Caught In The Act: Slogans (1991)

The Caught In The Act Column from the November 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Slogans

Connoisseurs of political slogans will have more than their fill during the long, wearying months leading up to the next general election. When it is all over they may well need a period of abstinence, to recover from gorging themselves on the concentrated nonsense poured forth from the fertile minds of the slogan-composers.

Labour and the Liberals, as the parties out of power, will be hoping the voters will fall for an appeal to a brighter future. The Liberal Democrats have already settled on Changing Britain For Good and in the last election Labour went down to defeat when the voters did not accept their invitation to Meet The Challenge—Make the Change. On the other hand the Tories will be trying to scare us with the prospect of a Labour government wrecking the prosperity they have so carefully organised on our behalf, as they did in 1959 with Life’s Better Under the Conservatives, Don’t Let Labour Ruin It and at the last election when they warned us Britain Is Great Again— Don’t Let Labour Wreck It. This last kind of slogan may not appeal to the unemployed, the homeless or social security claimants fretting over their meagre benefits but never mind.

Patriotism will certainly feature in the slogans for nothing goes down better with the voters than stimulating their pride in this grand old, polluted, crime- ridden, poverty-stricken country of ours. In 1950 the Labour Party, which was once thought to be internationalist, assured the voters that Labour Believes in Britain; in 1959 they startled the propertyless working class with Britain Belongs To You (it didn’t then and it doesn’t now) and in 1974 Britain Will Win With Labour which by 1987 had been slashed to Britain Will Win. Of course the Tories are not to be left out when it comes to patriotism; in 1974 they promised Firm Action For A Fair Britain and later that year Putting Britain First.

It is unlikely that any of the 1992 slogans will be more memorable than Labour’s battle cry of 1945—Let Us Face the Future, which was not so much an encouragement to look ahead as to divert attention from the embarrassments of their past. In 1970 the Tories under Ted Heath promised Action Not Words, by which they did not mean the kind of government policies which brought about the futile struggle with the miners and the inertia of the three-day week.

But this is all good clean fun and it keeps the advertising and media people happily busy. The people who should worry are those in the sloganeers’ sights, whose intelligence is so grievously insulted by their being the target of so much rubbish but who react in the only way the politicians understand—with their votes.

The voters will doubtless make their choice, either way, for callous Kinnock or malevolent Major. After the election everyone—or almost everyone—will be convinced that by choosing one or the other they have done something significant.

In fact whoever is in charge of capitalism, and whatever their personality, it makes no difference to how the system operates nor to its effect on its people. To change the world in any fundamental and permanent way we need to dispense with leaders and instead to rely on ourselves and our ability to run the world in our own interests.

Between the Lines

Watching Margaret Thatcher being cheered ecstatically—a six minute orgasmic ovation by the assembled Tories, to be precise—was an unnerving experience. I had watched leaders being wildly cheered for saying absolutely nothing on previous occasions, but in those eases their lips were clearly moving and audible world-like phrases were being emitted. Watching the Thatcher silence on BBCl’s Conservative Party conference coverage (Tuesday, 8 October, 2pm) offered a short flash of what it might have been like to have seen Stalin sit at an opera and have all the party hacks watch him suck his toffees while the performers sang to themselves. Mind you, with John Major as the Tory Pavarotti, watching Thatcher suck a mouth ulcer would be exciting alternative viewing.

At the event advertised as a Labour Party conference—in fact, a stage show for viewers with votes but no thoughts—the assembled players sang "We Are The Champions of the World" (BBC2, 4 October, 4pm). These lyrics were more Hitler than Stalin; the song by Queen, who play to chanting mobs in football stadiums, was one of the more embarrassing pieces of political indignity that Labour has stooped to in its bid to convince the electorate that it is harmless and toothless. In this respect, Roy Hattersley sang particularly well, winning second prize in the contest for the most foolish singing performance of the week. First prize must go to Kinnock for his leading part in this year’s Gang Show when he led a hall-full of pathetic-looking Labourites in a pathetic-sounding rendition of "We Shall overcome—Some Day". Kinnock neglected to sing the obscure fifteenth verse of this hymn which adds that unless "we" overcome next time round, i. e. the next election, there will be endless daggers heading for the back of the smiling leader. But that was what everyone was thinking as they underwent this humiliating televisual ritual.

By contrast, there was something quite cute about Eugène Terre Blanche, the Leader of the South African AWB. Nick Broomfield’s superb documentary The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (C4, Monday 7 October, 10,30pm) did not waste its time on the easy job of highlighting the foulness of the racist ruffians of this little outfit. Instead, the programme concentrated on the silliness of the AWB Leader (known to his followers as The Leader) and the sad way in which workers like The Leader’s driver JP and his soppy wife Anita were taken in by Terre Blanche’s amateur dramatic bid to become the new Boer Fuhrer. Terre Blanche showed himself to be a boorish Boer: arrogant, thuggish and with the kind of delusions of grandeur which makes some people imagine that they alone will determine the outcome of history. Hitler was never interviewed by Jeremy Paxman and exposed as a dopey little twit (there was no Newsnight in those days, but only Charlie Chaplin who carried out the same mission in The Great Dictator), but Terre Blanche was interviewed by Broomfield; it was like a smiling cat "interviewing" a mouse with a low IQ.

Terre Blanche claims to represent "the master race"; Kinnock claims to be a "democratic socialist" (what exactly is an undemocratic socialist? A non-socialist); and Major claims to stand for a "classless society". They are each as big liars as the next one. The Socialist Party is hostile to the lot of them.

Ivan

Blogger's Note:

In the original Standard this column was actually unsigned but Caught In The Act was Ivan's (Ralph Critchfield's) column, so I presume it was just a mistake at the printers that month. It happens.

Correspondence: Could the workers capture the House of Commons? (1908)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Could the workers capture the House of Commons?

Dear Comrade,—Are we justified in assuming that the working class, being the majority of the electors, could return a majority of Socialists to the House of Commons ? I am at present rather dubious on this point, having seen some figures in the “Daily Mail Year Book” for 1908, which seem to disprove the contention that the working class have the power to elect a Socialist majority. For instance, Kilkenny has 1,584 electors and returns one M.P. while Wandsworth has 34,461 and only returns one M.P. The Romford Division of Essex returns but one M.P. and has an electorate numbering 47,614, and Newcastle, with 37,417 voters returns two M.P’s.

Let us imagine an election to have taken place. A Conservative is returned for Kilkenny with 1,000 votes, and a Socialist is returned for Romford Division with 30,000 votes. We see here one Conservative and one Socialist returned, but the Conservative vote is only one-thirtieth that of the Socialist.

I should certainly think that the majority of the voters in divisions with a large electorate are proletarian, as it is only the workers who are found crowded together, while those divisions with a small electorate, which I believe are usually country divisions, would be mostly bourgeois.

In 1886 the Unionists were in a minority of 65,000 votes, yet they had a majority of 104 seats. We find a similar thing in Germany. The Social Democrats polled 3,251,000 votes and obtained 43 seats, while the Centre Party obtained 105 seats and polled only 2,247,000 votes.

I have written this letter in the hope that it may produce a discussion that will dispel these doubts from my mind.—Yours fraternally,

H. A. Young.

Dec. 8th, 1907.

Greasy Pole: Naming the day (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

It will not be long now before Downing Street goes onto Red Alert. All leave will be cancelled for the focus groupies, the pollsters and the spin doctors, as it is for the police when some great public disorder is in the offing. Come the First of May next year Labour will have been in power for four of the allotted five years, which means that Blair and his hangers-on must soon give serious attention to the date of the next election.

Whichever day they settle on and whatever anguish they go through in the process it will all be considered to have been worthwhile because there is general agreement that the timing of an election is vital to the eventual outcome. Since the party which is in power chooses the date they seem to have an overwhelming advantage; but if it were that simple no ruling party would ever lose an election. In fact the choice of date is sometimes given such importance that a prime minister who apparently loses power because they chose wrongly can expect that their days as leader are numbered.

Callaghan 

This is what happened to Jim Callaghan and John Major. Callaghan was under a lot of pressure to call an election in the Autumn of 1978 (he teased the Labour conference that year by singing a song about not being able to make up your mind) but he chose to wait until the following Spring and these few months turned out to be the Winter of Discontent. This was probably the final nail in Labour’s coffin but it is debatable whether their experience of government at that time was so happy and fulfilling that they should want to prolong it by a crafty choice of election day. They could hardly have claimed to be enjoying themselves, after episodes like the exposure of Wilson as a shoddy manipulator, Denis Healey’s persistent battle to hold down wages, the internal mumblings which eventually threw up the Gang of Four and the Social Democratic Party . . . Callaghan himself, who was a canny political operator, took the view that there had been what he called a “sea change” and there was nothing the Labour could do—including a clever selection of election day—about it. The voters had tried Labour government again, they had seen all too clearly that it could not live up to its promises so they felt like a change. In the usual sclerotic process of political preference, the voters decided that if they didn’t like Labour the only other possible course was to vote for a Conservative government.

Foot

It is unlikely that when Callaghan talked about a sea change he expected it to last for almost twenty years. Even worse for the Labour Party—during all that time there was only one election—in 1992—when they might seriously have dared to hope that their day was about to dawn again. In the first election after the defeat of the Callaghan government they presented a manifesto condemned by one of their leaders as “the longest suicide note in history”. And in case anyone thought they were serious about winning the election they chose Michael Foot, who as a vote-loser was in a class of his own, as their leader. In 1987, having elected Neil Kinnock as leader, in the hope that he would appeal to voters as the antithesis of Michael Foot, they lost again because it would have taken more than a clumsy windbag to overcome the entrenched Tory advantage. But in 1992 they seemed to think they had a real chance. They remembered the recent by-election results, they looked at the public opinion polls, they sighed with relief that the public opinion polls, they sighed with relief that the seemingly invincible Thatcher had been replaced by grey, whining John Major. They overlooked the fact that there was still too much ground to make up from the battering they had received in 1983. When he notched up his second successive defeat Kinnock knew it was time to go, to adopt failed the failed politicians’ guise of a wise, benign statesman and look around for one of those lucrative jobs they so easily drop into.

1997

By 1997 Labour had made up all that ground, and quite a but more, with not a little help from the Tories. There was, of course, the rampant sleaze among their MPs (or rather, as sleaze seems a way of life in the Palace of Westminster, the exotic exposure of it by Mohammed Al Fayed, who knows a thing or two about it himself). There was the open war over Europe, driven by the kind of bitterness which had John Major calling some of his most prominent ministers “bastards” and was so unnerving to any Tory who still thought that loyalty was their party’s secret weapon. There was the madness of John Redwood, Michael Portillo and his SAS speech, Ann Widdecombe justifying the shackling of women prisoners when they were in labour . . . Like 1979, it was a time of sea change. It was the Tories who were unelectable and Labour the party trusted to make all the voters’ dreams come true.

The fact that the years since 1997 have had the usual nightmare episodes will be weighing heavily with Blair as he ponders the date when he allows the working class to show how they judge his government. So far the government have not been hit by a recession, which allows them to claim to be controlling the economy through the stringent application of unusually perceptive policies. Blair must also be hoping that Jack Straw’s ambition to go down in history as a more grotesque version of Michael Howard will somehow stop people breaking the law. He will pray that there will be no more media-exciting scandals like Bernie Ecclestone and Formula One tobacco advertising, Lord Irvine and his expensive taste in furniture and wallpaper, Peter Mandelson and his fastidious needs in housing.

Power 

In all the excitement and speculation there will be very little attention given to the calculated cynicism implicit in the assumption that the date of an election will significantly affect its outcome. What does it say about how the working class regard their power to bring about the necessary basic, radical change in society, that they may vote Labour in December and Tory in May? That votes are cast, not in the actual experience of what capitalism does to people and how its political parties are unable to change things, but on how and when those parties pitch their appeal? What does it say about the parties who devote so much effort to this whole sordid process? Well, come next May, or whenever, it will be true to answer those questions in the only way the pollsters, spin doctors and focus groupies understand.

Ivan.

2005 General Election: Vote Effective – Vote Alternative (2005)

From the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In May 2005, this is the most important general election ever. Or was that in 2001? Or in 1997? Or 1987? The big political parties want to convince us about this because we may then be persuaded to vote for one or other of them, under the impression that by choosing between them we are making a difference to this social system. Vote for this party and our future is secure; vote for the other party and we put everything at risk. Here, for example, is Neil Kinnock in 1987:

  “Every election is a time of decision. But this General Election … faces the British people with choices more sharp than at any time in the past fifty years”. 

To which the “British people” sharply responded by emphatically rejecting Kinnock and his party.

Here is John Major in 1997: 

  “British people now have the opportunity of a prosperous future. But that prosperity cannot be taken for granted…  If we relax for one moment, our hard won success will slip away again”. 

By “relaxing” Major meant voting for the Labour Party, which was what the “British people” did, ensuring that Major himself slipped away into well-merited obscurity. Finally, here is Blair in 2001:

  “This general election is in many ways even more important than the last…Now is the chance to build the future properly…”

Blair did not say why, after four years of Labour government, the future had still not been built “properly” but he obviously did not need to elaborate in that way because the electorate returned his party to power by a hefty margin. So how are things now, after the threats and the promises? Whether in gratitude or fear, the workers will vote for capitalism again with the only uncertainty the pattern of their voting.

Blair and Howard

One factor which is likely to affect that pattern is the developing awareness that there is no significant difference between the Labour Party and the Tories. Because of this, solid Labour supporters who helped elect Blair in 1997 and 2001 now feel themselves disfranchised. Another factor is that, like so many of his predecessors, Blair has been exposed as a trickster and a liar, so that he is no longer the easeful vote harvester he once was.

On the other side, Michael Howard is looking more and more like a man who is desperately trying to throw off his past; for example wearing his customary oily smirk he urged us on TV to “Let the sunshine break through the clouds of disappointment we all feel”. The problem for Howard is that his time as a Tory minister is not remembered for being at all sunny.  As Home Secretary he was in the habit of using his time at the rostrum in Tory conferences to excite the ugliest of prejudices – and not just about crime. In this election, as Tory leader he has tried to exploit racist neuroses about immigration by promising to establish a Border Control Police, forgetting the time in the 1990s when, according to the Public and Commercial Services Union, he actually hampered immigration controls by slapping on a recruitment freeze. Howard has told a heart-wrenching story about his mother-in-law dying of an infection she picked up as a hospital patient but during the last Conservative governments all was not well with hospitals for there was a shortage of nurses and doctors and waiting lists – for anyone unable to afford anything better – were a problem then as they are now. Schools also suffered, being cut back on their teachers, books and other equipment. The last Tory government, under John Major, descended into such chaos that  when they were defeated in 1997 it was almost an act of mercy by the voters.

The economy

However those who voted in the Blair governments have no more cause for satisfaction. There have been Labour Home Secretaries who have exceeded Howard in their punitive response to those crimes which capitalism places outside the law. A succession of Criminal Justice Acts has tightened the screw on offenders while nourishing the ambition of those Home Secretaries to become party leader.

Detention – imprisonment – without trial, or even being told the reasons for being in prison, has become established. Blair’s sound bite about being tough on crime and on the causes of crime has been discredited as the causes of crime – poverty, stress, alienation, social disability – remain. Blair’s claims that under his government the British economy has been in controlled health have been exposed by the collapse of the Rover car company. The company was losing millions of pounds and cars are not manufactured in order to provide the workers with a wage stable enough for them to make assumptions about their future. The bottom line – to use an irritating, although apposite, phrase – is that if there is no profit there is no employment, even if that mean thousands of workers being transferred from a just tolerable level of poverty to one of abject degradation. That is the basis on which capitalism organises its wealth production and no government can affect it.

Alternative

Blair’s popularity has been seriously eroded by the exposure of his lies over the causes of the war in Iraq. But this was by no means the only example of a politician lying because none of them could readily admit to their impotence to control the events of capitalism. For them the only way out is through deception, at times to the extent that they begin to believe their own lies – as, it is rumoured, is the case with Blair. What this amounts to is that there is a basic unity among the parties which stand for the continuance of capitalism, which can only be solidified by every vote for those parties. But there is no need to waste the vote in that way for we have the means of basically changing society so as to eliminate the problems which now disfigure it.

The Socialist Party is standing alone as a party which aims at the capture of political power by the  working class, to abolish capitalism and replace it with a society based on common ownership of wealth production and distribution and making that wealth freely available to everyone. That is Socialism – the only alternative to capitalism and its political parties.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Naming the Day (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Will he, or won’t he? Should he, or shouldn’t he? Can he or can’t he? All over the country millions of people will be asking these questions, agonising in sympathy with John Major as he grapples with a historically vital dilemma. Should he call a general election in the near future—this summer, for example—or should he wait until his government has run its full term in 1997?

Advice for him will come thick and fast, to Downing Street, Chequers, Huntingdon or wherever he may be. Some of it will doubtlessly come from Tory MPs who sit nervously on vulnerable majorities. There will be much reference to precedent—to Wilson’s misplaced confidence in 1970, Heath’s misreading of the political situation in 1974, Callaghan leaving it late in 1979 . . .  All of this will have a common theme. The timing of an election is all-important, in fact it can make the difference between winning and losing. People who vote are so fragile in their political knowledge, have such puny memories, are so pliant in their intentions, that they can be easily induced by promises and deceptions into changing their minds about which way they vote. So with a bit of clever calculation, some well-crafted bribes and a canny sense of timing, any government can win its way back to power—again and again and again. Even a government like John Major’s, which day-after-day is exposed for its impotence and cynicism and contempt for the workers.

Interest rates
For example the Chancellor of the Exchequer has recently announced some reductions in the base rate—the last one on 1 January. This is seen as good news, as a promise that soon the economy will boom, unemployment will reduce, everyone will be happier and more prosperous. There is no factual reason for workers to think like that; reality is that whether interest rates are high or low has no significant effect on our living standards.

But reducing base rates is seen as good news for the economy and so for people's welfare and so for the Tory Party. As the Guardian put it: "the intense political pressure on the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, to boost the government’s fortunes was underlined yesterday when he brushed aside Bank of England misgivings and cut interest rates for the second successive month.” Bank of England governor Eddie George is, said the Guardian, ". . .  plainly wary that it is the political timetable, of an election in the next 15 months, which is governing the Chancellor's monetary stance . . ." Another one to be wary was Labour's shadow chancellor Gordon Brown, who sulkily tried to play down the change in the rate. In fact, whichever side of this bogus argument they took, both Labour and Conservative were agreed that there are votes in the matter of interest rates and they both want to grab as many of them as they can.

Falkland factor
What is important about this bogus argument is what it tells us about how the parties of capitalism regard elections and the people who vote in them and how to manipulate the whole timing to their own advantage. The government of the day treats an election as a time to try to divert attention away from its obvious failure to do anything about the problems characteristic of capitalist society and towards what it represents as its successes That is why the government tries so hard to convince us that people who are suffering the more extreme poverty do so because of some intrinsic personal fallibility while at the same time they tell us about how many fraudulent claimants of state benefits their investigators have uncovered. That is why in 1983 the Thatcher government submerged the memories of the problems they met in 1981 in a neurotic, reactionary hysteria as Thatcher handbagging the Argentinians. (Of course at the time she did get some help from the Labour Party with its splits and its election of Michael Foot as leader . . .)

By the same token whenever Tory ministers review conditions in Britain in 1996 they do so on the assumption that all reasonable people know things are getting better and better, everyone getting more prosperous, more healthy, more secure. Crime is falling day-by-day. If we believe enough of this often enough the Tories will be encouraged to give us a chance to show how grateful we are for all they have done for us by voting for them in an election.

Stress
Except that it is not quite like that. For one thing Britain is fast gaining a reputation as the sweatshop of Europe, as workers are forced to put in longer hours under the stress of unemployment. This kind of pressure produces its own problems. apart from physical illness such as cancer and heart disease (according to the Health and Safety Executive, stress-related sickness results in 90 million days absence from work annually). There is also a human cost, in mental breakdown, broken families and. in some cases, suicide.

None of this will be highlighted by Major, when he finally tells us the date of the election. Neither will he address the question of why, if his government had been so successful, he has to worry about the timing of the election. Why can’t he just leave the success to speak for itself and let his government stay in power for its full term, confident that the success will bring in the votes?

Perhaps he knows how impotent his government—like any other—really is to affect the course of capitalism and it does to the lives of human beings. Perhaps he knows that the timing of elections is a massive exercise in cynicism, which reveals the contempt which capitalism’s parties have for the workers and the support they regularly give to this social system. There is an effective response this. The voters—the working class—can realise the power they hold to radically change society, to make parties like Labour and Conservative a sordid irrelevance. If that happens John Major will be relieved of the stress of choosing a date for polling, like a gambler hoping he’s on a lucky streak.

Ivan 

Running Commentary: Who’s a Beastie Boy, then? (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the July 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who’s a Beastie Boy, then?

Their name was a warning of what to expect but there was still much outraged surprise when the American pop group the Beastie Boys flew into Britain some weeks ago on a jet stream of invective. The fame which preceded them was based on incidents such as their warmly greeting some disabled members of their audience as "fucking cripples". They went on to perform at "concerts" which featured a predictable uproar.

At an event in Brixton there was something akin to a minor riot. In Liverpool some of the audience tore up seating for missiles to add to the cans of beer which were flying backwards and forwards. When the group left the stage tear gas was fired into the crowd. Presumably some music (actually the Beastie Boys specialise in "rapping", or talking to a rhythm) was played at some point in these proceedings.

As a result the leader of the group. Adam Horowitz, was charged with causing grievous bodily harm to a girl in the audience who was said to have been on the receiving end of a can of beer which he threw.

Their leader's court appearance was an ideal opportunity for the group to grab the headlines again in a show of what incorrigible. fearless rebels they are. They might, for example, have described the magistrates as "fucking geriatrics" or something similar. But it was not to be; the case was notable for a distinct absence of reckless defiance. Horowitz's solicitor told the court that he is not an outrageous anarchist but a good boy who is close to his father (who is an eminent film producer); their lives are "intertwined". The group's reputation for madness and mayhem is no more than an image.

It is not uncommon for some entertainers — musicians, comedians, boxers, tennis players among them — to grow fat on the proceeds of a reputation for abusive and disruptive behaviour. Sometimes this is deliberately created by a cynical publicity machine. While in some cases a genuine ability may lurk behind this nonsense, it is not unknown for a talentless void to be covered by such outrageous, publicity-obsessed gimmickry. A lot of people were anxious to pay to watch John McEnroe (who had real talent) play tennis in the hope of seeing Super Brat get his comeuppance. A lot of people buy newspapers to thrill with anger at the latest excesses of groups like the Beastie Boys, whose talents are not yet as apparent as McEnroe's.

It all expresses the appalling decadence of capitalism, where cash is king and whatever makes money, however execrable it may be, has to be good.


Fast food philosophy

The Wimpy burger chain are clinching a deal with Bulgaria to set up trash-food joints in that Russian-bloc country. Wimpy's marketing director, Trevor Barnes, said on BBC Radio Four (Friday 20 March) that he wanted to "put across a philosophy" in the famous buns.

A fascinating example of metaphysics here — the trans-substantiation of hamburgers into philosophy. Better watch it, the next time you tuck into a Wimpy (if you can bear to, that is): strange things may begin to happen inside your stomach and brain.

They already have, obviously, inside Trevor Barnes's. . . .


Nostalgia

The fortyish middle-management people with 1.8 children, a Volvo and a building society to support, yearn for those balmy student days of '68 when they took part every week in the demonstrations intended to revolutionise society. Now, when they read the Sunday heavies, the colour supplements are full of nostalgia — forties furniture, fifties fashion, sixties music. Victorian values, all carefully packaged, sanitised, made desirable. There's money in nostalgia.

Stand in a Post Office queue when the pittance called a pension is being collected by someone whose life has unwittingly been devoted to the continuation of capitalism. Ask them about the good old days. Listen as they recount stories of hardship and poverty. Finally they tell you. with pride, “Everyone was happier then". Through NHS rose-tinted spectacles, they remember balls of whitewash, the sixty-hour week (if you were lucky enough to have a job), fighting for their (?) country and being skint three days after pay-day.

SuperMac said, we'd never had it so good. Did he mean us? As a member of the producing but non-possessing working class, you've never had it at all. Every politician both before and since has endeavoured to con the working class that the capitalist system of society is the only one capable of fulfilling the workers' aspirations. But if these are the good times we'll all back on tomorrow, the future appears quite bleak. Colour television sets, 200 shares in British Telecom and Ford Fiestas are a poor panacea for the ills of the working class.

Poverty, homelessness, wage slavery, making do with second best, are these the things that we want to be nostalgic about? Forget about the past, look to the future. Look to Socialism.


Business as usual

Obviously assuming that no one would object to such an assault on their visual senses, a company called Henderson Administration took advantage of the election furore to publish an advert showing photographs of every prime minister since Ramsay MacDonald in 1934.

It was an uncomforting sight. Baldwin in his bowler hat and wing collar; Chamberlain looking stubborn; Attlee smiling diffidently; Eden earnestly handsome; Callaghan grumpy; Thatcher strong and noble. . . .

"Since our formation in 1934" said the advert. "We've seen 21 general elections and 12 Prime Ministers". Through all that time — bull and beer markets, war and peace. Henderson has succeeded and has grown. Now it describes itself as one of the largest "independent" (whatever that may mean) investment management firms in Great Britain, organising over £7 billion worth of investments.

Now this is very illuminating. A general election is — every one of those 21 was — an opportunity for the capitalist political parties to make extravagant claims about the blissful progress which would follow their return to power and then to warn us about the awful consequences of victory for their opponents. To elect the other side, they have asserted, is to risk a rapid descent into ruin and decay.

Since Ramsay MacDonald's nominally National administration the people of this country have experienced Conservative, Coalition and Labour government. They have tried them all. While all this has been happening, through all the changes, amid the parties' promises and threats, the normal, essential business of capitalism has carried on. Money has been invested; workers have been exploited; fortunes have been amassed; a small class of social parasites has kept its privileged, secure, opulent position.

The small segment of British history contained in that advert told us that anyone who voted on the assumption that they were making a choice about society was wrong. They were wasting their time and their vote. Whatever the parties called it — the Tories with their people's capitalism, the Labour party with their "socialism" — the social system remained the same. Whoever was prime minister capitalism continued with all its problems of repression, war, poverty, famine, disease.. . .

Come the next election the same advert could well reappear, with another photograph as the only difference. The smug message, on behalf of the ruling class to the working class voters, will be the same. We're doing very nicely, thanks for keeping it that way.

A General Election in 1938? (1938)

From the February 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Herbert Morrison, leader of the London Labour Party, has been prophesying a General Election in 1938. He may possibly have inside information about the intentions of the Conservative Party, but this is hardly likely. More probably, as far as Mr. Morrison is concerned, it is no more than a means of keeping his own party on the alert and of disturbing the confidence of the supporters of the Government. It is extremely unlikely that the Conservative Caucus has yet made any decision about an election. All the same, political correspondents, who are well-informed about the way influential Conservative circles are thinking, are more and more discussing the likelihood of an appeal to the country not later than the autumn. One or two whose opinions are worth taking notice of say confidently that it is a certainty, and that the only reason for delaying it is the hope of a settlement with Germany and Italy which will make it easier for the Government to win.

There is reason to believe that the forecasts of an early election are to be relied upon, not because of their authenticity but because that is undoubtedly the way the wind is blowing just now.

Consider the position of the Government. They were elected in 1931 to rescue the country from the economic crisis, and re-elected in 1935 because they claimed they were well on the road to permanent prosperity. Now they say that prosperity is here, and that we shall never have a crisis again. But if the working class cannot believe in the prosperity, the Cabinet Ministers do not believe in their own talk of “never again." Already unemployment, after declining steadily for about five years, has taken a sudden turn for the worse. The amount of unemployment is now down to approximately the level of the last peak of “prosperity," 1929, but shows ominous signs of climbing again. And when the Cabinet and the captains of industry shout in unison that prosperity is here for good they do not believe it. They begin to have uncomfortable visions of a general election at the normal date, 1940, coinciding with another considerable trade depression. What more natural than that they should seek to escape that misfortune by having an election now and thus putting themselves in office for another five years until 1943? Perhaps by 1943 the inevitable slump will again have receded ? Or, alternatively, there is the chance of letting the Labour Party carry the baby again, as in 1929-1931.

If that is how the Ministers' minds are working, what of the Labour Party? They may reasonably hope that an election in 1940 would send them back in increased numbers if depression has arrived, and they can denounce the Tories for failing to ward off an “economic blizzard." But what a spectacle of the unreality of capitalist politics! In 1929 we were at a peak of capitalist prosperity, but hardly anyone realised it. Instead of seeing that a slump was in prospect the childlike innocents of the Labour Party fought and won an election on a promise to abolish unemployment, and appointed three very special unemployment commissioners to do the job within the framework of the capitalist system. Up came the normal economic blizzard, unemployment rose to a record height, and the first casualties were the three special Commissioners (Thomas, Mosley, Lansbury), two of whom are now outside the Labour Party and the third highly critical of its policy. The rest of the Party are now not a bit abashed and are prepared to offer themselves again as solvers of unemployment and preventers of crises. Only this time, profiting by their past experience, they hope to launch their Government when trade is down and likely to go up, rather than at the top of the tide.

The one changed circumstance that both Government and Opposition can discover is that the currency is now “off the gold standard." Spokesmen in both camps proclaimed in 1931 that this difference was vital and that it alone would forever prevent a return to crises and depression. Already events have shown that the expansion and contraction of capitalist industry goes its normal way, on or off the gold standard—Socialists, of course, pointed this out in 1931. An election in 1938, brought about by the Government to forestall a big increase of unemployment, would therefore find the Labour Party—itself unable to prevent the last depression—trying to prove that the way to prevent crises is to be off the gold standard, and at the same time trying to prove that this had not prevented the coming slump!

The moral for Socialists is obvious. It is our task to expose both groups and drive home the lesson that Socialism is the only way to cure unemployment and the rest of the evil effects of capitalism.

P. S.

Never mind the ballots (2015)

Book Review from the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box'. Edited by Philip Cowley and Robert Ford. Biteback Publishing. £14.99

With the General Election fast approaching, expect a slew of books on this theme. Subtitled ‘50 Things You Need to Know About British Elections’, this is one of the first. The chapters are short (typically four or five pages) and are written in an accessible style by a variety of UK political scientists and polling gurus. Many of the familiar names are there: Rallings and Thrasher, John Curtice, David Denver et al.

Chapters range from analyzing tactical voting, identifying who really votes UKIP, the influence of social class on voting, and why ethnic minorities still tend to vote Labour. There is lots of interest here, though it is a shame the publishers decided they had to try to spice things up further by including some embarrassingly weak chapters by staff at YouGov about sex and politics (eg the alleged sexual preferences and fantasies of different party supporters).

Many of the arguments put forward build on previous research projects like the British Election Study that have uncovered an increasingly complex range of voting behaviour in the UK. This includes large numbers of people voting for split tickets, ie voting for different parties on the same election day, such as when a General Election and local elections coincide. It also involves a decline in voting based on class factors as defined by the sociologists, though with a noticeable rise in recent decades of geographical alignment behind parties – most obviously Labour in Wales, Scotland and the North of England, and the Tories in the South and East. This geographical ‘flocking together’ occurs even when social class, housing and other factors have been accounted for. Interestingly, it would also appear that the prevailing underpinning values of voters in Wales and Scotland, for instance, are not that different on most issues to those of people in parts of the UK that tend to vote Conservative.

In sociological terms, the voters with the most traditional ‘working class’ profiles tend now to disproportionately vote UKIP when they vote at all (with a particular concentration of UKIP support among elderly white men who are – or were – blue-collar workers who had left school at 16 or younger). By contrast, Labour now gets almost as much support in percentage terms from the top fifth of income earners in society as it does from the bottom fifth. Indeed, this finding was reflected in surveys at the last couple of general elections where it was found that Labour attracted noticeably more support from readers of the Financial Times than it did of the Express, with the Labour percentage of FT readers being not too far below those of the Sun.

In many ways it appears that considerable numbers of voters are now shopping in the proverbial postmodern supermarket where parties appear like clothes brands that are either trusted or tarnished. What perhaps doesn’t come out as strongly here as it might though is that this is not just a reflection of voters clustering towards the political centre, but of parties doing this too. Indeed, arguably the most noticeable change in politics in recent decades is that managerialism has replaced political ideology or argument – parties now make little attempt to convince people of a distinctive view. Instead, like a good salesman who can build rapport with clients by ‘mirroring’ their body language and speech patterns, parties compete on broadly the same ideological ground but try to convince electors that they are personally more trustworthy, effective and professional than their competition.

If this is all rather depressing, there are actually glimpses of hope here too. Political attitudes can often change in generational waves and the chapter on changing attitudes to race in the UK is a case in point. Here Danny Dorling discusses ‘when racism stopped being normal, but no-one noticed’. He shows that the percentage of electors who would be opposed to someone in their family marrying a person from another ethic group has declined from around 55 per cent in the 1980s to about 25 per cent today as the older generations where these views were most prevalent have now died off, and with very few of the younger generation now holding these types of beliefs. This trend has been mirrored in other countries like the US and is one indicator among many that people in the main Western democracies may still be economically conservative, but are more socially liberal – and in some ways enlightened – than they have ever been before.

DAP

What To Do With Your Vote. (1929)

From the April 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a few short weeks you will again be invited to attend at various schoolrooms and public buildings labelled: "Polling Booth," and there inscribe against the name of some individual or other a little cross. Quite a simple little process, and one which, in our dull world, becomes every now and then invested with an air of excitement and festivity. Some of you will be voting for the first time in your lives, most will have voted at several previous elections. The great majority will feel that the occasion is such a rare one, and the excitement so general, they must, if only from a sense of duty, affix their little cross upon the ballot paper. There will be no lack of advisers. The hoardings will groan beneath ten-feet posters calling your attention to the enormous achievements of the party whose power is expiring, and, in contrast, to the millennium about to dawn if you vote for the other side this time. Each side—so called—will call your attention to the shocking lies now being disseminated by the other. Each will tell you that a vote for the other is a vote for catastrophe. Little windows in shabby streets will break out in a rash of cards, begging the passer-by to "Vote for Spoofem," or some other. Halls and schoolrooms will be hired, street corners and market places annexed, whereat hoarse and fervent orators will pour forth tales of their opponents' rascality and the stained-glass, saintly purity of themselves. The newspapers and the Press generally will join in the national fever, and if report be true, the ether will be exploited by means of the radio. Leather-lunged loud-speakers are to squawk their message from touring vans, and altogether we are in for a hell of a time.

In the face of all this racket and excitement, to ask you to make no use of your vote seems rather feeble, doesn't it? In point of fact, we do not ASK you to do anything. When you try and quietly figure it all out, the feebleness lies in a rather different direction.

In the first place, why all this pother, why this hectic atmosphere, why these repeated emphatic appeals for your vote? Very briefly, it is because they want to GOVERN you. There is a tremendous emphasis on that word "govern." Familiarity has dulled appreciation of its essential meaning to most people, but it is worth pausing just there, and saying the word "govern" over and over again to yourself until it takes on a little flavour if strangeness, and you try and realise what government means. Time was when people were not asked to vote for government. They got it, hard and heavy, and they knew it. And when it hurt too much, rebellion was born, and riot, insurrection and discontent. Now, after generations of struggle, you have gained the right of being asked whom you wish to govern you. But notice, in particular, you are still to be governed. Even the Labour Party promises you a Labour Government. Now, if you still retain enough of the flavour of strangeness about that common word, government, you should ask yourself, "Who are the governors, pray, and who are the governed?" and "Why Government at all?" A critical survey of the world around you should supply you with the answer. The governors are the rich, those who hold the keys to our means of life. The governed are the poor, those who have to hire themselves for wages to the rich and powerful. The rich govern the poor, that is, they keep you in order and stamp upon any sign of revolt or discontent, and by long experience they have found that the way of retaining their power to govern you is by getting your assent to its continuance. So they arrange themselves into two or three groups, whose opinions differ upon trifling administrative details, and represent themselves to you as dire and bitter antagonists and ask you to choose or the other for master. Now, in theory, this is a dangerous proceeding, for you might see through the trick and say "A plague on all your houses." In practice, it has worked out very satisfactorily for the rich, for as they own the Press, the Pulpit, the Schools, the Broadcasting service, and your means of livelihood, any alternative opinion is heavily handicapped. But in spite of all, no monopoly can be complete, or eternal. The little sheet you are now reading is a proof of that.

The system in which a small rich class own the means whereby all live, and a large class have to hire themselves for wages in order to live, is called Capitalism. It is the system in which we are living to-day. The Socialist Party of Great Britain suggests as an alternative that the means of living should be taken away from the small parasitic class at present owning them, and commonly owned and administered by the whole people. That alternative is called Socialism. You will be asked some day to vote for the one or the other. That question will not be asked of you at the next General Election. What you will be asked is: "Do you still want to be governed; do you still believe in Capitalism? If you do, it will not matter to Capitalism whether you put your little cross against the Conservative, the Liberal, or the Labour candidate. They will have secured your voluntary assent to the continuance of Capitalism, and your willing acceptance of the fact of being governed. That is all that matters to them. If, where a Socialist candidate is not running, you write the word "Socialism" across your ballot paper, your vote is spoiled. True, but at any rate you have not signified that you are a willing supporter of Capitalism. The best thing, of course, is to join the Socialist Party and see that at the next General Election there is no need to spoil any ballot paper.

W. T. Hopley 

Editorial: X-Factor (2010)

Editorial from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

It will have come to the attention of some workers, that the UK franchise for administrating the market system on behalf of the owners of this part of the planet (the capitalist class) will shortly be up for grabs. There is, in other words, an election on. Tenders are invited from political parties devoid of principles and eager to represent the interests of the UK capitalist class, whether in battles with capitalists from other regions, or with the demands of its local working class.

The only problem in this cosy arrangement is that a few centuries back, in order for the capitalists to triumph over the aristocracy who held power previously, the working class had to be brought on -side.

As land gave way to industry as the economic powerhouse of the state, the new boss class (capitalist class) sought liberation from the restrictions that suited the old rulers (landlords). At the same time the new working class – who actually worked in factories producing the wealth that the upper classes fought over – were not lying down. Freed from serfdom they were able to demand – and win – political freedom: the vote.

So the system has a weak link, an Achilles heel: the political authority of capitalism requires to be regularly reinforced by support at the ballot box. Once every four or five years therefore, we all get our 15 seconds of heady power at our fingertips in the form of a stub of pencil and a scrap of paper.

The first shots in the battle between the main parties have been fired. This campaign looks like being the most vacuous yet, substituting personalities for policies, and making the ‘X-Factor’ and ‘Britain's Got Talent’ look like principled mechanisms for decision-making.

For most of its lifetime Labour at least pretended to have some sort of affinity to working class interests – while expertly shafting us year after year. Thankfully, no pretence at any sort of ideological difference between the parties is maintained by anyone in the know. It used to be said that you couldn't slip a cigarette paper between the policies of the respective parties. Our preferred analogy nowadays would of course refer to a credit card.

The Socialist Party here and our companion parties in the World Socialist Movement do not fetishise parliament. But neither do we see any contradiction in including it – where it exists – as an essential part of the toolkit for making a democratic revolution. The vote in the hands of the working class has only one real use – as a means to unambiguously express majority support (when that happens) for the revolutionary change from production for profit to production for need.

We don't see the vote as the only part of the sort of peaceful and democratic revolution we seek. Far from it, but while it is there we think it should be used. Socialism will only work with the active, informed participation of the many – in stark contrast to the sideshow in people’s lives that this election will be.