House of Commons' intervention on Russia's anti-NATO line

Press Release



22 February 2010

Russia Urged To Press Its own Reset Button with Nato

Denis MacShane MP, former FCO Minister and UK delegate to the Nato Parliamentary Assembly has urged Russia to press its own reset button and lower tension with Nato members.

MacShane made his appeal in the House of Commons (22 February 2010) after declarations from Moscow that the Kremlin’s new military doctrine saw Nato as Russia’s principal opponent.
UK defence secretary, Bon Ainsworth, also called for a “reappraisal by Russia of its attitude to Nato” and said there was “no reason for the Russian to adopt their (anti-Nato) line. He urged the Russian to soften their position.
The Labour MP who specialises in foreign and security questions also called for less military confrontation and more political-diplomatic containment in Afghanistan.

Please see below extracts from MacShane’s comments and exchanges with Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, in the Commons.

Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab): At the Munich security conference the other week, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said that Russian military doctrine now saw NATO as its principal foe. Does the Secretary of State agree that it is time that Moscow pressed its own reset button and started to work with us as allies and partners, rather than future enemies?

Mr Ainsworth: We would welcome a reappraisal by Russia of its attitude towards NATO. There is no reason for the Russians to adopt the line that they have, and any reappraisal or softening of their position with regard to what they perceive as the threat would be most welcome and beneficial to themselves as well.

Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab): My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) is wrong: the Dutch Government have taken no decision on Afghanistan; they have simply collapsed on account of Afghanistan. Does that not send out a slight warning signal that we perhaps need a little less military confrontation, with all its collateral damage that does so much harm to our good name in Afghanistan, and much more political and diplomatic containment?

Mr Ainsworth: We need political progress in Afghanistan, which is vital, and we need to deliver it through the Afghan Government. However, the last thing that we want is to provide anything other than reintegration, reconciliation and political progress, but we will not achieve it from a position of weakness. The Afghan Government still depend on ISAF for their basic position, and they will do so for some time while we grow the capability of the Afghan national army and the Afghan national police. Of course we should emphasise the political and development side of these operations, as they are vital at the end of the day.

Contribution to the debate on the future of the left in France and in Europe

This article was published in the French daily newspaper Libération

22 February 2010

Ne pas stigmatiser le capitalisme, mais lui opposer des contre-pouvoirs

Jacques Julliard a introduit un débat essentiel. Comme Luther en son temps, il a hardiment placardé ses thèses sur les portes de la cathédrale de la gauche - Libé. Julliard dénonce avec vigueur, propose sans crainte et incarne l’antithèse de la pensée unique. A l’instar de Luther, fondera-t-il une nouvelle religion ? Non. Mais cette réflexion lancée sur l’avenir du socialisme mérite qu’on s’y attache, si tant est qu’elle puisse quitter les terres franco-françaises pour trouver un écho au-delà du Rhin, des Pyrénées, de la Manche et pourquoi pas de l’Atlantique.

D’abord, entendons-nous sur le vocabulaire. L’invocation du républicanisme par exemple, si pertinente en France, sonne creux ailleurs. C’est oublier que les idées sociales-démocrates les plus innovantes sont souvent nées sous des cieux monarchiques : Suède, Norvège, Espagne ou Pays-Bas. Le socialisme français est guetté par l’enfermement dans le paradigme national. J’aimerais que son discours sache transcender les frontières.

Quant au capitalisme, il est vrai qu’il a su s’adapter à la financiarisation de l’économie grâce à une faculté de métamorphose perpétuelle. L’objet de la lutte socialiste n’en reste pas moins le même : détracter le fonctionnement capitaliste pour le faire plier. On veut faire porter aux marchés financiers la responsabilité de l’échec du politique, échec à garantir le financement de l’économie, à lutter contre le chômage structurel, la misère sociale ou encore la montée des extrémismes religieux. Le raccourci sent bon en période électorale. Il y a cinquante ans déjà Harold Wilson, chef de l’opposition travailliste britannique, accusait les «gnomes de Zurich» de dévaluer la livre par leur spéculation. Cela n’a pas empêché la droite de régner en maître sur l’Europe pendant les Trente Glorieuses. Là où la gauche continue de faillir, c’est dans sa mission d’organiser le marché de manière plus équitable.

Pourtant, les pistes de réponses à la financiarisation excessive existent : modifier la structure décisionnelle des multinationales cotées en bourses, redécouvrir la mutualisation, accroître la transparence des flux financiers et la compréhension des risques par les régulateurs, responsabiliser les agences de notation, restreindre l’accès aux marchés des fonds d’investissement domiciliés dans les paradis fiscaux, entre autres. L’idée d’une taxe sur les flux financiers internationaux avance aussi, lentement.

Et que dire de la diatribe ressassée contre le libéralisme, qui n’est pas plus néo qu’il y a vingt ans ? Jadis, on aurait appelé socialisme d’Etat le régime dans lequel l’entité étatique prélève plus de la moitié des revenus nationaux et régule des pans entiers de la société et des comportements individuels. Pendant les «trente inglorieuses» (depuis 1980), le néolibéralisme érigé en culte s’est paradoxalement accompagné d’une emprise croissante de l’Etat sur l’économie et la société. L’Etat de droit a avancé, les injustices ont reculé et le bien-être matériel s’est accru dans les sociétés occidentales. La gauche n’essaie pas de dépasser ce paradoxe pour proposer des réponses originales ; elle préfère s’enfermer dans l’accusation idéologique.

Au demeurant, à trop incriminer le capitalisme financier, nous restons aveugles face à un capitalisme autrement plus destructeur, le système par lequel l’autoritarisme communiste fusionne avec l’accumulation capitalistique. Cette alliance - qu’Orwell aurait baptisé «ComCap» - est le nouveau moteur de l’histoire en Chine. Des millions d’ouvriers sont enfermés dans des camps de travail dignes de l’ère stalinienne, les accidents industriels ne se comptent plus, les paysans quittent massivement leurs terres ancestrales pour le travail en usine. Et en même temps, des centaines de millions d’hommes et de femmes chinois commencent à échapper à la pauvreté. La production des chaussures, appareils photos et autres téléphones portables destinés à satisfaire nos besoins constitue le plus grand programme antipauvreté jamais créé.

Face au ComCap, que répond la gauche ? Elle fredonne un refrain protectionniste et antimatérialiste qui laisse la voie libre au président Sarkozy et à ses envolées lyriques sur le rôle crucial de l’Organisation internationale du travail. Comme chez moi, la droite offre l’utopie d’une régulation sociale globale en prenant soin de démanteler la protection sociale. Cette nouvelle droite a abandonné son attachement au néolibéralisme débridé de l’ère Reagan-Thatcher. Le conservateur David Cameron se pose en héraut des politiques éco-sociales. Pendant que la gauche stigmatise, la droite avance ses pions et nourrit son offre électorale.

Néanmoins, partout en Europe, une saine discussion sur l’avenir de la gauche semble éclore. Récemment Andrea Nahles, secrétaire générale du SPD allemand, s’est associée à la réflexion menée à Londres par des représentants de la gauche européenne venus de dix-neuf pays pour réfléchir aux bases d’un projet de société juste (The Good Society Project). Henri Weber a raison : l’internationalisme est le futur du socialisme. Mais cela exige de poser des questions qui fâchent. Dans le cadre de cette conférence londonienne, un socialiste roumain, Christian Ghinea, a expliqué les bienfaits du dumping social pour les salariés de son pays. Les rémunérations versées par les entreprises délocalisées ont permis d’augmenter le revenu local médian de 75% entre 2005 et 2008. On peut voir les délocalisations comme un crime capitaliste perpétré contre les travailleurs mais cet argument controversé place la gauche face à ses incohérences.

La tâche qui nous attend n’est pas de rétablir des barrières à l’investissement et au commerce mais de construire des contre-pouvoirs pour éviter l’exploitation des travailleurs. Cessons de compter benoîtement sur Fiat ou Siemens ! Malheureusement, l’empereur syndicaliste est nu, ce que nos partis sociaux-démocrates rechignent à admettre. Pire, l’empereur ne souhaite pas se rhabiller. Base émaciée, manque de représentativité, rivalité fratricide ; les maux sont connus mais les remèdes non administrés. Tant que les syndicats ne porteront pas massivement la voix de tous les citoyens, - salariés du secteur privé, travailleurs indépendants et chômeurs inclus -, les revendications des fonctionnaires seront perçues comme des implorations corporatistes coûteuses.

L’Union européenne n’a jamais été un projet socialiste - même si les conservateurs britanniques pensent l’Europe comme un continent contrôlé par Karl Marx - et la direction prise au niveau européen n’est que le reflet grossi des agrégats politiques nationaux. Il n’en demeure pas moins que les solutions aux doutes qui nous occupent ne peuvent se trouver que dans l’édification permanente d’une gauche européenne et internationale. De façon ingénue, le philosophe et poète américain Ralph Waldo Emerson écrivait : «La seule façon d’avoir un ami, c’est d’en être un.» Ingénu ou lucide ? Cessons de projeter nos fantasmes idéologiques sur le monde ou d’exercer stérilement la rhétorique de la dénonciation et poursuivons ensemble nos aspirations progressistes.

Book review: Jacques Chessex's A Jew Must Die

This book review was published in the Financial Times

22 February 2010

A Jew Must Die, by Jacques Chessex (translated by W Donald Wilson, Bitter Lemon Press £6.99, 92 pages)

This short novel is one of the most powerful accounts of the horrors of anti-Semitism as it descended into mass Jew-killing. It is set not in a Nazi death camp but in peaceful, neutral Switzerland. The Swiss asked the Germans to put the infamous “J” for Jude (Jew) on the front of German passports so that Swiss frontier guards could know who were German tourists and who might be Jewish asylum-seekers. In the 1930s Davos was home to the biggest section of the Nazi party outside Germany.

The Goncourt prize­winner Jacques Chessex is one of the best-known Swiss novelists writing in French. The story is a true one. He grew up in the small French-Swiss town of Payerne. There, a group of xenophobic Swiss, egged on by a Jew-hating pastor, Philippe Lugrin, decided to anticipate the final victory of Nazism by killing a Jew just before Hitler’s birthday in April 1942. They chose a cattle dealer, Arthur Bloch, who came from Berne to the Payerne cattle market. The killing was sadistic and prompted by Bloch’s Jewishness and nothing else.

Well-translated by W Donald Wilson, the prose is taut, verbs and nouns in short bare sentences driving the story forward to its gruesome end. Chessex went to school with the children of the killers and met Pastor Lugrin by chance in Lausanne in the 1960s where the priest was still ranting about Jews.

Bloch’s grave stone carries the inscription Gott weiss warum: God knows why. This is Chessex’s only concession to the familiar trope of Holocaust literature: why a Jewish or Christian deity allowed it to happen. In fact, politics allowed it to happen.

Today’s anti-Semitism deniers dismiss the new Jew-hate as unimportant, or as an understandable response to Israeli excesses against Palestinians. Xenophobic politics is on the march again in Europe as the Swiss vote to ban Muslim religious architecture and the English elect MEPs from the anti-Semitic BNP. Disobliging remarks about Jews enter public discourse without much protest.

A belief in the existence of an all-powerful Jewish lobby wielding occult power took root in mid-century Europe. This novel spells out where such beliefs can lead. Of course it could not happen again. And then one reads the Hamas charter and questions begin.

Meltdown Iceland: lessons to learn

This book review article was published in Tribune

Icy warning: the Nordic saga of a Bourbon country that has learned – and forgotten – nothing

18 February 2010

Meltdown Iceland by Roger Boyes (Bloomsbury, £12.99)

Pity poor Iceland. Lost in the icy seas of the Northern Atlantic between Europe and North America, this ancient democracy has only known poverty and cod for centuries. Bullied by Roy Hattersley when the Daily Mail columnist was, briefly, a minister decades ago and sailed forth to lose the cod war, Iceland took its revenge on Britain by stealing billions of pounds from poor British investors in one of the greatest pyramid schemes of all time.

Roger Boyes is one of the best foreign correspondents of his generation. He has covered central and eastern Europe with style, and a sense of history, for The Times for 30 years. Now he has written a gripping and understandable account of the crisis of world capitalism by focusing on the small nation of Iceland.

Those who struggle to understand the width and depth of the crisis and are swamped by figures with unending zeroes in them can read this book and comprehend how greed conquered politics.

Iceland has many aspects of Nordic politics but with one fatal failing. The island of fishermen and geysers fell under the spell of uncontrolled Thatcherism. In a bigger country what was a high temperature became in Iceland a raging fever as Icelanders borrowed and borrowed both to finance a massive presence in Wall Street and the City of London and, at a more humdrum level, to build ludicrous homes and buy ludicrous cars as if Reykjavik was Marbella and Iceland was Dubai.

The British establishment fell in love with Iceland. The Audit Commission, supposedly the stern custodian of public money, invested in the Icelandic bank Kaupthing. So did local authorities acting on advice from government approved investment advisers. Now Iceland is faced with paying back billions to Britain and the Netherlands. Each Icelandic citizen faces a debt of 12,000 euros as London demands Versailles type reparations. No local authority treasurer has paid a price for wasting our council tax money in these unreliable banks and no one from the Audit Commission has resigned.

Boyes quotes a very senior British political leader telling bankers in the City in June 2007: “This is an era that history will record as a new golden age for the City of London. Many who advised me, including not a few newspapers, favoured a regulatory crack down. I believe we were right not to go down that road.”

Labour loyalty prevents me from naming who made that statement but can Iceland be blamed for taking its cue about de-regulated financial behaviour from big brother Britain and its political leaders?

The question is whether Iceland can be a lesson as we seek to shape market economics that do not end in the disaster of the lost hopes and millions of victims of the crash. To be sure, the ship has not sunk as fast as after 1929 but we are still holed below the waterline and no one has designed a new model that allows us to set sail with confidence again.

David Oddsson, the man responsible for leading Iceland to disaster as a boastful Thatcherite prime minister and then a de-regulatory governor of the central bank, is now editor of the main right-wing newspaper there. Iceland’s current president endorsed and covered the follies of Iceland’s financial adventurism. Iceland is the original Bourbon country, having learned and forgotten nothing as it leaves the men who ruined a nation in high office.

Britain and the Netherlands should look again at the over-harsh settlement they have imposed to get reparations from Iceland. But if Icelanders are still prepared to be led by the men who led them to disaster, why should the rest of the world bother? Boyes’ book is a short saga full of warnings. It will happen again, but this time to a nation with many times the population of Iceland.

The Greek crisis shows Europe's weakness

This comment was published in The Independent

16 February 2010

Shame on those now sneering at the European project

The right is forcing the pace in seeking to cast the EU in a negative light

Like the Bullingdon Club on a late-night binge, the Anglo-Saxon club of anti-Europeans is on the rampage, portraying the euro on the brink of collapse. Behind this stands a bigger right-wing agenda aimed at beginning a rollback of European Union construction and integration. Together with the venomous attacks on European citizens working in Britain - now routinely described as "immigrants" with all its Powellite insinuations - the right are forcing the pace in seeking to cast the European Union in a negative light.

It was odd to hear Chris Patten on Today at the weekend offering a soft version of this line. His lament was that Europe was run by second-division leaders and not giants like Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger and he held up John Major as the exemplar of European leadership. Fidelity to old friends is noble but the idea that Sir John, who fumbled Maastricht and appeased Milosevic, is to be admired is a brazen re-writing of history.

But Patten's dismissal of Europe chimes with the new Cameron line that the EU is irrelevant and not of much interest to Britain. This is smarter politics than the sneering contempt for the EU offered up over the years by William Hague or Liam Fox.

But is Patten right? Is Europe now so weakly led that its development hardly matters to Britain? Is the pound outside the Eurozone a saviour for Britain? Is the Greek crisis a harbinger of further rupture in Club Med countries, leading to a break-up of the Eurozone?

Let's take the arguments in turn. The Greek crisis is serious. But it is precisely because the EU has been kept weak that it was allowed to develop. Greece's Conservative government that was defeated last September lied consistently to Brussels about its national accounts, including some dubious derivative trades that earned Goldman Sachs $300m in the high noon of deregulated global Ponzi schemes the City and Wall Street indulged in.

The Conservative EU Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, turned a blind eye to his political friends in Athens. London has always rejected a role for the EU in internal national economic goverance. Thus Greece continued its clientalist and corrupt distortion of public finances without any intervention. Far from Europe being a superstate, Brussels is now revealed as being without the authority or will to send up distress flares, let alone insist on some link to economic truth.

Will the other Club Med nations follow suit? The smug northern consensus is that the markets will break Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. Yet Portugal has a lower deficit than France or the UK and lower unemployment than its neighbour. Spain's central bank has supervisory teams permanently patrolling the corridors of Spanish banks. There are no Northern Rocks, or RBSs let alone Lehman Brothers, on the Iberian Peninsular.

Does Britain's separate currency offer shelter? The pound has been devalued by about 25 per cent in the last 18 months. This has not helped exports. Britain's trade deficit with EU nations rose to £3.7bn in December and imports rose four times faster than exports last year despite the low-value pound. In the past a Labour government that presided over a devaluation bigger than those of 1949 or 1967 would have been crucified. But the consensus that stretches from the post-1997 Treasury to every Tory MP that the pound is good and the euro bad means there is no serious discussion about Britain and the euro.

If Greece or any other country is forced to quit the Eurozone that would mean its debt would become much more costly to service. If goods trading freely in Europe on the basis of a common currency become suddenly cheaper as a result of a devaluation the logical response will be protectionist counter-measures. Germany, with its massive trade surplus, will dominate Europe's financial landscape. The political consequences of a Germany as a hegemonic Weltfinanzmacht (World Financial Power) becoming decoupled from the rest of Europe should worry even the most complacent of British Eurosceptics.

We are all in this together, and the European question is going to become more serious with new doctrines, policies and, in due course, leadership shaping the next stage of EU development. Once again it looks as if Britain will be chirping from the sidelines. An isolationist Tory government would make matters worse. Will the British ostrich ever get its head out of the sands of Dover?

Gordon Brown's battle

This article was published in the Yorkshire Post
8 February 2010


The battle is not all over yet, Gordon... if you can use your strengths

The nation is fed up with its leader. The same party has been in power for well over a decade. Other elections and opinion polls show the voters want change.

Compared to the peerless communication abilities of his predecessor, the new head of government can stumble over words and is less telegenic.

Taxes are high and a resurgent Right-wing group of commentators say it is time for less government and more freedom for business. Voters are fed up with commitments overseas. Many think their nation is losing control of its identity as it signs up to supra-national bodies that require sharing sovereignty.

Britain in 2010? No, America in 1948 when everyone assumed that the long years of Democratic rule would end as the national mood, at a time of the Berlin airlift, seemed to be turned off the pedestrian, earnest Harry Truman after the actor's charm of the patrician Franklin D Roosevelt.

So certain were the opinion polls that Truman would be defeated they announced that his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, had won even before all the real polls closed.

The re-elected President Truman held up a famous Chicago Sun Tribune front page announcing his defeat with the biggest grin ever seen on a US president's face.

Will Gordon Brown break out the rarely seen smile as the votes come in on General Election night in three months' time?

Can he be Labour's Harry Truman and bring home a fourth Labour election victory? The tantalising possibility beckons but only if Brown rises to the challenge in three months' time of persuading the nation that his seriousness is worth a further spell in Downing Street.

The divide is there. Not since the gap between Disraeli and Gladstone has there been such a chasm between two men who seek to lead Britain into the second decade of the new century.

David Cameron is the opposite of everything Gordon Brown is. Rich, easy of manner, instantly friendly with all who meet him, clever without having written a book or policy paper in his life, a young marriage into a fellow scion of the moneyed landed class with delightful children and a home-life that shows an admirable and enviable work-life balance.

Cameron, above all, is English. Brown is pure Scots. The Calvinistic work ethic of the son of the Scottish Manse, who fears he is losing his sight. Despite his intellectual brilliance and a list of books and papers to his name, he waits until his 50s to become a parent.

Cameron has had all of life's glittering prizes offered to him without much effort. With Brown, there is a sense of toil and tears as he spent a decade watching Tony Blair run the show. But it was Brown who provided the economic and social policies that have led to the massive improvements in the health service, schools being rebuilt and millions of people of all ages and classes enjoying new cars, a nicer life style, rising house prices and one, two or more holidays a year.

Brown has just a few weeks to find the popular language that conveys the economic common sense that a major cut in public expenditure now would shut the taps of funds for scores of thousands of Yorkshire and British businesses. There are no state industries to privatise and no North Sea oil to provide a bonanza as in the 1980s. From building, to security, to training, to catering, to printing, it is public sector demand that keeps firms alive.

Brown needs to explain that the deficit is twice as big in America but has spurred over five per cent growth there in the last quarter. Unemployment is higher in Germany, and debt more of a problem in most EU countries. Britain does face challenges but they are manageable and the efforts to portray Britain as in the same parlous state as 1979 just do not make sense.

Brown should make clear that his rejection of calls by Conservative shadow ministers for instant cuts to please the bonus boys in the City is based on a hard-headed analysis of sustainable demand-focused economics.

But he must be brave and make clear to the public sector that the padding and endless flow of new jobs is over. Labour should set out a timetable not just for deficit reduction over the next government but a pledge to lower taxation, save on the greedy end of the labour market.

There should be a super-tax for two years on all public employees earning more than £100,000 a year, starting with the outrageous pay of BBC executives. Labour should aim to get more low-and middle-paid workers, including those who struggle to start a business, either out of tax altogether or by reducing their tax burden.

Cameron is tilting the tax breaks either to his fellow millionaires in the Shadow Cabinet or to the John Terrys of the world who can ditch a wife and marry a new one with a Cameron tax bonus for infidelity.

Brown was Britain's best post-war CFO. He has had difficulties since he took over as CEO. He should play to his strengths and make clear the state will be smaller and better focused under a new period of office for Labour.

But Britain cannot turn its back on the world. This week, the former Foreign and Defence Secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, sensibly called for a new entente with France so that Britain and France could forge new defence relationships to allow power projection and armed services at world-class level. Rifkind is right. But he knows that the Tory Foreign and Defence spokespersons, William Hague and Liam Fox, are obsessively hostile to Europe, as are most Conservative candidates and existing MPs.

Brown has to make clear that, like Harry Truman, he will not allow Britain to fall under the sway of a new isolationism. Many Republicans in 1948 wanted America to limit its "foreign entanglements", to use George Washington's phrase. Conservatives in 2010 are also keen to see Britain reduce its engagement with Europe. A survey of Conservative candidates showed them refusing to support the fight against global warming – the cause which requires more not less commitment to supranational policy decisions based on sharing sovereignty.

As Harry Truman campaigned to save America from Right-wing Republicans in 1948, his supporters cheered him on by saying, "Give 'em hell, Harry". Brown's fans might shout "Go get 'em, Gordon". Such populism sits ill with the stern, unyielding, puritanical style of the Prime Minister. But it may yet win him his first big election.

Oskar Lafontaine's departure from German politics

Auf Wiedersehen Oscar

2 February 2010

The shock news that Oskar Lafontaine, the eternally youthful No-sayer of the German left, is standing down as leader of the Left Party (Die Linke) and as a German MP opens the door to fascinating possibilities for the German left.

Lafontaine underwent a serious cancer operation last November and has now announced his retirement from politics.

This removes one of the most charismatic mobilisers on the European left. Lafontaine has been a star figure and unfulfilled hope of the German left ever since the Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt era came to an end with Schmidt's defeat as Chancellor in 1982.

Like Labour in the 1980s or the French socialists today, the German left after 1982 went up every cul-de-sac they could find.

Lafontaine played a left card by calling for Germany to quit Nato. He played an anti-union card by opposing the German unions' campaign for a 35 hour week, which was won just as the relatively closed economy of west Europe imploded under the pressure of Asia's export focused industrialisation.

Lafontaine had a power base as Premier of the small Saar Land or region on the French border.

He ran against Helmut Kohl in 1990. His Cassandra-like warnings that the economic consequences of German unification would cripple German growth and job-creation after the fall of the Berlin Wall have been more than justified.

But Cassandras never win elections and Lafontaine the orator darling of the left and the 1968 generation could not reach out to a wider audience. Like Neil Kinnock he was the hope of his party but not the wish of the voters.

He was attacked while speaking in the 1990 election and his knife wielding assailant cut deep as much into his psyche of the Peter Pan of the German left as into his flesh.

In March 1998, I was sitting with Gerhard Schroeder in his armoured BMW after speaking with the future SPD chancellor at a closing meeting in his Lower Saxony Land campaign.

It was Oskar Lafontaine conceding that Schroeder, his eternal rival since young socialist days for the affection of the SPD activists, would be the candidate to take on an enfeebled Helmut Kohl in the September 1998 federal election.

Schroeder and Lafontaine chatted amicably as Gerd offered Oscar the top job of Finance Minister and they discussed who would get other jobs. Suddenly Schroeder realised there was a British MP in the car listening and noting and put down the car phone.

Lafontaine was fascinated by Labour's success and the SPD's 1998 campaign was modelled on Labour's 1997 win even to the point of copying the pledge card which I handed to Lafontaine.

But in government Lafontaine could not handle the über realism and "New Middle" style of Schroeder. The radical darling of German politics was the Green Party's Joschka Fischer, who became Europe's most innovative and stylish foreign minister, leaving Lafontaine in the shade.

The SPD had inherited a poor debt and fiscal position from Kohl and had no idea how to set about reducing the 4 million unemployed. Schroeder decided to rebuild German industrial capitalism by holding down wages and Lafontaine refused to be the police man for this policy.

Unlike Britain where there was an almost Teutonic iron discipline in the Labour cabinet until after the 2005 election, German SPD politics were chaotic, vain, and driven by personal ambition and ego.

After 2000, Lafontaine looked over the political landscape and reverted to a youthful leftism. He launched his own left party and then merged it with the left-over Stalinists of East German communism who had a following amongst those East Germans who were the loser of unification.

He found plenty of supporters in west Germany as many SPD activists could not stomach the compromises of Schroeder's New Labourish embrace of global capitalism.

Germany's PR system of voting makes it easy for any breakaway left party to get some traction and Die Linke won seats at regional and national level. The question of whether the SPD should form an alliance with Die Linke bedevilled and bedevils German left politics as does the relationship with the anti-industry Greens.

Like a left version of David Owen, there were too many bitter memories of Lafontaine walking out of his party and government to make rapprochement easy.

Advocates of ultra electoral reform might ponder the break down of the democratic left in Germany which PR has helped accelerate.

The winners in terms of increased votes as a result of the economic crisis has been the liberal rightist Free Democrats who are now in coalition with Angela Merkel's CDU. Lafontaine, far from opening the door to a new era of left politics in Germany, just greased the slip path to power for the right.

But German politics will be duller with his passing. There is no one of his stature in Die Linke. A new generation of SPD leaders are now in place, though as yet no one of Willy Brandt's or Helmut Kohl's stature or Gerhard Schroeder's vote-winning appeal has emerged.

But with Oscar now retired the German left may find that more unity, more discipline, and more team-work are better ways to win power than compelling oratory and catching headlines.