Interview With MP Alan Keen – Part One

01Jan07

Alan Keen is the Labour MP for Feltham and Heston (I live in Feltham), and has been since 1992. He is currently Vice-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Aviation Group, Vice-Chair of the All-Party Sports Group and Chair of the All-Party Football Group. He is also a member of the Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee, and used to be a tactical scout for Middlesbrough F.C.

Alan has campaigned to reduce night flights and to limit the expansion of Heathrow airport, and he is particularly interested in Overseas Development and Foreign Policy. To quote him:

“It is a small world nowadays and Britain cannot be isolated from what goes on outside Europe. It is essential that we work to bring about a more equal society, not just in the UK, but throughout the world”

I met up with him for a chat on December 14, 2006. What follows is the rough transcript of the discussion. I wanted to know what he personally stands for, and to gain a few insights from an MP of how things work behind the scenes of formal politics. The most interesting bits of the conversation are, I think, his description of just how vital the fraudulent ‘45-minute’ claim was for garnering support for the Iraq war, and his candidness about the influence big business has on government policy.

Ultimately, though, however nice Alan Keen is (and he did seem like a really nice person) and whatever his personal views are, it’s the voting record that counts, and those interested can peruse this at leisure here.

(P.S.: sorry for all the (inaudible)’s – my Dictaphone was playing up).

When people vote for you as an MP for Feltham and Heston, are they voting for you – what you stand for- or is it a vote for Labour policies? How exactly does it work?

I think people in general elections vote for one party or another. Obviously, since I’ve been elected since 1992, I’ve done lots and lots of casework with people, so there must be some people might think, ‘Oh, I know it’s raining but we must go and vote for Alan because he helped us with this problem’. So some people will vote for me because I’ve helped them. Some people might have met me and I didn’t agree with their views, so they might vote against me, because they disagree with me. But in the main, people vote for Labour in a general election, rather than Alan Keen.

How is it that you work for Feltham – was it because you were born here, or – ?

Well, I was born in Lewisham but domestic violence caused my mother to have to flee with me as a baby, so being born in Lewisham was irrelevent. It obviously had some effect on my life or the reason why I should have to flee, but I was brought up on Teeside, close to Middlesbrough, where our whole family were. In fact, although my mother had obviously been living in London with my father for a number of years, all my family were from the North-East, so I was taken back home there to live with my grandparents. That’s where I got a Middlesbrough accent. I then came down south in the army, and when I came out I decided that instead of going back to Middlesbrough where jobs are always harder to get, I felt in London – and this turned out to be true – I could choose a job. I chose a job, and that job happened to be on the Great West Road in Brentford, and so my ex-wife and I bought a maisonette in Feltham in 1963. I’ve been in West London now – in different houses but all within half a dozen miles of each other – for 43 years, so although although I’ve got my Middlesbrough accent (which I’m very proud to keep), West London’s been my home for 43 years.

What made you want to become a Member of Parliament (MP)? Was it idealism?

Yes, I suppose so. I’d always worked in the private sector – I was a company director before I was 30 for an international company and then I owned my own business for a good few years – and I was just in the right place at the right time. It had never been a lifelong ambition to become a Member of Parliament, but Russel Kerr, who represented Feltham or Feltham and Heston for 17 years, was defeated in 1983 by a Conservative named Patrick Ground, QC . Patrick then held the seat again in 1987 and I was around at that time. People said to me, ‘will you stand for selection?’. I won the selection and therefore stood in the general election of 1992 and gained the seat back. But the reason I joined the Labour party was idealism, mainly. I wanted to make things better. In fact, my mother was what we used to call a ‘council house Tory’ – her ambition when I was a kid was to get a council house because we were renting a street house, and she got one after I left home. She voted Tory. She was a single parent, so I worshipped my mother; I had so much to be grateful to her for. So when I came down here [London] I began realising there’s a tremendous difference in opportunity for people compared with the North East of England, which was dependent on chemicals and had been dependent on shipbuilding and steel. Opportunities were smaller, and although there was probably some deprivation – and some of the worst deprivation in the country was deprivation in London – overall, the aspirations were lower in the North East, and I thought well, this can’t be right. There shouldn’t be differences like this. Things need to change. That’s why I joined the Labour party in my thirties. So I suppose it’s because I wanted to make things better; so if thats idealism, then yes.

Do you think that’s why most people become an MP?

It’s hard to say – I don’t know what the percentage is. But lots of people regard being a Member of Parliament as being influential and important. They misjudge (laughs), most of the time. But it’s a wonderful privilege, and I often say it jokily that it’s better than going to work, but it never ends really. It’s not as an attractive a job when you get into it as it seems to be from outside; there are never ending queues to be selected in safe seats for all political parties, so some people I do believe come into it because they think its an attractive job. Well it’s an attractive job for them – they’re attracted by it – but it can be really frustrating.

What if you disagree with a Labour party policy? How free are you to voice that disagreement?

Well, our politics at Westminster works on a heavily whipped system and because, going back to what I said a few minutes ago, people vote for Labour rather than for Alan Keen. They vote Labour because they think the Labour party will deliver what they want. They’re not happy with everything, of course, but they have to choose for Feltham and Heston between Labour and the Conservatives. If they choose to vote Labour, which more people did when they put me in, I have a duty to support Labour party policy. It’s more complex because obviously that premise doesn’t always stick to what was in the manifesto…(inaudible)…but I vote for the Labour party on occasions even though I disagree with them on that principle. On some issues, I suppose – I mean, Iraq was..I probably wouldn’t have voted – I abstained in the first vote, but I wouldn’t have supported..no I think on Iraq, it was more..I think I was misled. I was misled on the 45-minutes claim. I think it would have been very difficult for the government to get a majority had that not been misleading, because the 45-minutes, irrespective of all the other complexities, the 45-minutes..the Prime Minister must have either known- he either knew it was battlefield weapons not intermediate nuclear weapons and chose not to tell us that it was battlefield because he was happier that it would be pictured as more of a serious threat. So that’s more complex. I vote sometimes with the government even though I disagree with the policy, because you don’t always disagree with it completely or agree with it completely. It’s not black or white. But sometimes I’ve voted with the government even though I was less happy with the policy in order to keep party unity, in order to keep the Labour party in power. I’m not worrying about my seat, I’m worrying about the future of the Labour government. I believe we’re better off with a Labour government than with a Tory government, so sometimes even though I’m not happy I vote for party unity, because disunity could bring dislike of the party. Sometimes I think its necessary for me to make a point to the government, and say ‘look, you’ve got me at this point now, you should be worried. I’ll vote with you tonight; if you do anything like this again or not the same policy but a different policy area but where I’ve warned you that I’m getting really unhappy then I’m going to vote against you.’ So I’ve got some leeway, if that’s what you’re asking.

Many people I’ve spoken to feel that the Iraq war gave them an impression of the political system, that either a) many politicians don’t know really know what they’re talking about, or b) that they are willing to put politics ahead of peoples’ lives in other countries. Is there a way of making politics be less, or seem less, self-interested or corrupt?

I don’t agree that politicians could ever put politics above human life. I genuinely thought, even though I was unhappy about Iraq, I genuinely thought that more lives would be lost with Saddam Hussein staying there than being taken out. I do not agree with – I didn’t agree with how we’re going in there without the support of the rest of Europe, for instance. But when the 45-minutes thing came in – see, it’s very complex, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do..let me put it more clearly: I believe what we really need is a world police force. We couldn’t cope without a police force here – there’d be chaos. It has to be controlled democratically and the UN would have to be reformed completely in order to get anywhere near an acceptable level. I mean, our democracy is flawed – as you’ve been partly pointing out asking these questions – but we do need a world police force, and in a way action in Iraq would have been the action taken by an international police force, but some of the problems were that there were oil contracts between Iraq the U.S. and Russia and France, and they were influenced by self-interest, so there was a flaw in the democracy there. There was a flaw in the democracy because the 45-minutes claim was trumped up. A lot of the other stuff – whether they would find nuclear weapons or not – no one, I don’t think anyone really knows..I think most people misjudged the determination of some of the people in Iraq – whether they are from Iraq themselves or people coming in from the outside – no one really believed they would cause as much of a problem as they are. I mean, I was confident that Iraq by now would be operating in a very straightforward manner and would be a democracy. I listened to the head of the Kurds – they’ve always had a certain amount of self-government even under Saddam Hussein. The head of, well he called himself Prime Minister – I can’t remember now – he said he thought they’d be contributing by long before even now – he was looking ahead and he was confident, I believed him; he wasn’t trying to mislead us – but by now he said Iraq would be contributing to getting rid of world poverty, would be contributing to feeding people in Africa. Nobody really believed it would go on for as long as this, and so many lives would be lost on both sides, but still lives are being lost. And of course, Iraqis are killing Iraqis. Muslims are divided and…(inaudible)…it’s an awful situation, but we couldn’t – I’m not a pacifist and I could never sign up to anything saying that we must treat all international boundaries as sacrosanct. We should have been in Rwanda, we should have saved half a million people in Rwanda by going in. I think it was criminal that we didn’t do that. Every situation is different..its a complex world.

It seems to me that countries, including this country, have..international law, right now, is flawed in the sense that the enforcing of it is the responsibility of the UN, and the UN isn’t up to the job. It seems like countries like our own enforce the law selectively. So for example, Israel is breaking international law and has done for decades and the U.S. has continued to fund it. Israel is using U.S. helicopters and fighter jets right now to bomb Lebanon. The UK, in the UN resolution…the UN Security Council had discussions a few days ago and the UK abstained from the vote for a resolution that criticised both Israel and Hizbullah for their actions. Are you happy with our government’s response to the crisis?

I think the U.S. is so committed to maintaining Israel that they are unable to go back and..so it’s..until the U.S. says ‘look, we’ve got to have peace’…(inaudible)…I mean, it’s got to be a negotiated peace, obviously. It’s got to be by negotiations, and the US really has to accept that it’s…(inaudible)…probably the money that the politicians get there.. -

But with our “special relationship” with the U.S., shouldn’t we…

Yes, I think Tony Blair’s gone too far with that.

I haven’t heard Margaret Beckett..I’ve been trying to listen for any statements from her about what’s going on. She did say something on June 20, but -

I do think – I’ve got a lot of time for Margaret Beckett, and I do think that really, whoever’s been Foreign Secretary has been number two to the Prime Minister on foreign affairs. It’s very complex, I mean – I can..there’s so much wrong with our democracy. No democracy is perfect, but..you know, you read in the press that there’s never really been much discussion in the Cabinet, not like there was 30 years ago. Decisions are probably made in No. 10 by the PM and advisors. It’s not around the Cabinet table, so I think the Cabinet were given instructions and the PM got a very – or certainly was in a very powerful position, because of the massive majority Labour had in 1997 and subsequently, so he’s been able to get his own way and I don’t think any, or very few people who can get their own way are going to listen very much to other people. And with our type of politics, our type of democracy, party democracy and then national democracy, you need to be pretty tough to get where you are. It’s probably the same with other nations too.

Yeah, I was reading the Power Inquiry – it’s an inquiry into the state of our democracy. Tony Blair made a statement about it, but it was quickly forgotten about, but it was a big report into the problems with our democracy and presented a few recommendations on how to improve it. But a main one, and its one I’ve been following for some time, is with the media . Everyone recognises that we must have a free press in order to have true democracy, and..well firstly, do you think we have a free press?

The press is completely free. They can do and say what they like. If you read the Daily Mail for instance..most of that is so biased in one direction. You can go right through the whole newspaper -

I mean free from corporate influence. All the major newspapers are primarily funded by corporate advertising, and they are owned by corporations as well. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but something like the top 1500 English-language news organisations are owned by 89 corporations. When I read through the mainstream press, on a number of issues – for example the Indonesian occupation of East Timor – I find this constant..not lying, they don’t lie, but selective reporting and suppression of certain information – I don’t mean free from government, I mean free from power.

You have to bear in mind that newspapers would still lose all their adverts if they didn’t sell copies, because the advertisers want to show it to as many people as possible, so if a newspaper is unpopular, people aren’t buying it, then the advertisers would disappear very quickly. I don’t believe there’s some sort of conspiracy -

No, not -

between the…(inaudible) …so, in a way, the Daily Mail sells to people who like to read the stuff in there. Reading the financial papers, as I was reading yesterday – or was it this Sunday? – yes, the Mail on Sunday; there’s some ludicrous criticism of Gordon Brown in there which is just pathetic..I mean its just, anybody who..people who want it to say that, like if I read something in the paper about Cameron, I mean I might think its absolute codswallop, but I’d still like it, so I’d buy that paper.

But there’s a question about choice as well, because if the newspapers give different angles on issues, be they to do with government or anything else,..that’s one thing; but all of them..they confine themselves to certain boundaries, and won’t go beyond them. I have the time to read Amnesty International reports and things like that, but most people come home from a hard day’s work and they just want to read the paper or turn on the TV. So while you can say that most people enjoy reading the papers, I haven’t seen a real choice beyond these boundaries of debate.

I think the newspapers are a disgrace. I’ll give you one of the best examples from the Sunday papers, the broadsheets. Usually, and journalists admit this, usually the main story is just fabricated. Absolutely fabricated. They want to sell as many newspapers..it’s a vast business. So, you’ll read that..just, I’ll make it up: ‘John Prescott Leaves Reward, Wants To Get (inaudible) Within Three Months’. Now, no one is actually quoted if you look at it. They just say a ’spokesperson in Number 10′ said this…they don’t say that the Secretary of State said this, or even a backbench MP said this…the Sunday papers are fabricated, and you’ll hear admissions of that from journalists…(inaudible)…

Another thing the Power Inquiry report said that the ordinary man on the street does not feel that his vote really translates into -

Absolutely right. I worked with computers in Brentford on the Great West Rd. in the late 60s / early 70s…and I recognised even in those days – and the technology has changed, more than a million times since then – but I recognised that here was the technology – I was nowhere near involved in politics then – I recognised back then that the technology could enable us to move back towards individuals making an effect on decisions. Now, we’ve got the technology..we haven’t got complete security, but that’s a normal thing – I mean people are still worried about postal votes, never mind.. (laughs). But I’m not advocating voting every four or five years by computer, I’m advocating some decisions being influenced, politicians being influenced by people’s votes. I don’t mean me ringing up 10 times to ITV to get the best looking girl through to the next round of Pop Idol or something like that. I’m talking about complete security, so that people could influence decisions. I’m no expert on history, but it is generally accepted that Greece was the first democracy and – not everyone was given the vote of course – but they stood at the time in the square and put their hands up. Now, as populations grew you couldn’t carry on with that, so you had to have representative democracy, but [what we have today] is far short of what people deserve. We should have term limits for MPs, terms limits for Prime Ministers so you get more of a turnover..democracy, or lack of democracy (laughs) is one of my favourite subjects…

Is it changing, or…?

No, MPs are not going to vote for something that is going to be detrimental to them, so who’s going to vote for term limits? And its corrupted – I always put the argument, I’m always arguing with colleagues for term limits and as I’m getting older they say to me ‘ what do you mean term limits?’ and I say ‘its corrupted, isn’t it?’ and they say ‘what do you mean its corrupted?’ and well, they go on the defensive. When I was elected I thought 12 years; since I’ve been elected I’m thinking about 18 or 20 years. If that’s not a sign of corruption, what is? (laughs) And, you see, touching onto war again, this is before your time, but when President Reagan..most people thought he would be the last person to negotiate a reduction in arms but he did negotiate a reduction. I think he did that because he had an 8 year limit and he wanted to have something tangible to show…(inaudible) …and I believe if the PM has unlimited time…(inaudible)…he’s not going to take the decisions that should be taken at those times..he’s going to look towards the next election, and keep ‘that’ to one side and concentrate on ‘this’. If we had term limits it would give him more of an incentive to push to deliver..that’s my theory anyway.

You mention you were in the armed forces. What made you join?

It was national service. I don’t advocate national service but what I would like to see is a change in culture..I mean, most people travel for a year, don’t they? Some people are unsuitable for that – my son said that if he travelled he probably wouldn’t have come back and gone to university and completed his degree. But I think there should be a break after 18 or so where people do go off and do other things, and in a way the more likely they are to end up in a job where they use their brain without any physical abilities…the more we should try and something the opposite of what we’re likely to end up as – in here [Parliament], for example, we’ve got Secretaries of State who’ve never had a job in their lives. Never had to take decisions..it’s a ludicrous system.

I notice from your website that you’ve been involved a lot with Heathrow airport about night flights. Can you explain?

Well, what it is..it’s very difficult to get government to do anything other than follow what the airlines and the airport operators want, because it’s such a massive industry. I mean, they’re great – I’m very proud of of British Airways. BA are slick operators and very efficient, even though they mistakes sometimes, but they are efficient. And my constituents are very proud of British Airways, but the government tends to do what the industry wants. It’s always been that way.

With lobbies, or – ?

Governments really don’t take much notice of anyone who lobbies them if they don’t agree with them, and it’s such a big issue this but I’ll try and stick to the main point. So, those lobbying against Heathrow airport – and I don’t want any more expansion outside the present grounds, that’s why although I didn’t oppose Terminal 5 which was inside the grounds I oppose Runway Three because its going to damage further the environment. I don’t think we’re going to meet the European Standards for air cleanliness by 2010 anyway, but irrespective of that its making the road system so congested. My wife and I lobbied the Secretary of State and we managed to get him to say that although he was taking off the limits on numbers of flights he would guarantee there would be no increase in night flights before consultation until 2010, so it was a minor success.

End of Part One. Part Two coming soon…

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Tags: Alan Keen, Democracy