To Sir, Without Love (1976)

The Lavender List

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

There has been a lot of noise about your choice of peers for your last Honours List but before we deal with this vital subject perhaps we can ask you a question which I think has not been put to you: Sir, Oh Sir, wherefore art thou Sir? After all, you have so often proclaimed yourself an “egalitarian socialist” (whatever that is supposed to mean) who didn’t believe in titles. (We know you believed in other things. Like money. And translated your sincere belief into practice.) So what on earth has your hand been doing on the royal garter? It makes one doubt your honesty!

Of course, we Socialists understand the noble reason you have always given for creating nobles. You had to put “socialists” in the House of Lords so as to smooth the way for the introduction of “socialism”. Couldn’t expect those Tory backwoodsmen to bring in “socialism,” could we? And if you had to make Lords for the sake of the cause, what more natural than that you should choose your friends? So you created Lord Jumbojet, your solicitor. He was already President of everything in sight so he was well suited to Lord it (or to lard the lean earth, like the original Falstaff). True, he jumbojetted to the villainous Smithie for Sir Alec Whom? who does not claim to be a socialist (about the only one who doesn’t, I think). But it would be ignoble to quibble. He did it all for “socialism”. Noblesse oblige.

Then you made a Lady of your chef de cabinet (and about time too, I’m sure). Lady Marcia, the Virgin of the Slagheaps. Such a pity that your kitchenmaid had to have a flutter in the property sewers when you had been going out of your way to denounce such ways of making money under capitalism — though why the acquisition of wealth from slagheaps is any worse than from any other heaps — e.g. memoirs — is a bit puzzling. It’s all coming from the same source, the exploitation of the working class, isn’t it? Or did you find your five houses in a slagheap, perhaps? Still, we won’t be unkind to the Lady; as she explained, she only did it to have something put by for her old age. True, some villainous Socialist in the Socialist Standard was a bit caustic about this excuse, saying something about you having used your power to arrange pittances for the old age of real workers and why isn’t that good enough for my Lady? No satisfying these Socialists, is there?

In the light of all that sort of thing, the furore over your parting gift to a bunch of rather obvious capitalists, is really unfair to you. But now your hard stint at the coalface is over, what did you achieve for the workers? They did plenty for you didn’t they? And where is the socialism you got the power for? Somehow, I don’t think you’ll answer that one.

L. E. Weidberg