Book Festival: Ian Blair and Iain Banks

Two Ians (well, an Ian and an Iain) kept up the high quality of Book Festival events yesterday evening.

Ian Blair

Loathed by the right-wing tabloids as a champion of political correctness, and by many on the left as an authoritarian responsible for the police’s worst excesses, Sir Ian Blair’s new book will go some way to addressing his critics.

The former head of the Metropolitan Police has decided to make Policing Controversy a “memoir wrapped in a history.” It’s not just a recollection of his four years spent as Britain’s top policeman, but an in-depth discussion of modern policing.

Strikingly, he described the police forces of the 60s and 70s as “rotten to the core” and “employing more criminals than they caught.” As Blair rose through the ranks, a series of reforming superintendents were able to clean out the rot in the 80s and 90s, creating a highly effective but outdated police presence in the UK. He despairs that unlike other government departments, who are the constant subject of intellectual debate and strategic reviews, the last major review of policing in the UK was in 1962.

Confident that Britain is now one of the safest places in the Western world, he blames the media for portraying a skewed picture of crime in the country.

The killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian man mistaken for a terrorist by police gunmen, was the most controversial event of Blair’s career, and one he tackles head-on. He says that while he admits mistakes and thinks of de Menezes every day, the Brazilian was the “53^rd victim” of the 7 July bombers. “Remember what London felt like,” he says in his defence, “no police force in the world had had suicide bombers on the run before.”

Yet Blair doesn’t see a rosy future for Britain’s police. He’s concerned about possible heavy cuts to police budgets. Now free to criticise politicians, he describes the new government’s idea for elected police authority chiefs as populist and parochial.

He manages to gain the respect of the Book Festival crowd by citing Swedish sleuth Wallander as his favourite fictional detective. Blair might not have the perfect clearance rate of Ystad’s chief inspector, but Policing Controversy shows a more thoughtful side to Britain’s top cop.

 

Iain Banks

While other Book Festival speakers have tiptoed around politics, Iain Banks wades right in undaunted. “I blame Margaret Thatcher... and when the bitch is dead I’m going to go and piss on her grave,” he says in response to some minor political point, only half convincing the audience that he’s joking. An unashamed lefty, the renowned Sci-Fi author complains of only having “three Tory parties” to vote for in the last election.

His forthright political views have found their way into his literature. He describes elements of his Culture series of novels as an attempt to “retake the moral high-ground in space opera for the Left.” He also hits out at the genre of drab, British made “sub-1984” fiction with predictable dystopias and authoritarian governments.

Motor-mouthed yet filled with a roguish charm, Banks knows how to please his fans. He provided a few tempting titbits of information on the next Culture novel, and was happy to enter into detailed discussions on the minutia of his previous work. He describes his latest novel, Transition, as “51% mainstream, 49% science fiction,” though he spent little time trying to flog it, preferring to keep up the off-the-cuff banter with the audience and host.

However he didn’t receive an entirely easy ride from the audience. One man, troubled by the fact Banks had withdrawn his books from the Israeli market in protest over the Palestinian conflict, asked him if he would do the same to the more lucrative American market. Banks eventually managed to stumble across an answer, but it was clear he felt under pressure.

The in-your-face sponsorship of the talk by a whisky company (free measures were offered to us at the door) lent the event a boozy, informal atmosphere. Banks thrives in this kind of environment, and he provided one of the most candid Book Festival talks so far.