From the July 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard
That putrid stink is not from the corpses at the front: they have got plenty of sanitary men there. It is from your food released from cold storage by the profiteers.
Friday, July 11, 2025
Sting in the Tail: Suffer the little children (1996)
Suffer the little children
Stephen Dorrell, the health secretary, is expected to order health regions to give more priority to paediatric intensive care beds after reports that numbers have fallen dangerously low.
In one of the worst cases, Nicholas Geldard, aged 10, died from a brain haemorrhage last December after being taken to four hospitals and across the Pennines in a snowstorm because no bed could be found for him.
Mr Dorrell’s action could be less than compassionate, however, for according to the Sunday Telegraph (19 May):
“He will also expect at least 33 of the beds to be opened by the winter, when demand is at its highest and to avoid any scandals in the run-up to the general election. ”
This is another example of the cynical contempt the Tory Party and its "Torygraph" supporters display towards the health care of the working class.
Ways of seeing
The 60th anniversary of the Spitfire, one of Britain’s World War Two aircraft, had one Jonathan Glancey rhapsodising over its “beauty” in the Independent (8 May).
He informed us that the Spitfire was “one of the most beautiful machines made”. It was “glamorous, romantic, balletic”, and in case we still hadn’t got the message:
“The spirit of the Spitfire is deeply embedded in our culture, a machine that somehow speaks of cricket, the sonnets of Keats . . ."
All this tripe about a machine designed to kill and destroy, a weapon in British capitalism’s struggle to hold onto its empire, markets and place as a world plunderer. Can something like this really be beautiful?
For us, a kidney machine or even the humble washing machine, which at least reduces drudgery, are far, far more beautiful than the Spitfire and every other instrument of death and destruction.
Utopian “Socialists”
The syllabus of the Socialist Scholars Conference held in New York City in April had 42 speakers listed to speak on 11 subjects under the general heading "Two Cheers for Utopia—Re-imagining Socialism".
This looked promising; after all, when scholars get together to talk about “socialism" they invariably mean schemes for patching-up capitalism through programmes of reforms. Could this really be a conference to discuss genuine socialism?
Even more promising was the statement in the syllabus that:
". . . we believe a little utopia is precisely what our society needs. "
Alas, further reading revealed that for these scholars “Re-imagining Socialism" amounted to such “outlandish” proposals as a guaranteed income, opposition to privatisation and welfare cuts, etc.
This is utopia? Compared to our vision of a classless, moneyless, worldwide society of production for use, the imagining of the SSC is very limited indeed.
Spot that tune
The terms of reference of the Hearing committee of inquiry into the future of further education in Britain spell out what the inquiry’s priorities will be.
The terms emphasise the need for universities to provide graduates with the skills required by industry, and although the need to be internationally competitive gets ten mentions, scholarship gets only four.
Anyone who is shocked by such priorities should remember that this is capitalism, and what is good for business will inevitably come first. This is why a committee dealing with education draws five of its sixteen members from business.
The fact is that the cost of education is borne by our masters, and isn’t it still true that who pays the piper calls the tune?
What Sid wasn’t told
Remember Sid? He was the creation of the ad-men in the Tories’ campaign to persuade your ordinary punter to buy shares in the privatised industries in the hope that ever-rising dividends and share prices would bring him to love the capitalist system.
Of course, Sid wasn’t told that owning shares in a company didn’t mean it would never sack him, and far from having a say in company policy he wouldn’t stand a chance against the big institutional investors. Now, the directors want shot of him altogether because he is a “costly pest” (Independent, 14 May).
Yes, lots of Sids did buy shares, about £ 1,000 worth on average, but mostly they flogged ’em, took the money and ran—in 1987 British Gas had 4.4 million shareholders but now has only 1.7 million.
Sid was only the front-man in yet another foolish attempt to achieve the impossible—making capitalism operate in the interest of the vast majority.
Hanson hits out
Lord Hanson, multi-millionaire turned social pundit has penned a blistering attack on “destructive journalism” in an article in the Spectator (16 May).
The noble lord writes “Destructive journalism fosters the believe that politicians routinely evade the truth and break their promises."
Politicians telling porkies? We are shocked at the suggestion. Broken promises? Tut, tut. What calumny.
But Hanson is really upset at what is written about businessmen: “They are castigated for seeking profit, damaging the environment and much else besides.”
As if businessmen would stoop so low, me lord!
The Death of the Welfare State (1996)
Supporters of capitalism have always denied the need for a fundamental change on the grounds that the system can take care of the poor through state help and welfare, now the welfare state, the sacred cow of reformists everywhere, is being attacked from every direction
Labour and the Tories have, it seems, moved closer together than ever with respect to their attitudes to the welfare state. On 8 May the Guardian reported Labour’s Chris Smith, shadow social security secretary, saying:
"Surely it is time to get away from the sterile battle lines of public and private. . . The principle must surely be that the state acts as guarantor of all provision, the regulator of all provision and the administrator of some. ”
How they intend to guarantee those provisions that they don’t provide, which will presumably have to be provided by individuals for themselves through insurance, is not made clear; in fact not a lot is made clear. What is crystal clear, though, is that Labour has abandoned its commitment to the welfare state along with Clause Four; the to-and-fro of reform and counter-reform between the major parties, such as it was, is over.
This to-and-fro was never, of course, a simple external relation between the parties but has been just as much a part of their internal make-up since the Second World War. Labour introduced the NHS but also introduced prescription charges and charges for dental and optical treatment; the Tories under Macmillan expanded the council house building programme; the current cause of much argument and agonising within Labour—child benefit—was introduced by the Tories in 1945 before Labour took office that same year. The case of child benefit is perhaps particularly interesting and informative, given the possibility of the next Labour government abolishing it for 16-18 year olds.
Family Allowance, the immediate forerunner of child benefit, was agreed in principle in 1943 by the wartime coalition government, and introduced by the Conservative government of May-July 1945, gaining the royal assent on 16 June 1945. The Labour movement was split on the issue, with many trade unions opposed to this reform—but why? Wasn't it to benefit working-class families? In fact, it wasn’t, anything but, the capitalist establishment wanted to introduce this reform because they felt that capitalism in the UK couldn’t afford not to. In 1940, Eleanor Rathbone MP, chair of the Family Endowment Society, argued in favour of the introduction of Family Allowance, saying that a “man with a wife and family is much less likely to act (revolutionarily) than one who has given society no such hostage”. Family Allowance was to be an incentive for working-class men to have dependent families—which could then be effectively held hostage by the state should he question capitalist authority. The ruling class also favoured the introduction of this “benefit" on a more basic level; the unions, hardly revolutionary' themselves, would have been less inclined to oppose it otherwise. The Tory MP L.S. Amery, again arguing in favour of this reform (in the Times, 14 January' 1941), said that Family Allowance would “afford a logical basis upon which a stand could be made against all further wage increases”. It was thus seen as a method of keeping wage bills down.
Who benefits?
If Labour now want to abolish child benefit for 16-18 year olds, is it in order to correct past mistakes, to somehow pass on a real benefit to working people after all? No chance. While they haven’t said exactly what they would spend the money on, they have gestured vaguely in the direction of education; but whose education would it be spent on? Many working-class families have, over the years, come to rely on child benefit, particularly to help support children in further education. If child benefit is abolished for precisely those of the age to go into further education, how will the less well off working-class families be able to afford to keep them in education? The simple answer is, they won’t. The only options for many will be for 16 and 17 year olds to try for places in the already over-subscribed YTS system (adding further to the already massive pool of cheap labour for bosses), to directly enter the employment market with little or no chance of a job and no benefits, or to leave home and beg on the streets. What a marvellous range of choice capitalism offers.
There is another option of course, at least for those families with at least one wage-earner—to fight the employers for higher wages to compensate for the money lost. But if this was thought even vaguely likely, Labour would have been more reluctant to have considered this particular cut. The last thing they want is to encourage class conflict, particularly under their own administration; but the relative weakness of the trade union movement at the present time makes an immediate escalation of class struggle unlikely.. this doesn’t mean that it won’t happen; workers may find themselves forced to fight by sheer material circumstances. But the point is that the ruling class, at least in the West, is being forced to take back reforms that have been previously granted and supposedly reformist parties are being forced to institute and administer the process.
On the one hand, capital feels it can no longer afford reforms, on the other, it also feels that it must take past reforms away and to bolster itself at the direct expense of the working class because of the relative weakness of the trade union movement. This is happening right across the west, with the temporary' exception of France where the government keeps trying to cut back on the welfare state but where workers’ solidarity has so far forced them to back down. They will keep trying, though, because French capital is no more isolated or “sovereign” than anywhere else. In other parts of the world, such as the Far East, home of what western capitalists habitually refer to, with some envy, as “tiger” (“dynamic market”—note the use of this term in labour’s new Clause 4) economies, there have often never been any reforms, even basic democratic ones, to roll back, while countries such as Vietnam refer to themselves as socialist while they introduce some of the most vicious, exploitative capitalist economic structures in the world. Global capitalism is precisely that; nobody is insulated from pressures on profits, which under capitalism is where sovereignty always really lies.
The to-and-fro of reform and anti-reform has always been the pattern to some extent, but things appear to have reached a state where reform has effectively lost its impossible fight. Reformist parties such as Labour have almost entirely capitulated; they were never going to introduce socialism anyway, having only ever been at most state capitalist parties, but now they have given up entirely. A never-ending pissing into the face of a gale has left them wet and weary and has exhausted what emancipatory desire they might once have had. All their desires now are masturbatory and egotistical, focused on nothing more than the plaudits of high office that mask a basic sterility.
There are few more frightening, deadly or apt symbols of the failure of reformism than the world-wide rise of tuberculosis. The steady and virtually inevitable erosion of welfare reforms has caused the number of cases of TB to rise steadily in the west over the last few years after most people had thought it had been effectively eradicated. In other parts of the world, of course, it had never gone away in the first place. A recent article on TB in the Guardian Weekend (27 April) put this point quite succinctly. In the 1970s there was a general optimism in the west that TB was effectively gone for ever, thanks to vaccine research and improved living conditions. But only in the west:
“Admittedly, no one country ever wiped it out completely. And in the third world, things remained not much better than they hail always been. But, hell, they were free to buy our superdrugs weren't they? ”
Well, no, they weren’t. They couldn’t afford them. Profits, as ever, came first. As they do with HIV research, even while HIV is forming what the same article designated a “devil’s alliance” with TB, not that it’s on the increase again in west. Who is most at risk from TB? The poorest and weakest members of society of course, the elderly homeless and immigrants shoved into cramped and poverty-stricken living conditions. But as the welfare state is dismantled, it seems highly likely that TB will spread further, and it will spread first through the poorer sections of the working class. As the Guardian article
again puts it:
". . . tuberculosis is universally recognised as the disease of poverty. And as such, it acts as a chillingly efficient barometer of the human physical condition. Today, that barometer has swung right off the scale throughout the third world, and at the same time it is beginning to rise in Britain and other advanced capitalist states. ”
Reformism has failed and how the reformist project is collapsing; as it does so, evils we thought were wiped out or at least under control, are coming back with increasing vengeance. TB is not just a disease, in the contemporary world it’s also a symptom of the failure of reformism within capitalism.
In the film Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard says of American hypocrisy in war: “We cut them in half with a machine gun and we give them a band-aid.” Reformism was always a similarly inadequate response to capitalism’s violence in the name of profit, trying to patch up the symptoms of the disease that capitalism itself is. Now, though, the ruling class can’t even afford to keep the first aid kit stocked up. It’s high time the rest of us realised the necessity of taking on and eradicating the disease itself.
Jonathan Clay
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