The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 18

18 The Guardian Tuesday April 16 2002 Comment Analysis Isabel Hilton Cheering on democracy's overthrow uaiBi The putsch against Venezuela's elected leader failed this time Hugo Young A handful of rotters and media cynicism damage credible politicians We degrade public life with this fickle jade of perception The Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane was not the only one caught out by Hugo Chavez's return to power in Venezuela on Sunday, but he was certainly one of the most embarrassed. Mr MacShane committed the undiplomatic error of describing Chavez as a "ranting demagogue" Of course, when he let slip those unfortunate commentsMr MacShane thought that Hugo Chavez was a leftwing ex-president of a country with important mineral reserves in which the US takes a strong interest. Unfortunately for Mr MacShane, the ranting demagogue in question was restored to his job by a combination of people power and constitutionally minded army officers. Odd, though, that Friday's coup, a procedure not normally considered an aid to democratic practice, did not attract the condemnation it deserved. Chavez, after all, has twice been elected president by the largest margins in Venezuela's history.

In Washington, where the administration blamed Chavez himself for the coup that briefly removed him from office, the reaction to his restoration was even stranger. Far from welcoming the triumph of democracy, the US administration reprimanded Chavez expressing the menacing hope that he would be more careful in future, presumably in case he overthrew himself again. Given that the protection of democracy has so often been invoked in the past as an excuse for US military intervention in the third world, surely Washington hould have been rebuking Pedro Carmona Estanga, the businessman in charge of the coup or even preparing a military expedition to restore President Chavez to power. The attempt to overthrow Chavez did not really come as a surprise. The only question was what took them so long.

Nearly a year ago, a visiting Venezuelan, now living in the US, confidently informed me that a coup was in preparation, with the full support of senior figures in Washington. Chavez had been elected on a promise of radical social reform in a direct challenge to Venezuela's oligarchy. It was unlikely that they would let it pass. As for the US interest, it hardly needs rehearsing. Every Latin American reformer, from Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz to Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, has been perceived in Washington as a threat to US interests.

When the reformer has control of the world's fourth largest oil production and makes a point of cultivating the friendship of Fidel Castro and visiting Saddam Hussein, he almost writes the script on Washington's behalf. The coup-maker's handbook maps out the standard procedure: organise the discontent that reform has aroused, reduce the place to chaos and provoke some violent clashes. At that point the forces of reason can intervene to restore order and proclaim new elections which will not be held until the capacity of the defeated forces to fight them has been destroyed. So what went wrong this time? Perhaps it is a little more difficult, in the absence of the "communist to portray such a coup as a blow for democracy. In Venezuela's case, this was even more tricky since the two traditional oligarchic political parties that shared the country's power for nearly 50 years are completely discredited.

The oligarchy has been forced back on substitute organisations the Catholic Church, the main business organisation Fcdecamaras and some trade unions to challenge the elected government. In their brief moment of triumph, though, the depth of the coup-mongers' anti-democratic agenda became clear. They suspended congress, took control of the supreme court and were holding Chavez a prisoner. The US warned he should be more careful, presumably in case he overthrew himself again Far from being perceived as an enemy of democracy, Chavez has emerged as a popular hero. He is supported not only by the poor the 80 of Venezuelans who had seen little benefit from their country's riches until Chavez launched a large-scale public works and welfare programme but also by most of the armed forces in a country where the army has long been a force for constitutional government.

Whatever Chavez's failings, the radical realignment of Venezuelan politics that he represents remains legitimate in the eyes of most Venezuelans. There is opposition, of course, but it is up to the opposition to fight that battle constitutionally. It is only those who lack democratic support who fall back on the tired formula of overthrowing democracy in the name of democracy. Chavez returned to power at the weekend in an apparently magnanimous state. For the sake of Venezuela, he should try to maintain that magnanimity.

But given the weekend's events, it is not Chavez who needs lectures on how to behave. No doubt he has his demagogic moments, but it would be perverse to call him paranoid. They were out to get him; they still are. Where will Mr MacShane line up on the next attempt? commentguardian.co.uk the tenacity with which he was prepared to speak utter, cold-eyed gobbledegook to avoid the confession that the government had failed to keep a pledge. Dr O'Neill might put this down to a need to pre-empt the culture she dislikes.

It's clear the outline is already on her website that the lectures will not end without a lengthy charge against the media as the prime source of public cynicism. How can we trust reporters, she will ask. Why are journalists largely free of the accountability they've helped to impose on other professions and institutions? How can the public decide whose version of the truth is worth believing? How do we know when we're on the receiving end of hype For anyone puzzled by the funding of communist parties since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, Marxist journal What Next? offers a clue. In CPGB The Final Countdown, ex-member Phil Watson scotches false rumours by revealing that, years ago, Mark Fischer a CPGB leader bought out all the copyright on songs by The Wurzels. Cider is now obligatory at their many social gatherings." Were that not enough, the former member who sends us this excerpt recalls once seeing an Australian paper's obituary "for a Dr Noel Olive, a leader of the now-defunct CPA.

It mentioned his wife, who was Benny Hill's sister." Good God. "So I rang Mavis Robertson, doyenne of the movement, and asked whether she knew this (she did); and whether she'd ever met Benny (she had). I asked (jokingly Mavis was a stern woman) whether he'd ever secretly funded the party. She didn't think so, but she had seen him at a couple of party functions (out in the bush) with his sister and her husband, and he had stumped up for a couple of party BBQs." How comforting to think of the proceeds from Hill's paean to the oppressed worker, Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West) possibly the man who delivered milk from the Wurzels farm being ploughed back into the struggle. In the Mail's Wicked Whispers column is a reference to Honor Blackman's forthcoming Vagina Monologues part, next to a reference to her Goldfinger role as Pussy Galore.

Outraged, Marina Hyde rings John Beyer at Mary Whitehouse's Viewers' and Listeners' Association, now renamed Mediawatch. He has his Mail in front of him, and is directed to the page. Now, John, isn't this just way out of place in a family newspaper? Should middle England really be forced to take this filth with its breakfast? "I agree with you," says John. "It's pretty tasteless in very bad taste actually and entirely out of keeping with their description of themselves as a family newspaper." Well, quite. Thanking you.

Meanwhile, hearing rumours about that stage show (not from John Beyer), Marina makes another call. We've had a tip off, she tells Bernard Ingham, that you're about to be unveiled as the latest cast member in the Vagina Monologues. Any chance you could confirm or deny this? Click, brrr. No, we thought not. Cruel gossip that those Saturday night TV "top 10" space-fillers will take any talking head they can find (even David Aaronovitch) suffers a pre-emptive strike from Nerys Hughes.

Still so fondly recalled for that paean to Scousc wit, The Liver Birds, Nerys has been asked to contribute to There's Only One Kylie (BBC1 on May 29). "When they wrote and asked me," she tells a journalist, "I thought "Kylie Minogue and me, Nerys Hughes what's the connection?" They explained it was because we'd both taken part in the Poetry Olympics and they want to feature all sides of what she's done. No, I haven't got one of her records. How awful, having said how wonderful she is!" In the Sun, editor David Yelland permits a full-page leader entitled The Jewish Faith is Not an Evil Religion. Following last September's effort, Islam is Not an Evil Religion, it appears there is a partwork in progress.

Next week it's Zoroastrianism, while fans of Shinto are asked to wait until the start of the World Cup in Japan. The influen- I tial postmodern movement at the Sun is said to be pressing for Satanism is Not an Evil Religion, and we wish them well. Just to reinforce David's magnanimous decision to absolve Judaism from the charge of inherent wickedness, I am pleased to announce jcwish.co.uk as our 1 I dom of information laws passed by this government. To Dr O'Neill, human rights and transparent processes represent deluded dreams of democrats, based on a false analysis of the good society. She seems quite complacent about the overwhelming power of government, and of capitalism, and indifferent to the individual's need for better legal and political defences against both public and private oppressions.

But she asks some telling questions about the culture of suspicion, and the pervasive mistrust this visits on public people. Do the British really feel mistrustful from their own experience, or are they brainwashed into mistrust by the disproportionate prevalence of systemic cynicism? Are the professions politicians, doctors, teachers, social workers typically peopled by dishonest incompetents, or does the attention given to the handful of rotters gravely damage segments of the public world in a way that misrepresents it? Dr O'Neill also contests the extremes of accountability that grew out of the scandals of the Major government. One could expand her thesis. Has the Nolan process, a the impression that had been created. The BBC was not precisely accusing anyone of anything.

They didn't have the facts to do so. They were simply altering the burden of proof from guilt to innocence. The more unctuous the interviewer's tone of factual exculpation, the more emphatic his resort to perception as good enough reason for an implicit smear. Yet who is building this perception? The very people, mainly broadcasters but others too, who claim it as some kind of objective political truth. They seem untroubled by such perversity.

The claim was persuasive in the case of Bernie Ecclestone, at the beginning of the Blair government, where money and policy got shabbily intertwined. Keith Vaz was also clearly up to no good. But other more recent cases seem to me to depend more on the presumption of a politician's guilt in all circumstances than on provable misdeeds. This is a theme in the current Reith Lectures, in which the philosopher Onora O'Neill challenges the breakdown of trust and explores the reasons for it. They are stimulating, and relevant to the climate of the times.

They're a summons, as they should be, to re-think the hierarchy of some pretty deep-seated ideas about the rules of modern public life. There is much to disagree with. At one level, the lectures are turning out to be a reactionary manifesto. Though delivered as philosophy, they are among other things an insidious demolition of both the human rights and the free product of that time, produced a diminished not an enhanced public life, hedged about by rules that put people off public service? Are we going through the elaborate motions of formal accounting, without enriching the outcomes that matter? Are politicians less, not more, trusted than they were? The Blair government has its own problems with trust, and the important ones have little to do with smallpox contracts. They will take their place in the reception of this week's Budget, probably the most important Gordon Brown has delivered.

Will Gordon really be believed? When putting up tax, he'll depend more than ever on the credibility of his yet has he not already mortally damaged his chances of making the voters take him at his word? The history of Labour's way with facts and figures is not good. For most of the first term, these were constantly overstated for effect. Overclaiming for the miracles wrought on health and education was, for a time, endemic. The double-counting of spending increases became notorious. This was the culture of spin, Siamese twin to the culture of suspicion.

That mentality has not entirely died. Though the government swears it has changed tack, and is now into strategy not tactics, old habits die hard. Anyone who saw Alistair Darling last week trying to pretend that a recent report, eviscerating the dramatic falsity of Labour claims about child poverty, was itself false can have marvelled only at People who give money to parties always want something. This may be nothing more heinous than the pursuit of the national interest as they see it. David Sainsbury, a big giver to Labour, is in that category.

So was Stuart Wheeler, who gave a crazy 5m to the Tories to pursue their hardline anti-euro policy at the election. Men of such vast wealth do not usually need or want for themselves. Others, by contrast, might: an in with the party leader, a helping hand for their business, a seat at some New Labour table. They may or may not get it. The assumption behind current scandalised discussion of l-abour party funding is that they always do.

It seems to be taken for granted that the only reason a firm called Powder-Ject got the contract for 16 million smallpox jabs was that its chief executive gave 50,000 to the parry. And that the only reason Tony Blair is assisting BAE Systems to win an arms contract in the Czech Republic, as he helped the Mittal deal in Romania, is because of political donations received. This culture of suspicion is on the way to reaching its logical conclusion: it will soon become terminally imprudent for any business with the slightest chance of getting a government contract to give money to any political party. The culture has little need of proof to establish the premise on which it's based. Perception is all that matters.

BBC Radio 4, beginning with Today, went wall-to-wall yesterday with the iniquity of these transactions, not based on evidence so much as on Alexis Petridis Ageing rock critics keep harping on about a lost golden age. But pop music today is as inventive as ever and spin? When it comes to the culture of suspicion, aren't journalists undermining politicians, not politi-' cians betraying the public? There are answers to these questions. But the politicians have a case. A handful of I episodes get them black-! guarded as a profession. The episodes are different in de- tail and culpability, but they add up to a list.

They make I venality, for the party if not the self, seem like just about the only faculty at work in I ministerial motivation. Pub- lie life gets degraded, often not on the basis of evidence but of this fickle jade called perception, a concept that has the great advantage of being self-verifying. Sometimes, believe it or not, politicians are more spinned against than spinning. h.yuungKuardian.vo.uk was being outsold by Engel-bert Humpcrdinck. Harry Secombe was doing rather better than Pink Floyd.

There were hits for Cliff Richard, Vince Hill, Val Doonican and someone called "Whistling" Jack Smith, who I think we can safely assume was not one of the shock troops of the psychedelic revolution. Punk was raging in April 1977, but you'd never have i known it from tuning in to Top of the Pops. The big sellers were Starsky and Hutch's David Soul, manufactured disco act Boney swing Punk was raging in 1977 but you'd never have known it from tuning in to Top of the Pops Turn that racket down Recent cases seem to depend on the presumption of a politicians guilt in all circumstances a matter of time before Tony Parsons chips in with his ha'pennyworth and we all have to endure his story about taking speed with the Clash for the umpteenth time. I write this surrounded by teetering piles of CDs and records, all just released or out in the next few weeks. When I cast my eyes over them, do I see the graveyard of a once-vibrant culture? An irrevocably barren artistic wasteland? Curiou enough, I do not.

1 jie a raft of fantastic, diverse new albums. There's the Streets' groundbreaking take on garage, a mix album from Soulwax that transforms old records into thrilling new shapes, Cornershop's dayglo eclecticism, Wilco, Doves and Badly Drawn Boy offering inspired, emotive songwriting, the Flaming Lips mapping out new psychedelic territories. I see exciting new One of the many troubling sentiments regularly expressed in the wake of the Queen Mother's death was that her funeral was redolent of a more innocent time, a better era than today. Imagining that the world was some-1 how nicer in the age of diphtheria and world wars is obviously sentimentality gone barmy, but it's not just Daily Mail columnists and flag-waving royalists who in-1 sist on viewing the past through glasses so rose-tinted as to completely obscure the vision. Recent weeks have seen a string of carping, dis-i missive articles from ageing music journalists, apparently startled by the fact that they don't enjoy rock and pop music as much in middle age as they did in their teens and early twenties.

Here they come, their bathchairs festooned with safety pins and God Save Oz stickers, their clothes still musty with the stench of the Roxy club and the Isle of Wight Festival. Their spiritual godfather is the early 70s NME editor Ian MacDonald. His 1995 book about the Beatles, Revolution in the Head, ends with a quite spectacularly disingenuous essay claiming pop music has been in "catastrophic decline" since 1970 and that anyone who disagrees with him is "soulless or tone-deaf. Last week in the Independent, the veteran rock hack Charles Shaar Murray was hymning the "more innocent and ingenious era" of the 60s and early 70s and bemoaning the current charts. The month before, these pages played host to Colin Larkin, editor of the superb Virgin Encyclopaedia of Popular Music, throwing up his hands in horror at the state of pop.

It can only be bands: British Sea Power, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Coral, the Polyphonic Spree. And I see a heap of wildly inventive and original singles by R'n'B artists like Brandy, Tweet and Aaliyah, proof that black music is in ruder health than it has been for years. Ah, cry the doomsay-ers, but what of the singles chart, ruined by cynical, disposable teen pop? Charles Shaar Murray suggests we compare 20O2 with the "golden ages" of 1967 or 1977 to see firm evidence of a decline in standards, proof that "the best stuff is now on the independent In fact, examine the charts from 25 or 35 years ago, and you'll find nothing of the sort. In April 1967, the singles chart showed no evidence that the summer of love was beginning to bloom. Jimi Hendrix nostalgists Manhattan Transfer, and Cliff Richard again.

No one in their right mind could claim that the current singles chart is a hotbed of originality, but it's not as if the charts of the past were filled with free jazz, dub reggae and musique concrete. The singles chart has meant manufactured fluff and unctuous easy listening for decades. The best stuff has always been on the fringes. What's the difference between Gareth Gates and Vince Hill, between Gates's karaoke Unchained Melody and Manhattan Transfer's oily Chanson d'Amour? Not much. In fact, the only thing that has changed over the years arc the rock critics themselves.

Rock and pop music has always been largely aimed at people 20 or 30 years younger than them. Complaining pop or rock doesn't move you in the way it once did is like complain ing that you no longer find children's television riveting. You're somewhere between Homer Simpson who famously announced "everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974, it's a scientific fact" and a dad banging on the ceiling and telling his kids to turn that racket down. The danger is not Pop Idol or sampling or charts filled with disposable rubbish. The danger is people listening to the moaning of disillusioned hacks and venerating a chocolate-box version of the past instead of seeking out new music.

If that happens, rock and pop will end up as dead as some people are claiming it already is. Their personal grumble will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Alexis Petridis is the Guardian's rock and pop critic ale.rispatridishotmail.com new Religious Website of the Month. Here's an hors d'oeuvre. "Elvis Presley's Jewish roots and fondness for challah (bread) are explored in a new book and documentary film jewish.co.uk's Caroline Westbrook finds out more." The full banquet soon..