Book review
Crystallised reflections
Through the Looking Glass
(Verso 2001, £15)
Reviewed by Terry Conway
Through the Looking Glass has achieved more exposure than most writers manage after publishing for years, not least because the Guardian ran major extracts of the book two days running.
The reason that paper was prepared to cover the book, as well as the story of author Liz Davies’s resignation from the Labour Party and support for the Socialist Alliance so extensively was nothing to do with support for the principled politics clearly demonstrated in this work.
In fact the Guardian has often gone out of its way to rubbish Liz Davies’s politics but at the same time they know that their readers have followed her story more closely. Its ironical that the law of the market should occasionally stand the left in good stead but this time it did – even though the first day’s extracts were incredibly badly edited.
Hopefully the taste given to Guardian readers from these brief snippets will convince many to go out and buy the whole thing. The full menu is definitely to be recommended.
As Liz Davies says in our interview with her, Through the Looking Glass sets out to expose the machinations of new Labour. It certainly succeeds in that goal and does so in an accessible, vivid style – building up the total picture through a series of incisive cameos, which impacted on this reader despite the fact that there was little in the book that I wasn’t already familiar with.
Liz manages to make all the characters real, whether they are friend, foe or somewhere in between.
This is most memorable of course when she breaks with received wisdom. Her analysis of John Prescott for example gently undermines the popular myth that the man is a bumbling fool and an unwilling prisoner of his leader.
Instead Liz shows that often it was Prescott who was chosen to argue the Blairite line inside the party precisely because he was not seen as an outsider in the way that Blair’s coterie is.
Having assumed the role, he carried it out through the use of coherent arguments. Conversely she shows Blair, portrayed in the media in the image he has created for himself as Mr Cool, being riled on more than one occasion.
What is less clear to those readers who haven’t encountered Liz herself except through these pages, it is portrait of the author.
Few people in my experience use the same style when they are speaking as when they are writing. Liz Davies does – and it is a style with a good deal to commend it.
Not only do the people come to life, but the political implications of the actions depicted are drawn out in a gloriously understated style. From the dedication to Tony Benn "For speaking truth to power" through the concluding pages which illustrate the paucity of today’s Labour Left by contrasting it with the vivacity of the anti-globalisation movement, we are in no doubt of the viewpoint of this chronicler.
What emerges from these pages is a clear demonstration not only of the lengths the party machine goes to stifle even the mildest dissent, but their craven dedication to further the interests of big business and the rich, regardless of the cost to their own supporters.
Of course this is a story familiar to most readers of this paper – but hearing it again in such clear ringing tones certainly reinforced my anger and strengthened my determination to fight it yet more vigorously.
It is true that some of the heart-rending moments that led Liz to finally decide to resign from the party that she had worked for and in all her adult life don’t appear to the full extent they could.
I suspect the reasons for this are two-fold.
Firstly both Liz herself and the book are enormously generous to those she has worked with but disagreed with.
The second, as Liz states in the interview, is that the purpose of the book is to chronicle the rise of New Labour, not to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition to it.
This book is a valuable asset to anyone who wants to understand the rise of Blairism in order to fight it more effectively. Liz Davies has done the left a great service in writing it.
More than that, by continuing to commit herself to struggling for socialism, she is continuing to lend her insights and passion to a movement which is today developing in exciting new directions.