A Labour MP called John Stonehouse has had the bad luck to be arraigned at the Old Bailey on a charge of fraud and. being found guilty, sentenced to seven years in clink. In case this was not unlucky enough, the poor politician had to listen to an idiot in a wig telling him in the course of sentencing that three besetting sins led to his downfall: lying, hypocrisy, ambition. Now is it not remarkable that a man be so wise, a veritable Daniel come to Judgment, and yet pronounce such an obvious load of codswallop?
Can anyone be so obtuse as not to realize that it is impossible for a man to succeed in the dirty game of capitalist politics unless he exhibits these very sins? Sins? Does not the learned ass know that these are essential qualifications for the job and that without them you might as well look for some relatively honest job (a landlord, or a moneylender, for example)? Imagine a Labour politician coming to the electorate and saying: “My friends, I will not be a liar or a hypocrite. I will not tell you that I am a socialist or that you will be one whit better off if you return a Labour government into power because I know full well—and it’s high time you did too; you members of the working class have been conned so often—that if you elect me and my friends we will administer capitalism in the way it has always ben run. Indeed there is no other way. I will tell you that I want you to vote for me because being an MP is a nicer job than being a miner or a railwayman or whatever I would be otherwise. The only difference in voting for me instead of the Tory or the Liberal is that you will have Bloggs as your MP instead of Smogs or Flogs. Or, as Tolstoy wrote to Chekhov in another context, the difference is that between cats and dogs. No lies. No hypocrisy. And of course, no votes.
As for ambition, it is news that this is a sin under capitalism. I always thought it was regarded as a virtue to become a great leader of men or a great capitalist. The judge must have been reading Mark Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral where he defended his dead friend against the charge: “But Brutus says he was ambitious.’’ Well, whatever ambition signified in ancient Rome, it is nothing to be ashamed of in capitalist society. Harold Wilson’s daddy got a picture of little Harold in front of No. 10 Downing St. to fire him with the right ideas—and the ambitious little lad got there, didn’t he?
Needless to say, we are not seriously offering sympathy to Stonehouse. It seems he was in rather too much of a hurry to make his fortune and purloined a few hundred thousand quid that belonged to other people. This sort of fraud is not looked kindly upon under capitalism, even though it is a system which is actually based on the purloining of the wealth produced by the working class by a small minority of society for their own benefit. We socialists have no truck with the Stonehouse kind of frauds. We have no regard for crooks or murderers or rogues in general, but we can leave them to the tender mercies of the capitalist establishment.
Our worry—and it should be the worry of the working class as a whole—concerns the system itself and the politicians who run it. Because look at the absurdity of this Stonehouse business. He is found guilty of fraud and no longer represents the electors of Walsall North. His party’s aim is to secure his votes from the dupes of Walsall by putting forward promises while knowing that it has no prospect of fulfilling them. In other words, the element which the lawyers call the mens rea, the guilty mind, is clearly present and renders the Labour Party guilty of intent to defraud. His successor was formerly an MP and is as sure as we are that his being elected will have no more to do with Socialism now than it had when he was in the House before. We have little regard for Labour politicians but we know they are not such idiots as to imagine that their government will do anything other than administer capitalism. How can you be at the same time a Socialist, dedicated to overthrowing the system which now rules the earth, and at the same time say that you will make the system run better for the voters—who are of course almost entirely workers? (Capitalists can choose where they live so there aren’t many in Walsall which is a place only fit for workers.)
Winnick, Stonehouse’s successor, is a leftist and knows perfectly well that by electing him his voters will not cure their unemployment, their rotten housing, their insecurity—and the mental stresses that go with insecurity and cause one in six of the voters of Walsall (as of everywhere else, of course) to need psychiatric treatment at some time of their lives and cause the NHS to devote half its beds to mental sickness—i.e. as much as all the rest of the illnesses put together. It must surely be the greatest of all indictments of capitalism that it drives millions of people this way, people who organically have nothing wrong whatever. A lunatic system fit only for lunatics. And frauds. And yet here are the workers of Walsall, having had their fraudulent MP taken from them, about to be the victim again of the swindle that eclipses his.
At the same time as we read of Stonehouse being jailed for fraud his former leader announces that he is going to do a series on TV telling what goes on in the councils of the great. The former working-class boy, now Duke of Uddersfield is already reputed to have made half a million selling his memoirs but of course he is going to help himself to as much as he can. But of course, the “sensible” politicians like Wilson and Winnick (and Foot and Callaghan and Heath and Thatcher) deceive the working class with monotonous regularity and far from being charged with the “sin” of ambition are loaded with wealth and honours. And if the workers of Walsall swallow all the decades of bitter experience of so-called socialist governments, they really cannot altogether complain “I wuz robbed”. The virgin who out of sheer cussedness determines to frequent a dark alley after she has been warned it is the abode of thugs has no right to scream “outrage!” The workers of the world have had plenty of evidence that capitalism is their enemy. As long as they keep voting for it they will deserve what leaders they get.
As a sort of postscript to the above, it is worth having a wry smile at the letters column of that Sunday paper for the intelligent (Jesus!), The Observer.
They published a letter (16th Aug.) suggesting that the crimes of people like Stonehouse, like those of Hitler, are caused by the onset of the male menopause. At one time sunspots were held to be the cause of crises. Now we don’t need to look for the kind of reasons given in this article for the emergence of Stonehouse. It’s the male menopause! A brand-new disease which none of us knew we had till it appeared in the brains of Observer intellectuals. One looked in following issues for letters pointing out the sheer idiocy of this stuff; instead a letter (30th Aug.) by two nitwits: “Quite right. We are just writing a book about it”. Must read it. Perhaps we will find out why Hitler tried his first fascist putsch when he was 30. And why Sir ’Arold was an ambitious little brat when he was 8.
L. E. Weidberg
Blogger's Note:
The Labour Party candidate, David Winnick, actually lost the bye-election but he did he regain the seat at the 1979 General Election.
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