Who to follow into the Revolution? Brand or Bevan?

I've just finished Russell Brand's much-vaunted book Revolution which I really, really wanted to like. Unfortunately it was not to be. Here's why..

I found it to be a very long slog and I suspect that it may be destined for a place on the list of books that are bought but never finished (can anyone honestly say that they got to the end of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time?). All of Brand the comedian-cum-film-star-cum-people’s-revolutionary-cum-mockney-bloke is there. His need to be noticed is on every page and his unwillingness to get out of the way of the story confused/infuriated this reader at every turn. He likes to think of himself as plain speaking but this plainness does not extend to his writing. Here's a fairly typical sentence. ‘The significance of consciousness itself as a participant in what we perceive as reality is increasingly negating what we understood to be objectivity’. Clear as mud, eh? In a half-baked manifesto towards the end, he says "we know what has to change: corporate tyranny, ecological irresponsibility and economic inequality". That much we can agree on, but how do we bring about that change? Precious few suggestions for this and I suspect we'll have to wait until Revolution II to find out how to do that.

In interviews to promote Revolution, Brand has said that he is prepared to die for his beliefs. Before that time comes, the rest of us may have died from boredom. Can any Revolution begin with a yawn? But I'm being unkind: bludgeoned and bored I might have been but I have to admit that he certainly has been successful at getting ideas that others have been articulating far more coherently and for far longer, heard by a much wider audience. Perhaps that's his role in life - agent provocateur for the superficially impressed?

If you are looking for a 'grown up' book on politics, I can thoroughly recommend Aneurin Bevan's In Place of Fear. It hits all the spots that Brand misses by a mile. Written in the early 1950s, it is as relevant today as it was when it first came out. Bevan believed that Democracy and Socialism (not Communism) go hand in hand and that the unrestrained free-market undermines democracy. Rather than an economy based on the attempt to frighten people into working harder by allowing many to fall into unemployment, poverty and homelessness pour encourager des autres, Bevan proposed that government provides for the basic needs of all through a comprehensive welfare system and more control of the nation's resources and infrastructure. It's a programme of social democracy that seems to be gaining renewed support in the UK and it's one that Blair/Brown/Milliband have long left behind - and look at the electoral price they have paid. But let's leave that for another day.