Darling turns the screw (2000)

The Greasy Pole Column from the August 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

When New Labour came to power, it was assumed by many that knee-jerk government was over. But as Labour climbed the greasy pole, "principles" and beards were quickly shed

The governments of John Major and Margaret Thatcher did not go down in history for creating a harmonious country free of poverty, stress and disease but they will be remembered for a few other things—handbagging opponents, rampant unemployment and sleaze. And in response to these things, knee jerk policies—the rushing out of a parliamentary bill or some other measure after some sudden, media-motivated panic about a problem which, until then, had existed for a long time unmolested by any attention from frantic ministers. The idea of the knee-jerk was to give the impression that the government was alert to the concerns of the voters and would act on them with all possible speed. What really happened was that polices were trotted out which quickly ran into trouble precisely because they were so badly designed and so had to be withdrawn or reshaped, to the acute embarrassment of their originators.

When Blair's Labour Party came bounding into power in May 1997, overflowing with youthful vigour and optimism and fresh ideas, a lot of their supporters assumed that knee-jerk was a thing of the past, with the rest of the nightmare of Tory rule. From then on every government action would be weightily considered, carefully worked out after proper consultation and responsibly presented. It was, they triumphantly assured each other, the only way of dealing with any problem. New Labour, New Sobriety.

Benefits 

Well it did not work out like that. Just like the Tories before them, the Blair government gives every sign that they are not in control of the situation, that they are in a continual state of panic, cobbling together policies as each emergency hits them in a desperate attempt to keep the voters' confidence until it is time for the next election. We have seen several examples of this recently, as things get worse and worse for the government. We have seen Jack Straw's infamous crackdown on asylum seekers and his blundering attempts to reduce the crime statistics. We have seen Tony Blair's astoundingly mad suggestion to give the police powers to drag public order offenders to the nearest cash dispenser to pay an on-the-spot fine.

Another knee-jerk which has caused the government some embarrassment is the attempt to suspend state benefits for people who breach community penalty orders. The government's original idea was that the matter should not be tested in the courts, where the breach would have to be proved. It would need only a probation officer or a community service officer to allege that there had been a breach and to summons the offender for the Department of Social Security to cut the person's benefit—entirely in the case of Job Seekers' Allowance and partly in the case of Income Support—for up to 26 weeks.

A predictable objection to this proposal was that to cut the benefit of a person who had no other means of support was more or less inviting them to go out and commit a few more crimes just to get by. The Tory peer Lord Windlesham who, as a past chairman of the Parole Board has some experience in the matter, condemned the measure as ". . . rooted in deep ignorance of deviant behaviour and the most effective ways of countering it". The Penal Affairs Consortium described the proposal as ". . . retrograde, counter-productive and bound to increase crime". Such arguments did not impress the government, who are among the small minority who, in face of overwhelming evidence, deny that there is a link between crime and the levels of poverty. Nor were they impressed when it was pointed out that cutting benefit would not affect offenders who are in employment and who could therefore breach their community orders without fearing a cut in their income. The lawyers' argument, that courts, and not some government agency, should deal with breaches of their own orders was similarly dismissed.

Darling's beard 

The person with the job of implementing the policy is Alistair Darling, who glories in the title of Secretary of State for Social Security. In fact there was a time when Darling had strong reservations about the proposal but these were not based on any principled objections, nor concerns about the welfare of people whose only income he wanted to take away. Darling was worried about which ministry was going to have to pay to administer the measure. When he lost that battle he enthusiastically supported the idea. Which is just what would have been expected of him for he is a man who might politely be described as a pragmatist but more realistically as an unprincipled, ambitious climber. Just how ambitious was illustrated in the matter of his beard which, when he first came onto the political scene, was almost as luxuriously dense as Frank Dobson's. Darling liked his beard; his wife liked it a lot. But in 1996, when he was opposition spokesman on Treasury and economic affairs, Darling was visited by some of Gordon Brown's heavies who tactfully informed him that the beard had to go. It did not, apparently, inspire trust in what is known as the financial community (the people who make profits and losses from useless fiddles like selling and buying currencies all day long) and so could work against Labour's interests. Of course Darling, who is rumoured to have once been a Trotskyist, could have told these people that he had not come into politics to butter up financiers, except that that was why he had come into it. So gradually, over a short period, the beard came off. So Darling kept his job. And got promoted.

And the "financial community" was very happy. "In opposition," said the Financial Times on 14 June 1997, "Mr. Darling was widely praised for his handling of his City brief . . ." The admiration for him did not flag after the election, when Darling got into government, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury: "He is about as unscary as they come . . . Just the sort of person the City could deal with . . ." rhapsodised one senior banker. "Flexible on regulation and willing to listen . . ." burbled a City chief executive, who may have been nervous about what regulation might do to his firm's profits. With those kinds of commendations, Darling was not likely to lose sleep over measures designed to drive desperate and alienated people even deeper into impoverishment and despair.

Contracts 

When the attacks began on the proposal to deny benefit to people who breach their community penalty orders Darling did not show up so well; his admirers in the City would have been disappointed. Apparently devoid of any valid argument to support the cuts, he fell back on a spurious one: “Surely it is not unreasonable to say to someone if they enter into an agreement they should stick to it? . . . We are all responsible for our actions. Society is built on a contract. There are rights, yes, but there are responsibilities too” (Guardian, 24 June 2000).

That argument may have pleased one or two Labour dummies (one noble lord moaned "Why can't these people toe the line when they know the issue with which they are faced?") but it did not answer the case. As a lawyer Darling should know about the desirability of a contract being between equals. This would not have been the case with many community penalties, which are imposed on an offender waiting trembling in the dock to hear their fate from a judge or a bench of magistrates sitting on high. Community penalties were designed by the law to be direct alternatives to imprisonment, which brought an element of coercion into the acceptance of the "contract". In any case the ex-solicitor Darling seemed to have overlooked the fact that the need for an offender to agree to a community penalty was abolished some years ago; courts can now make such an order whether the defendant agrees or not.

But enough of Darling as a lawyer. What about him as a politician? Society is indeed built on a contract—or rather this society is built on the "contract" between the class who monopolise the means of wealth production and distribution and the rest of us, who "contract" to be exploited in order to live—and to lubricate and maintain the whole system. This is another contract between unequals because the working class have the choice to submit to their own exploitation or live on, or below, the bread line. For example, as Darling himself has pointed out (Guardian Special Reports, 22 August 1999), of the 2000 children born every day in Britain a third will be born into what is officially known as poverty. Left as it is, he said, many of these children will not only be born poor but will die poor. That is a fair measure of the effects of the capitalist society which Darling and his party support.

Promises 

When parties like New Labour present themselves to us at elections, wheedling and cajoling, they offer to enter a contract with us: give them our votes and they will organise capitalism so that it behaves as if it were not a society of privilege and exploitation. For some reason this kind of appeal, from Tory as well as Labour, is seductively successful at one election after another. It was effective in 1997, when millions of people contracted with Labour over its promises, for example to provide " . . . better schools, better hospitals, better ways of tackling crime . . . one nation, with shared values and purpose . . ." The Labour Party did not say then that their part of the contract would involve the deeper humiliation of the more vulnerable members of the working class while they fawned on wealthy capitalists and "celebrities". They did not say that, in knee-jerk policies and many other ways, they would run British capitalism in a style distinguishable from the Tories only because, as in the case of Darling's benefits cut for offenders, it would be even harsher.

Ivan

“Commerce is more sovereign than the sovereign” (Karl Marx)

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog

While the Chancellor of the Exchequer was making his pre-budget announcement based on the mere hope that recovery would begin in 2010, Gordon Brown was addressing a meeting of the employers’ organisation, the CBI. If he stuck to pre-released text of his speech he said:

“We have seen in previous recessions how a failure to take action at the start of a downturn has increased both the length and depth of the recession. That was the mistake made in the recessions of the 1980s and early 1990s. To fail to act now would be not only a failure of economic policy, but a failure of leadership” (London Times, 24 October).

He was being rather selective in his choice of historical precedents. He forgot to mention what happened in the mid-1970s when the then Labour government did try, as his Labour government is trying today, to spend its was out of that recession – and failed. To such an extent that the Prime Minister James Callaghan had to confess to the 1976 Labour Party Conference:

“We used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you, in all candour, that that option no longer exists and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting bigger doses of inflation into the economy, followed by higher levels of unemployment” (London Times, 29 September 1976).

But Brown also forgot that an attempt was made to try the spend the way out of the 1980s recession. Not in Britain but in France, following the election as President of Labour-type reformist François Mitterrand in May 1981 and his party’s victory in the general election that followed in June. One of their election promises was to abandon the austerity approach of the previous conservative government in favour of:

“a relaunch of economic activity by an increase in the purchasing power of the most disadvantaged and so by a relaunch of consumer goods”.

Sound familiar?

And this is what they did, the first measure the new government took, in June 1981, being to increase the minimum wage, pensions, family allowance and housing benefits and to announce that 200,000 new government jobs were being created. Like Alistair Darling, the Minister of the Economy and Finance hoped to be saved by an early economic recovery:

“We are hoping to anticipate, but in a reasonable way, a recovery in the world economy”.

The world economy’s reply was to force a devaluation of the franc within four months, in October 1981. From then on it was downhill all the way. The following June the government had to devalue the franc a second time, the Prime Minister offering the pathetic explanation:

“the international recovery was not at the rendezvous”.

By October 1982 the Minister of Planning was admitting:

“We must not dream. The crisis we are going through is going to get worse”.

The Prime Minister continued with his inanities:

“The day will come when the recovery will be there”.

In December the Minister of the Economy and Finance confessed:

“It is not us who are the masters of the world. The world goes as it is, it is in the grip of forces that no one can master”.

Then after a third (yes!) devaluation in March 1983 he declared:

“We were banking on an economic growth of 3 percent, but the recovery didn’t come”.

In October 1984 the number of unemployed passed the peak of 3 million (it had only been 1.7 million when Mitterrand came into office).

This failure to shorten and lessen a slump by trying to relaunch popular spending is one of the most spectacular on record. No wonder Brown didn’t mention it.

Brown, Darling and the others may not be around to have to make the abject confessions of failure that Mitterrand’s ministers had to make. But they will have maintained Labour’s record of every Labour government leaving office with a greater number of unemployed than when they took over.

Adam Buick

When You’re Smiling . . . (2008)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is likely that a lot of people would be noticeably happier if Gordon Brown would stop smiling. Those startling, carefully orchestrated facial arrangements – inflicted on soldiers in Afghanistan looking after the oil supply lines, on Olympic athletes calculating how much their status as gold medalists will be worth when they get back home, on bewildered parents taking their offspring for a quite sea-front stroll in Southwold – are not a pretty sight and convince nobody that the Prime Minister is relaxed and happy with his ability to grapple British capitalism out of its present crisis. Less disturbing would be the funereal countenance recently so characteristic of him.

To take the question further – what is there for Gordon Brown to smile about? Among the “experts” who expect to be trusted to correctly prescribe remedies for the ills of capitalism, there is general agreement that the situation can only get worse and that we are about to be overwhelmed by a slump. A couple of months ago no less a person than the governor of the Bank of England warned us that “The nice years of the 60s are over” – an assessment which would have impressed only those whose memories of those years – the boom and slump economy, the Cuba missile crisis, the war in Vietnam – are anything but “nice”. More recently Alistair Darling, Brown’s choice to succeed him as Chancellor of the Exchequer rocked the governmental boat when he declared, in an interview with the Guardian, that “The economic times we are facing are arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years and I think it’s going to be more profound and long-lasting than people thought” and later, bemoaning Labour’s fall out of electoral favour “People are pissed off with us”.

Resilient
Chancellors of the Exchequer are not supposed to be so frank about what goes on in the economy, so that Darling’s comments were open to being dismissed as a “gaffe” – which was in fact an admission that his comments were nearer the truth than Brown’s persistent assertion that the government has so effectively strengthened the British economy that it will weather the storm – unless the voters are so ungrateful that they put in a Tory government to undo all his good work. His government, Brown said, is ”resilient” in the way it is dealing with the present problems (expect to hear more of “resilient” – it has all the hallmarks of a word essential to any Labour Party weasel with ambitions to slither up the greasy pole).

The best that Labour MPs can offer in this appalling situation is to grumble that it is all Brown’s fault; get rid of him, by whatever means, and things will get better. The most recent of these was, notably, the discarded, embittered ex-Home Secretary Charles Clarke. The intellectual contortions required in this come easily to the practised amnesiacs on the Labour benches but we should remember that it is not very long ago that these same representatives of the people were clamourous in their praise of Brown as the greatest Chancellor of the Exchequer in history. This was the leader whose superhuman powers had constructed an economy virtually free of unemployment, with an uninflatable price structure and interest rates so low that thousands were tempted to leap into the void of unaffordable mortgages. Now that those happy delusions have been blown away by cruel reality Labour is turning to the equally bankrupt notion that their party’s salvation lies in ridding itself of Brown. Adjustments like that are effective conditioning to the dishonesty inherent in trying to run British capitalism. The problem is that no leader can be any more successful, can cook the books, deny reality and deceive the voting people, any more effectively.

Miliband
This will not prevent them persisting in their endless search for the unobtainable. And while they do this, each one will harbour, somewhere in their feverish self-assessment, the ambition that they are the ideal leader the party has been waiting for – the one with the insight and the power to succeed where historically everyone else has failed. For their own peace of mind, it must be hoped that these delusions will not endure beyond one or two sleepless nights. David Miliband, possibly enjoying in his abrupt promotion to the heady, if cynically seamy, job of Foreign Secretary, recently let it be known that he is ready to accept the crown. In an article in the Guardian he began in the pose as a fearless confronter of reality – although perhaps unsettling more stubbornly myopic Labour supporters– with the admission that “The odds are against us, no question” but then mollified those he had disturbed with a generous measure of re-assuring platitudes: “Every member of the Labour party carries with them the simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, and not the few” and later he expanded on this platitude with some more “…the challenge to society – to build a genuine sense of belonging and responsibility on the back of greater protection from outside risks and greater control of local issues”. Perhaps, in spite of this, Miliband will succeed to the leadership. But it will not take long for the surge of capitalist society to expose him as just another discredited politician.

This doleful procession of ecstatic expectations followed by rumbling doubts then exposure and rejection, seems to feed on a self-perpetuating energy originating in an apparently limitless capacity for working-class self-deception. There have been many victims of this, of eminent leaders fallen into the dustbin of history. Gordon Brown looks like being only the latest in this dismal line. How long can he keep smiling?

Ivan