Editorial: Leaders, get lost! (2006)

Editorial from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Countless column inches and seemingly endless hours of news reports have been given over to the leadership crisis the Labour Party is currently engulfed in. Speaking up for Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke said Blair would stand down when he was good and ready to do so and he accused Chancellor Gordon Brown of “absolutely stupid” behaviour in challenging Blair, commenting that Brown needed first to prove his fitness to lead.

Fitness to lead? Now there’s a thing. It assumes leaders have some special qualification acquired over years of study and self-sacrifice when the only real qualification is the ability to hoodwink others into thinking you possess knowledge and qualities they do not. Unlike other professions – doctors, surgeons, architects, physicists – whose skills come via many years of hard slog – politicians require none whatsoever. The only requisite credentials needed when standing for election are that you are over 21 years of age, not insane and with no recent prison record.

Despite this, many workers think we cannot function without leaders. This is a fallacy and one perpetuated by the ruling class to help them maintain their control over our lives. Indeed, so prevalent is this philosophy, that from the cradle to the grave we are taught to mistrust our own intelligence and to feel somewhat inadequate, to look up to our ‘betters and superiors’ (schools, church, politicians, parents etc) for their expert guidance and to accept without question the plans they draw up for our future.

It is assumed by many that leaders run the world. Well, we think it is we, the workers, who run the world. Politicians might make government policy, which becomes law, but it is we who build and work the hospitals and schools. It is we who build the bridges, roads and railways, ports and airports; all the products that humans need to survive. It is we who produce everything from a pin to an oil-rig and provide humanity with all the services it requires – we the working class! We don’t depend on leaders for these skills or for their guidance. They have no monopoly on our knowledge and intelligence or on the inventions we dream up to enhance the quality of life. If all the worlds’ leaders died tomorrow, few would really miss them and society would function just as before.

The concept of leadership has emerged with class society and will end when we abolish class society, when we abolish the profit system and all that goes with it. The master class have been allowed to lead because of their control over the means of living and by virtue of their control of the education system and their monopoly of the media and other information processes.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The greatest weapons we posses are our class unity, our intelligence, and our ability to question the status quo and to imagine a world fashioned in our own interests. Leaders perceive all of this to be a threat and so will do anything to keep us in a state of oblivion, dejection and dependency. Our apathy is the victory they celebrate each day. Our unwillingness to unite as a globally exploited majority and to confront them on the battlefield of ideas is the subject of their champagne toasts.

Remember this as the battle for leadership of the Labour Party hots up.

Greasy Pole: Is There Life After Tony Blair? (2006)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even by the standards we have come to expect from them, it was an outrageous piece of New Labour spin to tell us that the leadership handover between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would be “smooth and orderly”. For one thing Blair and his cronies must have known that announcing his intention to resign on some unnamed, unpredictable date in the future ensured that the handover would take place after a long period of chaos as a succession of hopefuls – and no-hopers – pushed themselves as potential leaders. We had already had the sly briefing about Gordon Brown’s alleged “psychological flaws” (which must apply to many politicians). The infighting could have been prevented by settling on a firm date but whenever this was raised with Blair he brushed it aside by saying that he would go when he had done his job of clearing up a few trivial matters like crime, the wars in the Middle East and Iraq, the NHS, education, poverty… The very idea is laughable, that there will ever, can ever, be a day when a political leader can pass into well earned retirement because they have succeeded in making all the necessary adjustments and improvements to society, so that from now on all will be smooth and orderly. While there is no evidence that Blair is an avid student of history it is clear that he has absorbed many of its essential lessons in the sleazier arts of politics.

Morrison

What can be said, on that score, about Gordon Brown? When he made that deal, across the Granita table, with Blair, did he not have an inkling of what he was committing himself to? Was he entirely innocent of any doubts about politicians’ readiness to keep their word? Did he not reflect on the examples of other nominated heirs to a party leadership who had failed miserably to achieve it? When the Attlee government was elected in 1945 the Deputy Leader of the party was Herbert Morrison, a canny, cocky political operator with the common touch. In contrast, Attlee was understated, not to say drab; when he was made Leader in 1935 Hugh Dalton, who was later Chancellor of the Exchequer, bemoaned “. . .  a wretched and disheartening result . . . And a little mouse shall lead them”. After Labour’s emphatic win Morrison made it clear that he had no intention of agreeing to Attlee as Prime Minister and that, before he accepted he job, Attlee should submit himself to a vote of confidence by the Parliamentary Labour Party.

This was the kind of situation which, in recent times, must have provoked an incandescent row between Brown and Blair. Attlee, however, was in a different mode. After his election triumph he went quietly with his wife for tea at the Great Western Hotel in London and it was there, among the delicate china and the scones, he was told that King George VI was anxious to fill the vacancy for a new government for British capitalism and would he please go to Buckingham Palace to set the royal mind at rest. Attlee took the view that the monarch should not be kept waiting while the Parliamentary Labour Party made up its mind so he went at once to the Palace where “without quibbles” as he put it, he accepted the top job. (He got his vote of confidence the next day – as if an hysterically triumphant, desperately ambitious, party would ever have dreamed of denying it to him).

Churchill

Attlee later described the notion of Morrison being party leader as “fantastic” – seriously out of touch with reality. He continued as leader after his government were defeated in the 1951 election, leaving Morrison to sulk and snipe, fretful in the knowledge that the longer Attlee stayed on the weaker his chances of succeeding. It was clear at that time that if the Labour Party was to have any hope of clawing their way back into government they would need to undertake a comprehensive overhaul of their policies and presentation but Attlee was too weary after his years in government to do anything about it. That was probably the time for him to retire but instead he kept going, which had the effect of stifling Morrison’s leadership chances (Morrison was, of course, convinced that this was the motivation). After Labour was defeated again, in 1955, Attlee carried on for a few months and then suddenly resigned, going to the House of Lords. The delay in his going had had its effect; Hugh Gaitskell had emerged as the likeliest leadership candidate and he won the ballot over both Morrison and Aneurin Bevan, leaving Morrison to nurse his bitter disappointment.

The Tory government which followed had its own inheritance problems for Winston Churchill had always made it clear that he would be succeeded as leader by his Deputy Anthony Eden; for example in 1942 Churchill told the King that if he failed to return from one of his trips abroad Eden should be asked to take his place. In spite of the Tories’ calamitous defeat in the 1945 election Churchill hung on as leader (in any case he never made any secret of his reluctance to take account of his party’s wishes). But he was bored in opposition and he might have resigned then except that his “Iron Curtain” speech seemed to revive his confidence in himself as an historic figure so he stayed, while playing on Eden’s loyalty by throwing out occasional hints that he would hand over in the near future – rather like Tony Blair today. At the same time Churchill made it clear that he would regard any suggestion that he should resign as base treachery. Even when he had a succession of strokes, notably in 1949 and 1953, which progressively disabled him, he kept himself in the job. It seemed as if he would never go.

Eden

The grinding pressure of disappointment aggravated Eden’s emotional and medical difficulties; at the time of Churchill’s 1953 stroke Eden was convalescing abroad after an operation, which prevented him taking over. In any case Churchill, in the words of his son Randolph, “fought his way back to health with a Roman mastery of mind over flesh” so that he was still Prime Minister when he turned 80 in November 1954. He resigned in April 1955 and Eden came at last into his inheritance, except that it was a procession of disasters. Under scathing criticism from a normally loyal Tory press – the Daily Telegraph ranted about “changes of mind by the Government; half measures; and the postponement of decisions” – the breaking point for him was his obsessive but doomed attempt to revive the standing of British capitalism in the Middle East by the Suez invasion (his wife later told how at times she had felt as if the Suez Canal was running through their living room). By now a very sick man, virtually living on prescribed drugs, Eden gave up and went to the West Indies to recuperate. After all that waiting, he had been Prime Minister for less than two years.

Spite

A common factor in these episodes, as with the present clash between Blair and Brown, is the absence of any differences in policy. The disputes were not about whether to run capitalism but who should be allowed to indulge their ambitions by doing so. From those roots a tangled growth of spite and venom has flourished, in which Brown abruptly ceased to be the assumed, widely welcomed, successor to Blair and instead became the target of vicious personal attacks, some of which originated from people who were themselves far from blameless. “Compulsive obsessive”, “autistic” and “childish vanity” were among the kinder assessments of Brown.

Perhaps most audacious of all was Charles Clarke’s charge that Brown is a “control freak”, which overlooked the fact that when he was Home Secretary Clarke was a relentless, determined advocate of Identity Cards. The winner of this “smooth and orderly process” among contestants who lay down laws which are designed to instruct us how to behave will be whoever emerges with the least shredded clothing and the fewest wounds.

Ivan

Exporting Crime (2006)

From the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The witch hunt against ex-prisoners from abroad shows that xenophobia is now more than ever official policy

It was in a desperate attempt to erase from the voters’ consciousness the idea that his party would ever be indulgent towards law breakers that Tony Blair and his opinion sculptors chiselled out the pledge that a New Labour government would be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. That smooth phrase covered just about everything as far as crime went and it opened the way to a succession of Acts of Parliament which brought in new laws, regulations, surveillance and intrusions. Anti-Social Behaviour Orders had the effect of making many offences imprisonable when they had not been before. Procedural restraints on courts were relaxed to encourage offenders to plead guilty when they were innocent. New prisons have been opened in an attempt – unsuccessful as it happens – to gobble up those who fell foul of Labour’s new penal policies. If all this had any real effect on the crime figures it has not been persuasively obvious but in any case the idea behind it all was to convince the voters – who are so often the sufferers from crime – that, whatever the truth of the matter, New Labour was doing something about it; given time they would eliminate it altogether.

But a serious problem with snappy, headline-grabbing slogans – Homes Fit for Heroes, You Never Had It So Good, The Pound in Your Pocket – is that capitalist society has a nastily remorseless habit of undermining them. When that happens the slogan ceases to be voter-seductive and becomes instead a repellent embarrassment. This has been the case over the government’s record on deporting offenders who are foreign nationals on their release from prison. It did not sit easily with Blair’s promise to be tough on crime, that such people should be free; the implicit fear was that they would use this freedom to commit other, perhaps even more serious, offences. As the media frantically dug for evidence, Home Secretary Charles Clarke admitted that at least five of the released foreign prisoners had committed further drugs-related and violent offences; two others had been accused of rape, although in one case the charge had been dropped through lack of evidence.

Somalia

Most damaging of all was the case of Mustaf Jama, who came here as an asylum seeker from Somalia and for that reason was not sent back to that country when he had served a three-year jail sentence for robbery. Jama is one of the prime suspects for the murder of the police officer Sharon Beshenivsky in Bradford. He cannot at present be charged with this murder because he seems to have fled to Somalia, although the fear that he would have been killed if he had been sent back there was enough to keep him in this country. Predictably, this fuelled the tabloid hysteria and encouraged the fantasy that the country was infested with foreigners who were using their early release from prison to rack up even more offences. The uproar became so loud and insistent that it cost Charles Clarke his job; in spite of Blair’s ritualistic assurances of boundless and never-dying confidence in him, Clarke was re-shuffled out of the Home Office and onto the back benches.

Another ritual was the official response to the pending storm of publicity. Last summer the Home Office admitted that there were some 400 released prisoners who under government policy might have been deported. But recently, in response to the determined chiselling away of the governmental wall of denial by the media and MPs, this figure was raised to 1023 – some of them convicted of murder, rape or child abuse. For a short time Clarke said that about 90 of these had been convicted of the “most serious” offences but one of the first actions of his successor John Reid was to raise this estimate to 150 and to elaborate by saying that to include those sentenced for robbery would put the total into “hundreds”. Almost by the day, the situation looked worse for the government. It is as well to bear in mind that this mess – partly a cumbersome, doomed attempt to distort the facts and partly a deliberate attempt to conceal the truth – was the work of the Home Office, which is so prominent in composing and enforcing the laws which are designed to instruct the rest of us in how to behave as the underclass in this society. The exposure of the concealment and the deception must have contributed to the Labour Party losing so many council seats in the recent local elections and perhaps, through the stimulation of a whole clutch of dangerous prejudices, to the relative success of the BNP.

Brixton

When he was Home Secretary in the 1960s the late Roy Jenkins said that it would be unacceptable for the prison population to reach 42,000. Now it is fast approaching 78,000 which, although there are many more places available than there were in Jenkins’ day, is the officially defined maximum. The Prison Reform Trust has stated that of the 741 prisons 142 are occupied above the limits of health and safety. An ex-governor of Brixton, which is a typically hectic, stressful London prison, has said that too many people are being given custodial sentences; these were the words of a man whose reputation was as an unusually perceptive and humane holder of his office. However, during his time at Brixton a few prisoners managed to fiddle their way into an evening’s freedom; the matter came to light when they were apprehended trying to wangle their way back inside in time to avoid detection. It was the end of Brixton’s unofficial evenings at liberty and, when the outraged laughter had died down, of that governor’s regime there.

Attempts to explain the increase in the prison population are soon confronted with the fact that the property rights of capitalism make for a huge cobweb of repression and denial of access to human resources. Within that, as symptoms of class society, there is the fact that the incidence of crime can go up or down in response to a number of influences. One of them is that working lives and survival are as stressful, if not more so, than they have been for a long time. Another is that New Labour rhetoric about getting tough on offenders has resulted in stricter conditions on Community Orders and the courts, responding to the urgings from Downing Street, using prison sentences more often than in the past. Then there is the fact that female crime has increased, so that more women are going to prison. And there is the rise in custodial sentences on foreign nationals who come before the courts. Over the past five years this figure has increased by 75 per cent, while that for British nationals has gone up by 11 per cent.

The foreign nationals in British prisons originate in over 160 countries, among them Jamaica, Somalia, Afghanistan, Algeria. These are countries notable for violence and social instability. In some cases – for example Somalia and Sierra Leone – there are problems in deporting released prisoners because it is too dangerous to fly there. Jamaica is described by Amnesty International (and other organisations) as a place where “Violence and crime are rife (and where) Police officers are allowed to kill with impunity”. United States Embassy staff in Jamaica are officially advised to avoid the inner city area of Kingston and of other towns and not to use public buses. Unsurprisingly, some of the people who come here from these strife-torn places bring their own strategies of survival, which might entail breaking the law here. Drug offences – mainly trafficking – account for about 60 per cent of the prison sentences and for 80 per cent of women prisoners, many of whom have harrowing stories to tell, of the poverty and fear in their home country which persuaded them to accept the hazardous role of smuggling in the drugs. It is a sad, tragic picture which is not relieved by vengeful punishment.

Delusions

New Labour’s response to this situation is to take powers to deport released prisoners wherever possible – they plan to make this an automatic procedure in future – which may relieve some very short term problems as it enables the government to pose as taking drastic measures which will reduce crime at a stroke and so boost their chances of being returned at the next election. But it takes no account of the fact that other countries can return British nationals (there are some 800 in EU jails at present). It will not affect the level of crime here by British nationals, which has proved impervious to government policies, because crime, like private property, poverty, repression, is endemic to capitalism. The policy of trying to export foreign criminals is presented as something considered, effective and durable when in fact, apart from stimulating some of the nastier delusions such as racism and xenophobia, it is another panicky episode of exhausted futility.

Ivan