The Volunteers
Contents
Title Page
FOREWORD
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
PART TWO
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
PART THREE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
About the Author
Copyright
FOREWORD
The coalmining strikes of 1972 and 1974 helped to bludgeon British politics into a crisis as intense as any it had experienced since Suez in 1956. In 1978, when Raymond Williams’s The Volunteers was published, the success of the National Union of Mineworkers’ strike actions caused swathes of trade union leaders to conclude that if the miners could take on and defeat one of the world’s biggest industrial employers, then so could other workforces.
The Labour Party found itself besieged by mad, ultra-left factions and activists who assumed that they could ride to power on a wave of industrial unrest, a surge of millennial syndicalism that would sweep away tiresome bourgeois politics. The Tories, initially bewildered at the damage wreaked on the Heath government by the miners’ actions, quickly pulled themselves together and started planning how best to defeat militant trade unionism in its strongholds.
By 1978, when The Volunteers was published, Jim Callaghan’s Labour government enjoyed little respite from the debilitating effects of financial crises, coupled with impossible public and private sector wage demands. The so-called Winter of Discontent heightened the atmosphere of crisis, and it became clear that public opinion was swinging behind the Tories in their determination to curb trade union power. Just months later, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister.
The Volunteers was published a decade after the events of 1968 which had nurtured a generation of unconventional political activists, often from middle-class backgrounds, among student bodies in France, Germany, America and Britain. Ten years on, many of these activists still yearned for fundamental change, though never agreeing on change to what, exactly. Each of their factions tended to loathe each other. They expressed their feelings by hurling allegations that their rivals were Stalinist or Trotskyite or Maoist or any one of a score of other deadly isms.
For the Labour Party, the deadliest of these was entryism. Incrementally, political activists would capture positions of influence within Labour and trade union branches. Their strategy was to replace social democracy and the ‘mixed economy’ with revolutionary politics and ‘public ownership of the means of production’, though they argued endlessly with each other about whether or not ‘public ownership’ constituted socialism or state capitalism.
Living and working in Cambridge as one of that university’s most distinguished and accessible academics, Raymond Williams was well aware of entryism as one more manifestation of the internecine warfare and sectarianism that the British Left wallowed in. The Volunteers sees him exploring the prospect of entryism taken to another level: one that entailed a secret infiltration of revolutionaries to positions of power in the civil service and into the political establishment itself.
He builds the rationale for this tactic slowly and carefully. The novel opens with what appears to have been an attempted assassination of a government minister at St Fagans Folk Museum, near Cardiff, perhaps as revenge for the killing by soldiers of a striking worker at Pontyrhiw, a South Wales coal depot that resembles Saltley Gate, the scene of a celebrated NUM success in the 1972 miners’ strike.
As Williams’s cynical, hard-bitten journalist and narrator, Lewis Redfern, investigates the links between the events at Pontyrhiw and St Fagans, he begins to wonder if the attempted assassination was little more than an extravagant ploy by some unseen revolutionary group to remind militant leftists everywhere that ‘adventurism’, in any form, has led only rarely to political aspirations being realised. It is as if, in the critical years of the late 1970s, Williams is translating into fiction Lenin’s warnings of the temptations, weaknesses and dangers of ‘infantile leftism’, whether it took the form of isolated violence or industrial syndicalism. Williams reminds us that, although the technology of mass communications (and its place in a rapidly changing society) had advanced immeasurably since the Russian Revolution, the Left was still obsessed with fighting the same internecine tactical and theoretical squabbles it had fought with little respite since 1917.
Williams was right, of course. Within six years of Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister, the trade union movement had been reduced to a whining shadow of its former bellicose self. The most feared of the unions, the NUM, had been neutered by a combination of Thatcher’s vengeful tenacity and skill and Arthur Scargill’s megalomania and incompetence.
Williams’s perspicacity was obvious to those who knew him in the 1970s. Among the melee of competing slogans, analyses and apocalyptic predictions, his was a quieter, calmer voice, warning us that it was time to wake up to the implications of the enormous changes in the world of communications. In the 1970s he was one of a tiny vanguard of observers who glimpsed with concern, not simply the spectre of a future in which television, radio and newspapers would be dominated by a handful of trans-national companies and media moguls, but also a future in which our culture, and cultures across the world, might be reshaped fundamentally by radical developments in communications technologies.
In the first pages of The Volunteers Williams describes how his fictitious ‘Insatel Global News Corporation’ is prepared to explore the commercial possibilities that might arise from any sector of human activity, from sport to the political underground to financial markets:
‘Incidents can occur anywhere,’ says Lewis Redfern, describing the news industry, ‘but incidents are not news. News depends on a system and the system depends on resources. Insatel gets its resources from advertising, from the big para-national companies, who push the oil and the fibres and the metals… In News Division the political underground runs second only to sport. International terrorist movements, bombs, hijackings, kidnaps: there is no better news in the business.’
Redfern is a ‘consultant analyst’, a journalist whose role in Insatel is to use his knowledge of subversive political groups to point his colleagues towards the juiciest, most lucrative stories. Normally, Redfern would work to identify the best initial routes before withdrawing to tackle the next story. This time, however, events conspire to begin chipping away at the hard shell he has constructed around himself for his own self-protection. He finds himself unable to make his usual exit as he delves deeper into the possible linkages between the Pontyrhiw killing and the St Fagan’s shooting.
Williams doesn’t use Redfern to express an opinion, either way, about the tactics of the Volunteers. Nor does he attempt to clarify the ambiguity of Redfem’s assessment of the group’s strategic aims. It’s as if Williams is reminding us that all political actions and gestures are generated and accompanied, always, by ambiguous motives and by unintended consequences, and that only rarely, if ever, is it possible for any of us to be absolutely certain about outcomes. Williams knew, as few others did in the 1970s, that the advances in communication technologies and the media’s insatiable and growing hunger for news and controversy might begin to resemble a great cauldron, stewing our diet above a flame of consumer demand. He wouldn’t have known, as we do
now, that it would result in media corporations having access to the Taliban and Al Qaeda – access denied to the soldiers our state pays to protect us from terrorism. Williams could see the beginnings of these strange and troubling clashes of moral, political and commercial imperatives. He allows Redfern to alert us to these clashes but not to pontificate about them.
Williams describes with skill the world that Redfern moves in. He may have set The Volunteers in an imagined 1980s but the novel is a fascinating reminder of the fashions and mores of the 1970s. He contrasts the clothes worn by the novel’s dour lefties with the predominating styles of that decade of peacock pop stars, spectacular hair and outrageous tailoring. In one passage he has Lewis Redfern describe the appearance of the sour, humourless Rosa:
[she] came through the doors and looked around. She was in a grey jacket and jeans: a sort of battledress. I can just remember when the hard types started wearing this, before it spread through the fringe and finally into the fashion photographs.
It is not difficult to recall from that time the beautiful faces of young women and men, tangled up in some Trotskyite sect, who made a fetish of dressing in what they imagined should be the clothes of choice of the working class. The drabber the better. The paler and pastier their skins, the more they believed themselves capable of ‘identifying’ with the downtrodden masses and of selling on street corners their unreadable propaganda sheets. Some would boast openly that, as creatures of the impending revolution, they were ‘dead men walking’, like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, the doomed German revolutionaries.
Perhaps Raymond Williams had Luxembourg in mind when he named the Rosa of the novel. He has Lewis Redfern comparing her with her sister:
she was really like her sister but in a harder-worn, harder-used copy. The same raven hair, the same big dark eyes, but the skin much flatter and duller, the lower cheeks almost grey, and the features more edgy, the mouth dry.
Williams does not attempt to describe with the same intensity the appearance of industrial South Wales where part of The Volunteers is set. Clearly, he knows the landscape but chooses to refer to it only in passing:
He got up. He looked across at me, then went to the window. ‘All quiet in the valley,’ he said ironically.
‘It’s late.’
‘I don’t know. That’s Maerdy up here, the street lights. If memories were battalions…’
I didn’t answer. I was desperately tired.
‘That’s another thing… It’s interesting. Both your parents went from South Wales to Birmingham. In the thirties, to get work.’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re at the right distance to get this place wrong,’ he said, turning and smiling.
London-based, jet-setter news investigator, Redfern is Welsh by inheritance. Williams describes in the novel Redfern’s rebirth as a political radical: not a drab radical, not one in thrall to the ‘dead men walking’ gangs. When, towards the climax of The Volunteers, Redfern comes to give evidence to a key inquiry he wears his denim suit and the batik shirt and refuses the more sober clothes offered to him.
Raymond Williams would have enjoyed placing that luminous little dab of colour. I remember him, in the late 1970s, besieged on a Cambridge stage by revolutionary students and tight-jumpered young lecturers, baying at him for not having mentioned in a talk he had just given the ‘fact’ that the phenomenally popular American-made programme for children, Sesame Street, had allegedly been financed by the CIA.
One young comrade, his pasty face turning red with righteous Trotskyite indignation, accused Williams of ignoring Sesame Street’s role in attempting to heal America and Britain’s fractured race relations by including in its line-up fictitious characters of all colours and from all ethnic groups. As the comrade, fist clenched, preached the virtues of encouraging race-based violence for the part it could play in the impending revolutionary struggle, Raymond Williams, smiling slightly, turned his gentle face in my direction and winked.
He was communicating his delight in having the ability to draw such a crowd and to have confirmed, time and again, that his wisdom and insight generated passion and reaction among all who encountered it. Later, over a pint, I had to admit that the counter-revolutionary thrust of Sesame Street had passed me by. He smiled and said, ‘Me too.’
Kim Howells
PART ONE
1
I was in the air fifty minutes after Buxton was shot. The fax was terse:
MINISTER BUXTON SHOT WOUNDED GROUNDS FAGANS POST CEREMONY SUB RIOT HOSPITALISED CARDIFF ASSAILANT NIL.
In the upstairs office the literati were already translating:
We are just receiving a report that Mr Edmund Buxton, Secretary of State (Wales) in the Financial Commission, has been shot and wounded in the grounds of the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans, near Cardiff. Mr Buxton was visiting St Fagans to open a new extension and a newly re-erected building in the Folk Museum, which has extensive open-air exhibits. Earlier today he had presided at a joint session of the Financial Commission and the Financial Board of the Welsh Senate. When he arrived at St Fagans there was a noisy demonstration against him, but this was kept under control by the police. The shooting occurred later, but as yet we have no precise details. There are no reports of the assailant or assailants being detained. Mr Buxton, who is fifty-seven, has been flown to hospital in Cardiff. We shall of course keep you up to date with any further news as it comes in.
As a trailer this would do. Political sensation comes through like that. It might even jerk a few people awake. But almost everything that mattered was still there to find. We can all make the moves to catch history on the wing. But story and history are hard masters, once you take time to stay with them. The literati could fill in. We, downstairs, had to get out and meet the world.
There were eight of us on standby, but there was never any doubt who Friedmann would send. In my three years with Insatel, working out of their London terminal, I have acquired this instant identity: what the ex-intellectuals who run Insatel insist on calling a field. I am what they call their consultant analyst, on the political underground. Insatel is a news and events service. ‘Wherever it’s happening, with Insatel you’re there.’ In fact not you, public you; me, public me. Our reporter, your reporter. Wherever it’s happening, Mr X marks the spot. But at conferences and in promotions they don’t call us all reporters; they call some of us consultant analysts. Reporters are steam people, pre-media people. But we, I, have still to get up and go. If anything happens that sounds political, but that isn’t a speech or a party conference, there I am sent: young mole burrowing.
Of course I’ve accepted the field: the underground field. It is all that keeps me in work. Insatel cost a fortune even before oil and wheat got together to inflate the international economy. As an idea it had belonged to the fast smooth days of universal expansion. Where better to put other people’s money than an international television satellite service? After the moonshot, friends, this is the globeshot, the space–time fusion. That is to say, relatively fast television coverage of relatively predictable and relatively accessible events. Most of the events, of course, Insatel arranges itself: all the big sporting contests, the festivals, the exhibitions; Insatel’s sponsoring contracts are virtually the only means of finance, in the capitalist world. But somewhere in the margins, on a different principle, other things occasionally happen, and that’s where we become relevant, we in News Division. The network already installed for spectacle has this subsidiary facility for unarranged events.
Yet we go up and down, financially, on heavy things like oil and wheat; on cars and trucks and washing machines; on fibres, on metals, on food packaging. To run at all we depend on these other things moving. Incidents can occur anywhere, but incidents are not news. News depends on a system, and the system depends on resources. Insatel gets its resources from advertising, from the big para-national companies, who push round the oil and the fibres and the metals. To run fast we depend on them booming, and la
tely they haven’t been booming. Consultant analysts, by the score, have become, overnight, out-of-work reporters.
Only Insatel’s internal ratings saved my own job. In News Division the political underground runs second only to sport. International terrorist movements, bombs, hijackings, kidnaps: there is no better news in the business. Thus even in a (relatively) quiet part of the world, I was a consultant analyst they needed. I can get near these people. I understand their mental processes. I speak their language. Or so Insatel believes.
Nothing is now more respectable, in my kind of world, than an underground past. Until the middle eighties, with new things happening all around them, the media still sent their seasoned old men: tough veterans of the lobbies, the press conferences, and the small-hour ministerial negotiations. They never got within shouting distance. For a start they’d forgotten how to shout. No one now knows what they really did. My private guess is the airport bar, drinking with Immigration and Customs and stolidly alert for a shipment of foreign arms or foreign gold.
Then a new generation took over, or, to be strictly accurate, was inserted. There were a good many of us, a few years out of the active movement, needing jobs and a new kind of action. A few of us made it, while most of the generation drifted, fairly happily, into teaching and publishing and the respectable agencies. We lost touch with them, easily. But we didn’t lose touch with the few who were sticking it out: squatting, translating, organising, splitting, regrouping, marching, researching, recruiting, being recruited. That is still our world, we still think in its ways, though the consequent distinction between observer and participant has become, to put it mildly, a bit of an issue.
The really hard groups never touch us; we have to dig for them. Even when they issue their distant, quasi-official communiqués, they don’t give them to us, who would know what questions to ask. They give them straight to the establishment, who wrinkle their long noses but still take them at face value, like all the other official handouts they’re used to reporting. But many groups that appear quite hard do accept us, circumspectly, for what they can get, and that, of course, is publicity, visibility, some minimal sign that all that sustained, dedicated, voluntary work is having a little registered effect: of course distorted by the media but present in the media; a bitter habituation; the best exposure you can get.