutal conflict, satire ceases to be a laughing matter.

Andy Bunday

“Taking a line for a walk” was how, memorably, Paul Klee described his drawing, adopting an approach that allowed his imagination free reign. By contrast, Richard Long makes art by taking himself for carefully planned solitary walks, usually in remote and sometimes distant lands, whether in Britain, Canada, Mongolia or Bolivia. Long’s work can be seen as “land art”, a movement concerned with how artists respond to the way landscape influences and affects our lives, part of the romantic tradition in which humankind and nature are perceived to be in some complex symbiotic relationship.

Today there is little landscape that has not been shaped or affected by human activity, whether from farming or industry, or by environmental change. All of which makes the idea of communing with nature – which lies at the heart of Long’s work – demand great leaps of the imagination from the viewer.

This major survey, covering four decades, includes the three main areas of Long’s work – the walks, the stone sculptures and the wall paintings. Each walk takes the form of an illustrated account, whether through a field, across counties or even countries. These are documented with black-and-white photographs (later colour images seem intrusively self-concerned) recording traces created by Long, whether of a path trodden in a field or a pile of stones signalling his presence. Spare, minimal text, almost mystical in its intensity, gives brief details of his impressions at the time.

The central magnificent gallery, lit by natural light, houses six “stone sculptures” made up of carefully selected rocks laid on the floor, brought from faraway places, though the caption gives no information of why or how they were collected. Norfolk Flint Circle is an eight-metre sculpture consisting of a single layer of flint stones nestling close together to create a miniature landscape of whites and greys, the rounded flints recalling the shape of the human body. Another sculpture brings together huge, roughly-hewn lumps of different coloured rocks, too large to carry from distant places, a much less sympathetic assembly but one that alludes to monumental forces.

Some of the most effective works are created on the gallery walls using mud gathered from riverbanks, the Avon is a favourite supply and is close to Long’s native Bristol home. Some mud is grey, other a rich terracotta. The mud is literally daubed onto the wall by Long using only his hands in vast repeating patterns, seemingly random but with a regular and controlled rhythm. After the cerebral “walks”, these have an element of passion, a physical and emotional relationship with earth that is both grounded and grounding.

In exploring the “relationship between time, distance, geography, measurement and movement”, Long’s “dialogue with nature” touches on broad philosophical issues that tempt us to question perceptions about nature and art. While the images and landscape Long conjures up, often with a minimal amount of information, are evocative of time and place, the bringing into the gallery of pieces of landscape raises uneasy easy questions about the environment and the respect we have for it. Long creates a certain fresh air beauty, but it seems as much a concern with self as it does with nature.

Emmanuel Cooper

Richard Long: Heaven and Earth continues until September 6. The exhibition is accompanied by a well-illustrated catalogue and essays on the artist’s work.

Orwell: A Celebration
Trafalgar Studios, London

New writing for British theatre experienced a boom in the mid-1990s and we are still living with the aftershocks. But these reverberations come in many different guises, as is obvious in this revival of Che Walker’s 1998 play, Been So Long. Although Walker has kept the basic outline of his play, as well as much of its exuberant language, he has turned a slight story into a bouncy, occasionally hilarious, musical.

Set in a losers’ bar in Camden, Been So Long has two plotlines: in one, vicious white boy Gil is determined to hunt down Raymond, a local black lothario, because he claims he stole his girl three years ago. In the other, Simone and Yvonne, two feisty women, hit town and Simone falls for Raymond. Will this be just a one-night stand or can they stay together? Keeping an eye on everything is Barney, the quiet barman.

As well as being a snapshot of Camden street-life, the subject also of Walker’s The Frontline (which was revived at Shakespeare’s Globe earlier this summer), Been So Long is a study of beautiful losers. Each of the main characters is damaged by their experiences (family break-up, prison, lack of love) and the question is whether damaged people attract each other – and can they overcome their hang-ups? In the end, the muted optimism of the final scene suggests that they can.

Because of Arthur Davill’s music, a sex war play quickly becomes a Barack Obama moment: the final rush of sound, the joy of the dancing and the feel-good energy of the production, directed by Walker himself, means you leave the theatre on a high. Although most of the songs tend to slow down the action, one or two of them are great – and Walker’s cast, led by Cat Simmons and Naana Agyei-Ampadu as Simone and Yvonne, belt them out good and proper. Best of all, Omar Lyefook gives Barney a soulful integrity which carries his songs beautifully.

In the fun and fury of a rough and ready production, dominated by a huge set which feels out of kilter with the idea of a squalid bar, the staging does tend to obscure the play’s greatest asset, which is Walker’s language. With its moments of sexual ecstasy, inventive insults and ornate formulations, the dialogues really sing, revealing a world of revels and dreams far from the everyday. It’s a pity that they take a backseat to the music.

Words are similarly central to Orwell: A Celebration, a compilation of superb extracts from Coming Up for Air, Shooting an Elephant, A Hanging and part of the ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Staged to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the first publication of Orwell’s influential dystopia, this event is beautifully edited by Dominic Cavendish, superbly directed by Gene David Kirk and excellently performed by Hal Cruttenden, Alan Cox and Ben Porter.

Not only do Orwell’s observations, especially about our obsession with our bodies and our childhood pasts, with fast food and with untimely death, seem still highly relevant, but also the elegant simplicity of his language is a provocative lesson in clarity of expression and humanity of feeling. In a world where Big Brother and Room 101 have quite different meanings to their originals, it is salutary to be reminded just how great a visionary Orwell was. And this is really great stuff.

Aleks Sierz

Take a frustrated actress and her equally frustrated wheelchair-bound husband, both hounded by a sleazy loan shark looking for a £5,000 debt in cash or kind, and you have the recipe for a depressing night at the theatre. It reads like one of those creaky black and white kitchen sink dramas on the old BBC Play for Today, dark, grim and menacing. But The Revengers, thankfully, is nothing of the kind. Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood have written a snappy comedy using serious ingredients and achieving one of the best humorous plays I have ever seen.

It tells the story of Katy Dream, once a television sex symbol as Gemma Peel, a leather-clad, crime-busting, martial arts heroine in a show called “The Revengers”, but now, long after her stardom has faded, she is driven by necessity to work as a sales girl in supermarkets promoting, among other things, vegetables while dressed as a carrot. Her acting days seem to be over. Her husband Jimmy is confined to a wheelchair following an accident at the docks and, unable to find much work, he fills his days by training for road races, making strange soup combinations (Guinness and beetroot, winkles), lavishing praise on Fidel Castro and working as “the oldest paper boy in the West”. The marriage is strained, but hanging together.

Out of the blue, Katy gets the opportunity to audition for the role of Portia in a production of The Merchant of Venice. Jimmy dampens her enthusiasm, but she remains determined to seize this chance to reignite

her acting career. He has his own dreams to see out the rest of his days in his beloved Cuba.

The arrival of a loan shark, Gary (“smarmy twat”), looking for the repayment of money, unsettles Katy and soon he wheedles and needles his way into their life, schmoozing with her and ridiculing Jimmy. The story moves along at a pace and offers enjoyable plot surprises as the three characters spar with each other, keeping us guessing how it will all end. It concludes beautifully.

From the outset, the audience is involved, as Katy and Jimmy confide their innermost thoughts directly to the auditorium. We end up caring about them in different ways, because they care about each other.

Patric Kearns has directed this wonderful play with supreme confidence, taking the drama of the situation and blending it with elements of farce and moments of serious reflection, deftly choreographing the action around a deceptively simple set and expertly encouraging excellent performances from the cast.

George Telfer (Jimmy) gives a hilarious, authentic portrayal as the gruff husband, making his behaviour likeable and appalling in almost equal measure. Sam Clemens (Gary) carries off the wide-boy charmer with a twinkle in his eye and a sharp tongue, sometimes with chilling ease. But, if it was a competition between the actors, all of whom give outstanding performances, Katie Bonna has the edge in her portrayal of Katy. She is magnificent as the play’s central focus. She moves around the stage with assurance and holds the audience’s attention and affection throughout. It is a genuine tour de force and, if there is any justice in the theatrical world, she will be blessed with a long and distinguished career.

Ed Waugh and Trevor Woods have crafted an extraordinary dramatic comedy – sometimes light in touch, sometimes dark in depth but wholly entertaining on a number of levels. It is a shining example of great theatre and should not be missed.

Joe Cushnan

It is easy to see the beauty in the beast when you look at those huge American trucks with their distinctive driver’s cabs and aura of majesty on the freeway. They have featured in red neck movies and bring together the outlaw swagger and romantic tenderness of modern Western heroes. Country music lauds truckers as gritty yet sentimental. They are as much a part of American life as burgers and fries, endless highways and Wal-Mart superstores. But they are much, much more than machines.

As Shane Hamilton, Assistant Professor of History at Georgia University, tells it trucks and truckers have played a major role in defining and helping the US way of life to evolve, feeding on the population’s high expectations of product availability in stores from coast to coast and, as a result, to end up heavily dependent on voracious consumerism.

In Trucking Country, Hamilton analyses the significance of US industrial transportation and distribution mutations and the effects on cultural evolution, regional identity, economic upheaval, legal changes, political debate and policy amendments. We are taken on a journey from the 1920s to the present day that reveals the shifts in social dynamics and the ensuing pressures on economists and politicians to find ways to free up the food supply market but to retain a grip on its reins, to deregulate but keep control, to fragment but maintain some degree of cohesion.

Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s included initiatives to ease unemployment and to reform financial and business practices to help the national recovery from the Great Depression. How efficiently products were transported around the country from farm to table was a key element to restoring stability and morale.

We find out about the reality of distribution upheaval under the layers of trucking romance as debate, aggression, protest and, sometimes, violence erupted in several tangles over the years involving politicians, independent truckers, unionised truckers, cattle farmers, dairy farmers and retailers, all claiming the high moral ground as champions of the consumer.

From this unsettled situation came Wal-Mart in the early 1960s as a kind of “white knight” provider of products, available in abundance and at cheap prices. Its existence today as a low-cost, low-wage, anti-union economic retailing behemoth suggests that the so-called free market flourished because the US population was lulled into a dubious sense of satisfaction at the thought of endless supplies of merchandise available 24 hours a day, all made possible by freeways full of trucks and truckers.

If you want to know what really drives the US economy, then this thoroughly researched and well-written book is for you – and that’s a big 10-4, Rubber Duck.

Joe Cushnan

Not only has the entire political balance of the national press moved further away from that concept, but in the  near half century since it died our trade has seen the most remarkable transformation in the way we communicate ideas, events and certainly propaganda since William Caxton invented moveable type. In fact, we have now entered a period where the talk in fashionable media circles (and it is therefore probably unreliable) is all about the “death of newspapers” along with prophecies that future generations may well grow up in a world without knowing what pen and ink is, except as museum pieces; and where the craft of letter writing may come to be regarded as a preadamite art. In fact, we already have a couple of generations who haven’t the slightest idea of what the Daily Herald was all about.

Such disturbing thoughts occurred to me as I read a most amazing book written by George Lansbury, one of the great Labour Party pioneers of the early 20th century. It is called The Miracle of Fleet Street: The Story of the Daily Herald and was first published in 1925 by Pelican Press. It has just been republished by Spokesman Books with the original typography used 84 years ago. The reason for that, the publishers point out, is: “So modern readers can enjoy the elegant achievements of Labour’s earlier typographers.” For £15 this classic collectors’ item, surely a kind of socialist Biblical text, is an exceptional bargain.

In superb style and with charactistic modesty Lansbury, as its original editor, describes the astonishing birth of what became the national daily newspaper of the Labour Party and trade union movement. And for those young people who have never heard of the Herald let me point out that after its birth in 1912 with an initial capital of £300 it  struggled through World War I as a weekly, was re-born as a daily in 1919 and then, finally, adopted in 1922 by the Labour Party and the TUC as the official national paper of the Labour movement.

Most amazing of all that paper, the Daily Herald, had by 1937, the year Tribune was born, developed into the biggest selling national daily newspaper in Britain.

Of course, that astonishing point had not been reached when Lansbury wrote this book. Yet he lived long enough – he died in 1940 – to witness his dream paper reach the summit of British newspaper readership ahead of them all, beating the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, the lot. Yes, I realise it is now almost beyond belief.

In the meantime, Lansbury had become a Labour MP and,  briefly, leader of the Labour Party between 1932 and 1935, when Clement Attlee succeeded him. It is an extraordinary story and an integral part not only of  Labour history but  also of  Britain’s  history – and one that is still too little appreciated.

When the curtain finally closed on the Daily Herald in 1964 it still had a circulation of more than 1 million when it was bought out by the Daily Mirror group who re-labelled it as The Sun. Five years later, in 1969, Mirror Group Newspapers sold the title to Rupert Murdoch for £75,000  (which now would hardly buy a season ticket at Manchester United). He turned a broadsheet Labour paper into a Tory-supporting tabloid with topless girls on Page 3 – and the rest is a sad story. Sad for the left in British political life, sad for journalism in general and, in my view, sad for the entire culture of radical ideas and radical writing. To be sure, there have been attempts to fill the gap: The Guardian came close to achieving it at one stage,  especially after the death of the News Chronicle in 1960;   and then there was The Independent, gallantly launched in 1986 and still trying hard but, alas, faltering in recent years.

Make no mistake, the going is tough for any daily newspaper, let alone one that has the courage to challenge all that we mean when we talk of global capitalism. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of journalists bear the scars of  that battle. But is it really any tougher today than when George Lansbury faced a similar huge challenge in 1912? When he scraped together £300 to launch a daily “strike sheet” with the help of a few trade unions and the Co-operative Society? Maybe, now, it is an impossible challenge. Yet after re-reading the remarkable story of the Daily Herald, the miracle of Fleet Street, I’m not so sure. Or am I just an old romantic?

Geoffrey Goodman