So They Say: Slow Learner No. 1 (1975)

The So They Say column from the December 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Slow Learner No. 1

It is said that a little learning is a dangerous thing. The self-inflated Conservative No. 2, Sir Keith Joseph, seems to have taken the maxim at face value and decided that he for one need learn nothing at all. In a paper delivered to the Foundation for Business Responsibilities on 11th November, he urged “the need for a greater public understanding of the wealth-creating process”. However, there existed, he felt, an unsympathetic attitude in Britain towards the whole concept of profit making and this attitude had to be changed if the entrepreneurs were “to be able to get on with their function”.

It seems fortunate that this particular good shepherd has decided it necessary to guide us from the “swarm of mini-myths” which have, he thinks, brought on such an unsympathetic attitude. Few, apart from Keith Joseph himself, appears to have escaped their influence—for in the course of his remarks he managed to accuse almost everyone of this failing, including trade unions, (other) politicians, successive governments, companies, the bulk of the workers within the education system, and the population at large. But in his view, one man more than any other was really to blame—Karl Marx. Joseph accused him of being “one of the greatest myth-makers in history”, pointing in particular to the greatest myth which Marx is supposed to have propounded as being:

  That private capitalism is exploitation, but state capitalism is freedom.

Guardian, 12th November 75

Although we can only speculate on the extent of Marx’s works which Joseph must have read to draw such a conclusion, we do know that when he debated with the SPGB in April of this year he was informed by our speaker:

  The SPGB never supported nationalization, which is state capitalism. Private or state makes no difference. We are Marxist. Marx’s conception of Socialism is a society where you do not have a wages system. There would be no prices or profits.
(Reported in Socialist Standard, June 75)

Considering the clarity of this position, and the mental muddle of Sir Keith Joseph, it would have been reasonable to expect him to learn something over the past months.

Perhaps Not

The New York Times published an interview with Sir Keith on 10th November in which he stated that Britain was sliding into a “Socialist Slumdom”. He wanted to know where the “Great” had gone from Great Britain.

  Are we to be destroyed by ideas, mischievous, wrongheaded, debilitating yet seductive, because they are fashionable and promise so much on the cheap?

Quite, Sir Keith. How long will it be before you stop informing workers that the British Government is made up of Socialists, and that your own particular brand of capitalism will run in the interests of workers any better than the Labour Party variety?

Stop Press

The royal commission on the Press is examining a proposal that a state-run printing corporation he set up, and has called for the opinions of various interested parties before deciding on the issue. On 10th November, the Communist Party of Great Britain put on what they considered to be an exceptionally respectable mask. Their head of publicity, Mr. George Matthews, expressed the view that the facilities of such a corporation should be available to a “wide range of democratic organisations, particularly in the labour movement”—but specifically opposed their use by the National Front.

The CPGB felt that facilities should not be available to those who produced material which incited racial hatred. Perhaps recalling that its parent body the CPSU stands accused of exactly this practice, he added the following qualification:

  We think that there would have to be criteria. There would have to be, first of all, justification by the body concerned that it was in the public interest.

Guardian, 11th November 75.

Which immediately raises the point—what is in the public interest? Both the ruling class in Russia and in this country have an answer—the continuation of capitalism. Having accepted this general premise, all that is left for the anti-working class parties such as the Communist Party or the National Front is for them to squabble over whose discrimination is more desireable. The CPGB seems to feel that workers are incapable of recognizing the dangerous futility of National Front propaganda—so much so that they are to be "protected” from their views. There is a reason, that of obscuring the issue. Workers who adopt a class attitude and recognize the real issues facing them as a class, soon see through the dangerous futility of other reactionary political parties including the CPGB.

Slow Learner No. 2

On the 5th November while others let off Catherine wheels, rockets and roman candles, Denis Healey attempted to ignite something which looked like a damp squib, but which he assured us was in fact the Government’s plan for the rejuvenation of British Industry. The proposals aim vaguely for an extension of state control in industry and are the outcome of consultations between the government, the trade unions and the Confederation of British Industry. They are aimed, equally vaguely, at preventing a plunge in British living standards “to the level of the Mediterranean countries”. The measure of success which the “rejuvenation” will have can only be assessed later, but one thing is clear, the position of the majority of men and women will be unaltered. They will remain members of the working class, dependent on a wage or salary in order to live. That is a simple fact which capitalism teaches the working class. Mr. Healey said regarding current economic problems and the projected solutions:

  We learn slow, but we learn good.

Guardian, 6th November 75

Workers should not be dispirited at his apparent inability to learn anything at all. We live under a social system in which working-class poverty is the norm; the history of capitalism has always shown this to be so. If Mr. Healey says he learns slowly, we can believe him, but the sooner that workers put their own interests first by working for Socialism and leave the tardy scholar to catch up later, the sooner the social revolution will take place.

Alan D'Arcy

50 Years Ago: Labour and the TSR2 (2013)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the latest babies of British capitalism, proudly wheeled out by its doting parents, is the TSR-2.

This aircraft, it is claimed, can do almost anything by way of airborne destruction. In its ability to perform the most horrifying deeds, in the range of its destructive power, in its diabolical versatility, the TSR-2 is something like a precocious, delinquent child.

These horrors are going to cost something like a couple of million pounds each. Commenting on this, Mr. Denis Healey, the Labour M.P. (who put the cost at £20 million each), asked what this sum represented in terms of schools, hospitals, and so on. This is a common complaint, whenever the amount of money which capitalism spends upon weapons is discussed. Yet what do the Healeys expect? Capitalism has a list of priorities to which it allocates its resources and human comfort is not near the top of it. This was as true under the Labour government which Mr. Healey supported as under the Tory one which he attacks.

Indeed, Mr. Healey showed how small are the differences between his own party and the Tories on the issue of armaments when he went on to say that the TSR-2 is a waste of money, which could better be spent on military helicopters and other transport aircraft and on the Buccaneer, a naval strike ‘plane which is already in service

The best, then, that the Labour Party offers us on the matter of armaments policy is to look after the purse strings more carefully than the Conservatives have done. They will try to make sure that every penny the British ruling class spend on their weapons gets value for money.

(from ‘News in Review’, Socialist Standard, December 1963)

Between the Lines: House of Frauds (1992)

Healey and Howe in ermine.

The Between the Lines column from the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

House of Frauds
I have long been of ihc view that there is something particularly silly about the British ruling class. All that left-wing talk about how the rulers will prevent a socialist majority from having our way has never carried any credibility. Watching tire Channel Four Cutting Edge documentary on the inside life - life? - of the House of Lords (16 November, 9 pm) was watertight evidence that sanity is no qualification for being in the ruling elite of capitalism.

The rituals of the so-called Upper House, where twelve hundred unelected members can claim five hundred pounds a week for doing a totally worthless job which involves a lot of sleeping, are part of that public school tradition which makes Britain an ex-Empire. The documentary showed the induction into the peerage of two new life frauds. Geoffrey Howe — Thatcher's hatchet man at the Treasury who finally turned the axe on the mad priestess herself — and Denis Healey — who started out in the Communist Party and ended up as the Labour Chancellor who introduced monetarist policies before the Thatcherites ever entered Number Ten.

These social vandals were receiving their pay-off for a lifetime's dirty work of screwing the working class on behalf of the bosses. That is why life peerages are given to politicians and trade union leaders who have served the system well. Most members of the House get there simply because their old man died and they inherited a peerage. Remarkably, the documentary stated that one third of all members of the House of Lords went to just one school: Eton, the place which has huge annual fees and where names of pupils must be signed up soon after they are born. So much for the myth of equal opportunities under capitalism.

But back to the silliness. Watching the absurd rehearsal of their inauguration, where Howe and Healey had to practise putting on and taking off their ridiculous medieval hats and bowing to the Lord Chancellor as they proceed towards him, it became clear that this sort of behaviour would not be out of place in the confines of a psychiatric hospital where disturbed people repeat certain actions with no particular purpose. The parliamentary games are to a great extent about doing barmy things simply because other people have done them before. Those caught up in such a ritual, and benefiting from the payments involved, no doubt think that they are indispensable.

In fact, this documentary was ample proof of the good sense of dispensing with these useless people. Unlike other critics, however, socialists are not simply out to abolish the House of Lords. We want to abolish the entire function of government. This will only happen when lire majority refuses to be governed, to live as inferiors in a class society, and to demean themselves by accepting for one moment that there are superior people who must sit in a special House or Chamber and make decisions for us.

Terry Fields

More Frauds — No Longer In The House
Socialism will be a stateless society without leaders or led. The Cutting Edge documentary the week before the Lords' expose was about the Militant Tendency — in particular, their campaign in Broadgreen in Liverpool to retain their MP, Terry Fields, in the 1992 General Election. As it happens, the Militant members shown on this documentary were exposed as sincere and enthusiastic people whose convictions were worthier, at least on the surface, than the tired old official Labourites who were out to defeat them.

The problem with Militant is that they are a fraudulent body, they pretend to be socialists, but they stand for state capitalism — a repeat of Lenin's failed vanguardist strategy. They claim to be the real Labour Party, even though Labour has expelled them and is embarrassed by them. Terry Fields appealed for support on the grounds that he was the real Labour candidate. His supporters sought votes on the basis of sterile old promises to make capitalism better. Fields lost the election. Of course, he lost in part because he was the victim of a campaign to discredit his leftist stance. But it would be nice to think that he lost also because workers in Broadgreen were unwilling to get excited about left-wing Labourism, were not prepared to give yet another pseudo-radical five years to govern them from the House of Common Thieves in Westminster, that they regarded Fields and other politicians as playing a game that they wanted no part in.

The Socialist Party is hostile to both ermine-clad rulers who like capitalism as it is and reformist MPs who want capitalism with bandages over its worse sores. Neither Etonians nor Leninists, but THE WORLD FOR THE WORKERS!

Steve Coleman

Labour Party Hypocrites (1970)

Editorial from the September 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party, now in opposition, has the opportunity to try and rebuild its severely damaged image of being the party with ideals. Their publicity men tried their best with posters and hoardings during the election, but the reality of Labour's record in office was just too much for them to whitewash.

“Arms for South Africa” is an issue which the opportunists in the Labour Party are determined to hang on to and develop this purpose, but their hypocrisy in doing so should be obvious to anyone who has followed the Labour government’s foreign policy. It was Denis Healey, Minister of “Defence”, who in 1968 proclaimed. “Her Majesty’s government and the South African government share the responsibility for maritime security in the South African area”. It seems now that he expected them to carry out this function with arms supplied by countries other than Britain. Throughout Labour's period of office the Simonstown Agreement was honoured and joint naval manoeuvres continued. Healey and his colleagues by accepting a ban on arms shipments to South Africa were attempting to gain the best of both worlds: defence of the Cape trade route and continued trade with and investment in South and South-West Africa and, at the same time, expanding trade and influence in the rest of Africa.

The Tories, on the other hand, are considering whether there is not too much at stake in South Africa for this dual policy to continue. They may have been influenced in this choice by the companies with subsidiaries in South Africa who supply some of their political funds, but whatever the reasons for and against, these have nothing to do with the suppression of the South African population by a racist dictatorship, but solely with the interests and fortunes of the British capitalist class.

Douglas-Home in defence of the Tories’ proposals pointed to the inconsistencies of Labour's position. Their opposition, he claimed, could only be credible if they accepted total boycott; the Tories were in favour of contacts and convincing by example. Contacts it appears means supplying arms to South African government and setting an example means passing racist Immigration Acts. The Labour Party of course has contributed its fair share by passing the “Kenya Asians” Bill, with support from well-known Tory racists.

The best way workers outside South Africa can help hasten change is by building a principled opposition to all forms of racism, and by developing a strong revolutionary. Socialist movement on an international scale that will strike at the very roots of imperialism in South Africa and elsewhere and at world capitalism.

The Falklands: Doing the Bulldog Thing (1982)

From the May 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some said it was war, to others it was more like comic opera. Most people’s knowledge of the Falkland Islands was limited to what they had read in their stamp album but they were sure that it was a place worth defending against a vile foreign dictatorship. The Argentinians were rather better known, since their football team was once called “animals” by the then England team manager Alf Ramsey, who was not averse to including one or two cloggers in his own side.

The British fleet which was despatched to deal a mighty blow at the invaders of the Falklands sailed out of Portsmouth trying not to look as if it was redundant. It was led by two aircraft carriers, one of which will be sold to the Australian Navy and the other scrapped. Five hundred of the sailors preparing for battle had had notices of redundancy and so had 180 of the workers in the Portsmouth dockyards where the ships were made ready. Among the crew was Prince Andrew (“a serving officer like anyone else”) who truly is redundant but gets paid handsomely for it and who seemed liable to fly an expensive helicopter into battle. It was in a rather desperate patriotism that thousands of workers waved the fleet away: “We have to do the bulldog thing” urged the wife of one of the sailors, perhaps reasoning that a dead dog is better off than a live unemployed sailor.

There was too some bellicose relief. Capitalist powers devote an enormous amount of resources to training their people in how to kill other workers in a war. Servicemen are liable to become frustrated, if all their expensive training and equipment is allowed to atrophy for want of the nourishment of a nice, destructive war. So the Guardian could report: “The men, with their planes and missiles are, after years of war games, spoiling for the real thing”. There was also some relief at the sudden emergence of this external “enemy”, who are always useful in helping persuade workers to accept sacrifices. And sacrifices, as the dole queues get longer and prices rise and rise, are what British capitalism wants from its workers right now.

The government’s acute discomfiture at the “humiliating affront to this country” (the departing Lord Carrington’s description) was in large part due to the fact that they had based a lot of their electoral appeal on the promise to be strong on “defence”. Was the Iron Lady to be foxed by a bunch of gibbering foreigners who spend all their time turning out cans of poisoned canned beef? Would the Tories ever live it down? There was much praise and sympathy for the hugely suave, hugely wealthy, Lord Carrington. Even American Secretary of State Alexander Haig had a good word to say for him, forgetting that only recently he called him a “duplicitous bastard”. Carrington didn’t need sympathy; he retired in good order to his acres in Buckinghamshire, a green and pleasant county of which he owns a substantial amount.

There was nothing comic about the Labour Party’s nauseous frenzy to exploit the situation. It was almost as if a general election had already been called. In the Commons on March 30, Denis Healey accused the government of being “caught with its trousers down in the South Atlantic—a phrase for the connoisseurs of Healeyisms. Callaghan, pretending to be helpful, recounted how much better the interests of British capitalism had been looked after when he was responsible, In 1977, he claimed, there was a similar crisis but the Labour government resolved it secretly, with a combination of military threat and diplomatic pressure. No MP took Callaghan’s trousers down by asking why the leader of a party which once claimed to stand for international working class interests should be fishing in the murky waters of capitalist diplomacy. In fact, Carrington had been following the same policy—on this issue, as on others there is no difference between Tories and Labour—but his bad luck was that the Argentinian rulers were under pressure to call his bluff and the whole thing was played out in public.

Of course the real star of the Labour benches was Michael Foot. Belying his reputation as a doddering, ineffectual bungler, the Labour leader lashed the government for their “betrayal of those who looked to it for protection” (he was not talking about workers struggling to live on social security). “We should not”, he raged, “see foul, brutal aggression successful in our world”. (He was not attacking the record of past Labour governments on Korea, Malaysia, Biafra, Vietnam . . .) Foot’s speech was applauded by the MPs as a flag-waving, drum-banging demand for the war in which, of course, he would not personally be in the front line. It was, we remember, only a few months ago that he won an affectionate ovation at a Labour Party gathering by describing himself as “an inveterate peacemonger”.

Many Tory MPs were delighted with Foot’s performance. One sure way of winning their respect is to make a speech calling for workers to be sent off to war. One of the more effusive—or perhaps he had merely lunched well—gurgled, “For once, you truly spoke for Britain”. There was no report that Foot so much as blushed at this insulting compliment (a few days later he was calling himself “an international democratic socialist”), nor that he was perturbed by Labour MP George Foulkes’ warning that “inevitably thousands of British troops will be killed”. The Labour Party has never flinched from the prospect of workers dying in the conflicts to protect their masters’ interests, especially if an inveterate votes-monger like Foot may be able to translate their deaths into an election win.

The Conservatives, also worried about their political standing, simply tried to shelter in a measure of fantasy. Thatcher declared:

The Falkland Islands and their dependencies remain British territory , , , It is the government’s objective to see that the Islands are freed from occupation and returned to British administration at the earliest possible moment.

But in the reality of world capitalism 1982, places like the Falklands are not defensible by any available British force for any length of time. British foreign policy has been based on that reality for some time now. In historical fact the “British administration” of the Islands was itself an “occupation”. The British settlement of the Falklands was contested by France, Spain and Argentina, from the latter half of the 18th century. The Spanish were there until 1806, when the Argentinians threw them out and in 1833 a British force arrived and, politely but firmly, ejected the Argentinians. The Prime Minister of the day made it plain that the British ruling class would not allow ” . . . any other state to exercise a right as derived from Spain, which Britain had denied to Spain herself”. This has never been accepted by any Argentinian government and, at the very least, they have registered an annual protest. Children there are taught about the perfidy of the British over the Falklands, rather as British children have been taught about the Germans, French, Japanese, Argentinians . . .

In 1851 a Royal Charter—the official sanction to the exploitation of the resources and the people—was granted to the Falkland Islands Company and since then the Islands’ economy has been dominated by that company. The FIC owns nearly half the land, a third of the sheep (wool is the Islands’ only product of any significance) and employs over one sixth of the population. It controls the bank, the dock and the supermarket. In 1972, after a brief spell of ownership by an offshoot of Slater Walker, the FIC was taken over by Charrington Industrial Holdings, which has big interests in fuel distribution and was probably attracted by the FIC stake in the islands’ transport and warehousing and the possible presence of oil. Argentinian investors almost pulled off a stealthy take-over in 1977 but this was thwarted, partly by the Foreign Office. Charrington seemed shaken by the experience, and declared that they would never sell out to a foreign concern. Soon afterwards they were themselves taken over by Coalite, a company based in Derbyshire. Through all these machinations the workers of the Falklands plodded on, in the bare, windswept landscape, raising sheep and turning out the surplus value for whichever bunch of capitalists was appropriating the wealth they had produced.

Those workers are in the main descendants of the Scottish, English and Welsh who went to the Falklands after 1851. Most families are tenants of the FIC and live in tied cottages which they must leave when they are too old to be exploitable any longer. Until recently the majority of members of the Legislative Council were nominated by the British government. If the Falklanders prefer this kind of feudal paternalism it can only be because they think—with good reason—that that life under Argentinian military rule has even less to offer them. A final irony is that, if any of them tries to take refuge in Britain they will have no automatic right of entry. The Foreign Office has promised them special concessions but, although they hold British passports, they are legally excluded because they are defined as non-patrials under the 1971 Immigration Act.

Behind the feigned concern for the fate of the Falklanders is the fact that for a long time it has been British policy, under Labour and Conservative governments, to phase the Islands over to Argentine rule. As James Callaghan pointed out in the Commons on April 7, in a brief respite from his jingoism, there had already been negotiations about the British hold over the Falklands, which might have led to some sort of leaseback arrangement with Argentina. In 1971 a commercial agreement gave Argentina a near monopoly in fuel supply and air travel and the first big runway at Port Stanley was Argentinian built. The Director General of the Falkland Islands Office in London had this to say, about the British attitude to their efforts to resist this trend: “We have consistently not been getting sufficient support from the Foreign Office these last twelve years”.

Naturally a lot of publicity was given by the British media to the transparent cynicism behind the invasion. Argentina is another country in the grip of a severe recession. At the end of March a trade union demonstration against the effects of unemployment and rising prices brought some of the worst civil disorder since the military took over in 1976. But the move against the Falklands brought a miraculous change; patriotic frenzy swamped the reality of the workers’ parlous condition and of the murderous repression by which the Argentinian rulers defend their position. As the news came through there was another demonstration but this time the Argentinian workers were chanting support for Galtieri and his annexation of Los Islas Malvinas.

The hysteria and deception on both sides ensure that it will take a long time to purge the Falklands crisis of historical myth. It will be written up as an affair of honour; the Argentinians will describe it as a blow against foreign imperialism and the British as a defence of human rights. But the wars of capitalism have never protected human rights; in truth they have damaged those rights, at times destroyed them. Diplomacy—one of the practised arts of the capitalist system—cannot be an affair of honour; it must function by double-cross, concealment, treachery and lies.

So British and Argentinian servicemen went across the ocean to do battle with each other in their masters’ cause. It was another doleful example of ignorant workers being easily duped by the empty jingoism of desperate politicians. Animals do it better; at least they don’t take themselves willingly to the slaughterhouse.

Ivan

So They Say: Dodging the issue (1977)

The So They Say Column from the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dodging the issue
A good number of people have been led to believe that the Labour Party has the interests of the working class at heart and its representatives have been careful to cultivate the idea. When this belief is questioned by pointing to the government’s failure to deal with social problems and hardship, the Labour Party explains—or more accurately, explains this away—by saying that they are bedevilled with other matters which in their estimation have to be seen to first.

In the face of growing discontent over wage levels, the government has chosen to associate the level of wages with the level of inflation as if the two were virtually the same thing and that the former will determine the latter. It is not a new ploy from them, two years ago they were placing announcements in the press urging “moderation” in wage claims under the headline “Inflation — we can beat it together." Perhaps wary of reminding workers of the earlier campaign, the current one takes the form of government ministers making speeches.

  The message is gradually getting across that moderate wage increases are the way to improve our standard of living . . .  In fact, we can now predict with confidence that for the next six months inflation will be brought increasingly under control. Whether or not it continues into 1978 is wholly dependent on the pattern of wage settlements during the next year.

Mr. Hattersley. The Times 13th August 77

The one new feature to note here, unlike all the previous and inaccurate predictions by the government on inflation, is that this one is made “with confidence.” The illogicality however is the same; inflation is caused by an excess issue of paper money and the note issue has risen by well over 50 per cent. under Labour. Contrary to the impression (the “message”) from Mr. Hattersley, the note issue is not under the control of the working class, or increased at their bidding. The note issue is determined by the government through the Bank of England.


Gold and silver linings
High unemployment figures give one indication that capitalism is passing through one of its periodic depressions. If we were to take the pronouncements of politicians at face-value, the only salvation lies apparently in “getting business back on its feet.” This impression of a down-and-out capitalism has led some “left-wing” groups, like the Oxford Street sandwich board man, to issue stern warnings that the end is at hand. Ironically, while awaiting the “end” they busy themselves by calling for the right to be employed. Even on their own analysis they do not see the contradiction. However, newspapers publish relatively believable items as well as political speeches: The depression may be serious, but the collapse of capitalism is not upon us.

  The net profits before tax of 229 British companies, whose annual reports are included in the Exchange Telegraph’s statistics service, reached a total of £1,444.1m during the month of July. This compares with £1,015.5m using the same companies for the previous year. The net profits before tax of 1,527 British companies in the seven months to July 31, aggregated £12,403.6m as against £8,953.3m for the same period, using the same companies.

The Times, 2nd August 77

The Times calculates “Company profits up by 42 per cent in July” and using the same calculation, this would put the increase in profit for the 1527 companies up by an average of approximately 38 per cent, over the seven months’ figure for last year. These companies at least have something to show for the Labour Party’s “socialism”.


Great expectations
British workers have a new group of friends, or at least it appeared so at first. The German news magazine Der Spiegel of 1st August says that British workers are a much maligned lot and cannot be blamed for the country’s woes. The magazine draws its conclusion after interviewing a number of German businessmen who are operating in Britain. The German director of a London lighting company had this to say:

  It is more important to (British) people to be treated right than paid properly. If you approach a British worker roughly he will down tools.

Daily Telegraph, 1st August 77

Only a cynic would suggest that treating people “right” is a good bit cheaper than paying them “properly.” The praise rolled on; the head of Klippon Electricals, a sister company of the Weilemuller Company, denied that German workers are better than British. In his own company for example

  Our profitability is so high that it’s the sort of thing others dream about.

No doubt the “others” he refers to are members of the British capitalist class. The workers’ rôle in all this, be they British or German, is simply to make the dream come true.


Still at large
The Chancellor of the Exchequer has an odd sense of humour. When he was talking about the government plans to restrict wage claims to no more than 10 per cent. per annum, he was asked whether negotiations on productivity deals would be permitted to go above this figure. Yes, he thought.

Provided they are genuinely self-financing.

The Times, 11th August 77

This recalled the dreadful beast sighted by Harold Wilson two years ago—“the recalcitrant employer, a rogue elephant” (we think he meant unicorn)—who was causing all manner of difficulty by happily agreeing to over-pay his workers. Sounds as if he must still be at large but we are not entirely surprised to learn that the Labour Party has so far failed to track him down.

Alan D'Arcy

Is there life after Thatcher? (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ungrateful dole queues and Social Security claimants did not celebrate the news that Margaret Thatcher intends to be Prime Minister after the next general election. Will they really have to endure the sculpture of her hair and the nag of her voice for so long? Will she rule over their misery for ever? Or, if she ever does leave the scene, will there be very much left for her successor to take over?

With her huge parliamentary majority, Thatcher can afford to ignore such reservations. Under her leadership, she claims, something called Britain has found something called a new confidence and purpose and all sorts of desirable things arc going up—industrial output: the number of people in work: "personal income”; profits. These are obviously examples of manipulating statistics, viewing movements from a base figure which is convenient so that changes always seem to be as you want them. The allegedly upward movement in employment, for instance, has clearly not happened since Thatcher came to power although it may be possible to make it seem that something like it has occurred in very recent times. So the three million who have not been part of the increase in employment, those who are in work but subject to the downward pressure on wages which has followed large scale unemployment. and those who battle to survive on the meagre state allowances, will not be impressed by the figures. Neither will those who find it increasingly difficult to get prompt medical treatment or access to social services or who are aware that civil liberties are under a growing threat . . . Of course we are accustomed to Prime Ministers telling us that their period of office is one of progress into an enduring prosperity but beneath this specious rhetoric an odious reality festers.

There was rather more gratitude and celebration among the Tory grassroots, although it must be said that political awareness does not flourish in that particular piece of undergrowth. Thatcher is, after all, an unexpectedly effective vote-winner and her blatantly populist appeal to the more regressive impulses among the working class pleases the constituency workers who lick all those envelopes and trudge all those streets. The Prime Minister’s loyal parliamentary lieutenants also made the predictable noises of ecstatic expectation, perhaps spurred on by the unusually large number of cx-Cabinet ministers now lolling on the back benches as a result of disagreeing with the female fuhrer.

In another part of the Conservative Party feelings were not unmixed. Those who see themselves as prospective occupants of Number Ten may become restless and rebellious if Thatcher hangs on so long that they miss their chance; like many of her predecessors, she has neglected to bring on any likely successor, as was the case with Eden and Churchill. Thatcher has also developed a knack of absenting herself when these aspirants are in trouble, as she did when Leon Brittan was wrestling with the siege at the Libyan Embassy. From the unlikely origins of a provincial grocer’s daughter, Thatcher has learned much about the dirty game of politics.

Much of the dismay which greeted Thatcher’s declaration was caused by her name being linked with unemployment, cuts in services, pit closures, attacks on the National Health Service and so on. People who think like that regard the present plight of British capitalism and the wretched poverty of millions of workers here as the results of a deliberate, unnecessary Tory policy, largely the personal inspiration of Thatcher herself. This too is a grass roots opinion and it is just as ill-informed and unhelpful as the ecstacy in the Tory constituencies.

The first thing to be said on this score is that Thatcher’s actions arc by no means unprecedented. In her anniversary statement, when she looked back on five years of Tory rule and forward to centuries more of it, she gave this warning to all workers who might think of struggling to protect their living standards against the government’s attacks: "A lot remains to be done . . . and every bit of industrial disruption just adds to the mountain we have to climb". Nearly twenty years ago, on 26 October 1964, Harold Wilson was saying the same sort of thing, in one of his regular hectoring appearances on TV: "The old fashioned restrictive practices have no place. We must get rid of monopoly practices, overmanning the job, costly demarcation arguments, and a temptation to indulge in wildcat strikes". Wilson was talking about an ".  . . extremely serious economic situation which the country is facing", and just as he was a precedent for Thatcher so there were precedents for him. In the twenties many staple industries, on which much of the fortunes of British capitalism rested, were in decline. Coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding and textiles were particularly hard hit by the rise of foreign competition and as they were in many cases concentrated in a few centres their decline caused severe hardship and depression also to be concentrated. Just as they are nowadays, areas like the Rhondda and the Tyne became wastelands of despair, relieved by occasional flashes of rebellion. It seemed then, as it is thought by some people now, that large segments of industry in Britain were being destroyed never to revive—and there was a popular tendency to blame this on the deliberate policy of a particularly callous government. The similarly popular remedy was to change the party in government to one which promised to be less callous—like one including Philip Snowden, Jimmy Thomas, Ramsay Macdonald . . .

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

Anyone who thought, and who now thinks, like that simply does not understand capitalism and its cycle of economic activity. The depression of the twenties was followed by a measure of recovery before the Great Crash and the intense misery of the thirties. The war saw another recovery and for some years a condition in which full employment was itself a problem to the capitalist class because of the strength it gave to the workers’ bargaining. A succession of governments, Labour as well as Conservative, grappled with the problem of holding wages back at a time when the pressure was for them to rise. They called their attempts at restriction by many names—a pay pause, stages one. two. three . . . : the social contract, and so on. They all amounted to the same thing: a government trying to do its job of running capitalism in the interest of the ruling class and against the interests of the working class.

The post-war boom, so long-lived, was beginning to falter just as the minority Labour government of 1974/9 came to office. After a brief honeymoon with their election manifesto, during which they bought off the miners’ strike which had given such anguish to Ted Heath, Labour got down to the affairs of the British capitalist class—which meant assaulting the workers' living standards. As the recession deepened Labour deserted the very Keynesian policies which, they had once so confidently argued, were the positive remedy to any slump:

   It was Denis Healey, not Geoffrey Howe, who first put monetarism on the agenda of British politics, and abandoned a Keynesian strategy. It was Healey, not Howe, who put prices and profits before public spending and jobs (Stuart Holland MP, Guardian 16 June 1980).

Keynesianism was not alone as a cherished principle to be rejected by that government. A party with its roots in the trade unions, and so to be expected to look favourably on union activities to improve workers' conditions, they fought the unions to the last day of their office. When that courageous and useful bunch of workers, the firemen, were forced into strike action in an effort to improve their meagre pay, it was the Labour government which contemptuously broke the strike with the use of blacklegging troops. When the hospital workers, another group of socially useful people, struggled for better pay and conditions, Labour ministers urged that blacklegging should be a normal, accepted practice:

    I assert very clearly that everyone has the right to work and everyone has the right to cross a picket line. It is not a sacred object and I hope they will do so (James Callaghan. House of Commons, 23 January 1979).

Of course the Labour government claimed that all of this—holding wages down, breaking strikes, cutting services—was all done to improve our lives although they could never satisfactorily explain just how this was to come about. It was all, they said, something to do with fighting inflation, by which they meant rising prices and the inexorable alternative was high unemployment, once described by Denis Healey as ". . . by far the biggest single cause of avoidable human misery and suffering’’ (House of Commons. 20 April 1972). At the time the Tories were in power so it was safe for Healey to anguish about human suffering but when his time as Chancellor ended unemployment had doubled, extending this avoidable misery to twice as many people as under the Tories. Healey had celebrated his accession to the Chancellorship with a threat to squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked but in the event the rich did rather less squeaking under Labour than under the Tories. During the Heath government the proportion of wealth owned by the top 1 per cent fell from 30 per cent to 22.5 per cent; under Labour it climbed, to 23.5 per cent in 1975, 24.9 per cent in 1976 and so on.

The reasonable conclusion from all this, comparing one period of capitalism to another, and government by one party to that of another, is that there is nothing of significance to choose between them. Capitalism in the early thirties under MacDonald is little different from capitalism in the early eighties under Thatcher. Anyone who thinks that things here are so bad that they should escape abroad must think again, for there is little to choose between capitalism in one country before another. In France, for example, the Mitterrand government, which was greeted by delirious left-wingers as the start of a socialist revolution, is now carrying out policies which are to all intents and purposes identical with those of the Giscard d’Estaing administration which it succeeded. Finance Minister Jacques Delors recently spelled out what Mitterrand "socialism" means: 

   The road to economic salvation can only follow a model which puts the accent on a drastic drop in inflation, maintenance of the buying power of our currency, and the ferocious search for competitiveness.

Delors’ austerity programme, according to the Guardian (4 May 1984) is being compared to those of Thatcher, Reagan and the former right wing Premier Raymond Barre. By the same token it could also be compared to those of Healey and of Labour Chancellors of the past—Cripps, Snowden, Gaitskcll.

None of this is coincidental. This present recession affects capitalism worldwide and politicians all over the world are trying to deal with it in the same futile, anti-working class way as their predecessors in office did. There have been slumps before and there will be again, for they are endemic to capitalism. The preferred remedies remain basically unchanged through time and space despite the fact that at no time and nowhere have they been effective. The only thing which changes is the political personalities who promote these remedies, and the succession of impoverished workers who obstinately support what the politicians represent in the face of the massive evidence that this is all a waste of effort.

The simple, clear conclusion to be drawn from this is that we must look for something more fundamental and enduring than the characters of politicians and their panicky responses if we are to understand capitalism and why it works as it does. A social system rooted in class ownership of the means of life is essentially anarchic; it cannot be controlled by economists or politicians; it must produce conflict and impoverishment for the mass of the people. That was what happened before Thatcher ever came squawking into her Grantham babyhood and it will be happening after she is gone to her grave.

So yes, there will be life after Thatcher—the life of capitalism. When she leaves office some other politicians will go through the same impotent deceptions and will be the object of a similar ill-informed adulation.

Ivan

Political Notes: Splits (1982)

The Political Notes column from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Splits
Does the Tory government know its own mind? On the one hand we have Howe and Tebbitt, dredging among the official statistics, assuring us that there are unmistakable signs that the worst of the recession is over and that we can now look forward to better times ahead. On the other there is Francis Pym, who has the job of master-minding the government’s propaganda, warning us that things are going to get worse:

  In the short run, living standards generally can only fall . . . we have to find ways of coping with and living with much higher levels of unemployment

There is no evidence that Pym was thinking about his own living standards or his own unemployment, although he talked about what “we” have to cope with. In any case, those with memories extending beyond last week may well prefer this sort of gloomy prognostication, from their experience of what has too often followed a politician’s hearty assurance that better times are just around the corner.

Are speeches like Pym’s, then, completely irrelevant? In fact, some people might find consolation in them, for no politician can forecast what will happen to capitalism’s economy; they can no more foresee a slump than they can a boom. If they had this ability the present recession would not have happened. There would be no three million dole queue. There would be no public expenditure cuts. We would be spared the offensiveness of ministers like Norman Tebbitt, who pretends that poverty (ours, not his) is good for us. We would not have to endure Thatcher’s nervous defiance of the reality she sees all around her. And we would be freed of the drivel of people like Pym.

Whatever stress this government is under, they are not split on the fundamental principle that capitalism must be run in the interests of its owning minority of parasites.


Malignant
The death last month of Ritchie-Calder saw the end of an identikit lefty, who moved easily in the unreal world of soft headed, temporising liberals, ready to support any excess of capitalism provided it is the work of their favoured party.

A devoted member of the Labour Party and a journalist who wrote mainly about science—which he saw as a means of dealing with social problems—Ritchie-Calder must have been thrilled when, in 1963, Harold Wilson began to claim for Labour the role of the party of science. The red (or was it white?) hot technological revolution, promised Wilson, was going to abolish poverty and strife through a four per cent growth in productivity. It sounded simple and it deceived a lot of people, like Ritchie-Calder, who should have known better. And of course it didn’t happen as Wilson promised.

Typically, Ritchie-Calder was a professed pacifist who nevertheless supported war, ending up with an important job on the Political Warfare Executive during 1939/45. Plenty of other lefties went the same disreputable way, after a brief obligatory struggle with what they called their principles.

After the war, Ritchie-Calder's continuing quest for impotence led him into the United Nations; he toured the Congo on their behalf during the troubles in 1960. He probably felt more comfortable there; the history of that country’s blood soaked exploitation by the rubber-seeking imperialist powers can keep a left wing journalist’s typewriter rattling for months.

Inevitably, he joined CND. No Aldermaston march was complete without his personification of the delusion that capitalism can be a society where human knowledge and achievement are used for human benefit.

And inevitably again, the ruling class showed what they thought of him that he presented no threat to their interests—when in 1966 he became a life peer and. a few years later, chairman of the Metrication Board.

Ritchie-Calder was one of those eminent people who give respectability to the organisations of capitalist reform—and therefore to capitalism itself. They may or may not be sincere; what is undeniable is that they are dangerously misguided. We have had too much of them and of their works. Behind a benign exterior they are as devastating as a malignant disease.

 

Cuts

Margaret Thatcher was once dubbed by Labour MPs, taking advantage of the abolition of free milk for some school children, as Thatcher the Snatcher. (The Iron Lady later said that she had been so wounded by these slurs that she would creep home and weep privately to her husband Denis.)

Well now the Prime Minister has advanced up the scale of criminality and from a snatcher has become, according to one outraged Labour MP. the Westminster Ripper. This parliamentary language may be written into the Labour Party campaign to exploit the government’s discomfiture over the cuts in public expenditure, which are now being blamed for almost all our ills from suicidal unemployed to decaying hospitals.

From this there has emerged a handy, distorting equation: Tory equals cuts equals poverty; Labour equals no cuts equals prosperity. Like all such propaganda, this has no basis in truth.

The Labour government of 1929 was infamous for its attacks on the already precarious living standards of the workers. That this was no accident was proven by such Chancellors as “Austerity” Cripps and Roy Jenkins, with his lugubrious warnings about the disaster awaiting us if we continued to live it up in our palaces on caviar and champagne. As a result of watching Jenkins on TV, a number of slum dwellers are said to have guiltily reduced their consumption of fish fingers, hoping thereby to contribute to the national recovery.

The last in this line—Denis Healey—was known as the “first monetarist”, which did not mean that he was a “monetarist” but that he zealously pursued a policy of public expenditure cuts. The latest account of this is in the book Inside the Treasury by Joel Barnett, who was Healey’s Financial Secretary. Apart from admitting that, in contrast to their promises to be able to control capitalism, the Labour government of 1974 did not have the first idea of what to do about the economy, Barnett records how Healey’s proposed cuts were pushed through the Cabinet, against some typically inconsistent opposition: “There is no will in this Cabinet,” expostulated Peter Shore, “To tell the IMF to take a running jump, even if unemployment rose to 2 million”.

Both Labour and Conservative governments have imposed cuts, which is another way of saying that they have both tried to do what the capitalist system demands of a government. They are basically in complete agreement on that. And that is another way of saying that no member of the working class, with the power to transform society, should misuse that power by supporting them.

The Passing Show: "Double-Think" (1963)

The Passing Show Column from the December 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

When George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-four, he was concerned in particular with what he called “double-think.” This was the term used to illustrate the crazy practice of reconciling one's self to an evil by equating it with its opposite, summed up in such terms as “War is Peace." What impressed Socialists when reading Orwell's book was that some at least of the facets mentioned in it were with us already, particularly “doublethink." Private property society has always had its double-think to help justify its existence to the underdogs, but double-think has become sharpened and enhanced under capitalism to a degree.

Take "War is Peace” for example. Countless times have we been told that we must arm to the teeth to preserve peace, never mind the abundant evidence to show the futility of such action that it does anything but preserve what uneasy peace we may enjoy. Labour, Liberal and Tory parties have all preached the same tragic drivel, and the working class have largely agreed with them.

And should war come, there will no doubt be plenty of them now to urge us to “fight for peace” (another bit of double-think), or rather for the recovery of the peace which their policies have so blatantly failed to preserve. But by then they will have quietly forgotten their previous words. In the meantime, they will continue to vote for “defence” expenditure (more double-think; no power ever has "offence” expenditure), and assure us how much in our interests it all is.

Propaganda goes on the whole time to keep us conditioned to the idea. Sometime, it is more of an undertone, but it is there nevertheless. An example of this was the row which blew up recently over the Australian government's decision to order the American TFX bomber to equip its air-force instead of the British TSR-2. In a subsequent attack on the Tory Government, Labour M.P. Denis Healey said:

  It is said that the whole (TSR-2) programme will cost us about £1,000 millions, which works out at £20 millions for every aircraft ordered . . .  does this make sense in military terms, particularly when the army is still crying out . . .  for helicopters and other transport aircraft which could be bought for only a tiny fraction of the sum? ” (Guardian, 5/11 /63.)

You get our meaning? Mr. Healey did not spend precious minutes arguing a case for armaments as such. The whole assumption behind his statement was that, of course, you agreed they were desirable. It was just a question of which armaments, when, and how much they would cost. Note in addition how you are asked to believe that it is your money which is at stake and that therefore you have an interest in seeing how it is spent.

But in truth, such is not for you. An interest like that is for the capitalist class and their spokesmen, like Mr. Healey, because the colossal sums spent on war weapons as well as other state expenditure cannot by any stretch of the imagination come from workers’ pockets. Workers get their wage packets and the rest belongs to the capitalist class, but strenuous efforts are made to delude workers otherwise. For without their support, armaments are impossible. Indeed, without it, so is capitalism. There’s the lesson to learn.


Hypocrisy
There was once and still is a man called Dr. Nkrumah who was imprisoned by the British but later became prime minister of the new West African state of Ghana. Later still he became Ghana's first president when it was declared a republic.

Not long after his rise to premiership, ugly rumours began to circulate about his dictatorial ambitions. Some of his more outspoken opponents just “disappeared” and threats and intimidation were levelled against others. During his lifetime as premier, the Ghanaian parliament passed in 1958 the infamous Preventive Detention Act which enabled his government to imprison for up to five years without trial, anyone considered a danger to the state.

Now we read that this act has been amended to add yet another five years to the period of imprisonment where the for release under the old act. “A distasteful necessity,” claimed the minister of defence in his support of the new move. Now where have we heard such words before? Ah, yes. In South Africa recently when similar powers were given to the Verwoed government.

And talking of South Africa, this brings us to the whole point. There was another of those demonstrations in Trafalgar Square on November 3rd, this time in protest against apartheid. Among the many messages of sympathy and support was one from none other than—Dr. Nkrumah. Somebody once said that those who live in glass houses should never throw stones, but clearly this does not apply to capitalist politicians. Cant, humbug and hypocrisy are political meat and bread to them. Nkrumah is certainly no exception.


The Duke again
The Duke of Edinburgh certainly gets around and simply loves making speeches. On October 30 he spoke at the Coal Industry Society’s luncheon, on the next day at a flight safety conference, and on November 5 at a nature conservation study group. A record enough to turn any politician green with envy, you might think, though it was the first of these speeches which interested us most.

“How much longer could we go on exploiting every feature of this country for gain?” he demanded to know, and continued : “Is it possible to reconcile the national need to increase prosperity with the national need to use this prosperity for the benefit of the human population?'’ He said he did not pretend to know the answer, but a few thoughts do occur to us.

First of all “we"; if by that he means the majority of us [we] do not, in fact cannot, exploit any aspect of this or any other country for gain. We are the working class, and all that we “gain” from our labours is a wage packet. That doesn’t make us very prosperous. Conversely, of course, there is the other ten per cent., and this includes the Duke, who do the exploiting and reap the benefits of ease and comfort. This other “we,” if they were honest, would answer the Duke's leading question with the words: "For just as long as we can." Or, to put it another way. “For as long as the workers are mugs enough to let us.”

Blessed are the Poor . . .

Who said that? Well whoever said it, there's one body which doesn’t believe it, and that is the Church of England. The total revenue to the Church Commissioners for the financial year ending March 31 was over £17 millions, of which more than £9 millions was from stock exchange investments and about £5½ millions from real estate rentals. In fact, stock exchange and property deals have more than doubled the Commissioners' income in the past fifteen years. Their capital assets are valued at more than £300 millions.

Rich, very rich, you would say? So would we, but not the Commissioners. Another report followed a few days after their financial one, telling us that they were not really wealthy after all. Apparently the Commissioners contribute only about half of the money needed to keep the Church working. Be that as it may, it does not really concern us. A fool and his money may soon be parted, but what interests us is where his huge sums of money come from in the first place. There is only one answer— from the exploitation of the working class.

Eddie Critchfield

When Labour Ruled (3) (1992)

From the January 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

In their wildest dreams—and some of them have been pretty wild—the Labour Party could not have hoped for more auspicious circumstances in which to contest a general election than they had in February 1974. Quite simply, the Heath government handed them victory on a plate, liberally garnished with enough propaganda material to satisfy the hungriest opposition. The Tories had won power in 1970, against most expectations, with what seemed a clearly-defined policy on unions, industrial disputes and state investment in industry. These were quickly modified, or abandoned. or applied with such purpose that the country was sunk into the misery of the Three Day Week—and that over Christmas.

In contrast to the Tories’ apparent yearning to return to the days of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Labour Party under Harold Wilson could offer the guarantee that their close relationships with the unions would get the factories and the power stations working again, the street lights and the television sets on. and the grateful workers co-operating by moderating their wage claims. What was surprising was that the Labour Party only just scraped back into office, as a minority government. Their eventual defeat five years later was not so surprising because by then they also were branded as a party of confusion and compromise and by the chaos of the so-called Winter of Discontent.

Familiar faces

But there was more to that defeat than the strikes and disruption of that winter. When Labour took over in March 1974 (a few days after the election were spent in Heath trying to survive in a coalition with the Liberals; as their leader then was Jeremy Thorpe it was probably just as well for them that the negotiations failed) they had a lot going for them.They were experienced and capable in the techniques of government; they knew how to run a ministry, deal with the higher-ranking civil servants, fight their battles in the Cabinet, persuade the working class that they were not doing what they actually were doing and so on. Such deceptions are always better received by the voters if they came from a familiar face and in people like Wilson. Callaghan, Healey and Jenkins Labour had some very familiar faces indeed. They had made themselves familiar during their previous spell in power, telling the working class that British capitalism was in crisis and they must tighten their belts to rescue it.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

Barbara Castle, who was another familiar face mainly because as Minister of Transport she had brought in the breathalyser, excitedly confided to her diary: "We could turn out to be the most successful Labour government in history”. Harold Wilson promised everyone that the mistakes of the 1964-70 Labour government would not be repeated; for one thing he would confine himself to a relaxed vigilance to ensure that Labour carried out the promises in its election manifesto. On one past "mistake" he was specific. "A wage freeze is totally unacceptable. It would destroy this government", he informed the Cabinet in December that year.

Within three days of the return the government had ended Heath’s state of emergency and Three Day Week, mainly by settling the coal strike. The Pay Board, set up by the Heath government to check on wage claims which were above the official limits, was abolished and in July statutory wage restraint was ended. Other titbits were thrown to a relieved and expectant electorate—a freeze on rents, a promise to increase pensions, control prices and subsidise food. Museum admission charges were abolished—who now remembers that they were ever free?

Social Contract

Labour’s alternative to the Heath governments statutory wage restraint was the Social Contract. This was the central plank of their wages policy which guaranteed an end to strikes and other industrial disruption. "It is”, Wilson assured us in their manifesto for the election in October 1974, "about economic justice between individuals and regions. It is about co-operation and conciliation, not conflict and confrontation". In fact there was nothing new about the Social Contract since it was wage restraint by another name, based on the hope that the unions would moderate their wage claims in return for something called the Social Wage which covered things like state benefits, subsidies and rent control.

In October 1974, hoping that the workers would agree with their own assessment of their brief time in office (according to Wilson "no post-war British Government has achieved more in six months”) Labour called another election. Their hopes were not reflected in the re-election results; although there were 42 more Labour MP’s than Tories their overall majority was only three. To make matters worse the government was confronted with economic problems which made the Social Contract and the other promises in their manifesto look decidedly fragile—at a time when they could no longer blame the Tories for the mess they inherited.

Except that there was a different Chancellor of the Exchequer, it was like 1966 all over again. Early in 1975 Denis Healey was telling the unions, the Cabinet and anyone else who would listen that British capitalism's big problem was "inflation", and to beat it he proposed to cut public expenditure by £1 billion, including £62 million from the National Health Service. This was a bit puzzling to those Labour Party supporters who had believed their own propaganda that economic problems could easily be dealt with by increasing public expenditure. Some of them may also have wondered about Healey’s orthodox insistence that "inflation" was caused by excessive wage claims and his pressing for rises to be limited to ten percent which he knew, with prices rising as they were, would mean an effective cut in living standards of 2.5 percent. Was this, they may have asked themselves, what was meant by the Social Contract?

Soaking the rich

In any case the Social Contract did not survive for very long. In July 1975 the government more or less admitted that the whole idea was a lot of vote-catching nonsense when they announced a policy of virtually statutory wage restraint under which rises would be limited to £6 a week. The responsibility for such exposure of Labour's electoral deceits was. of course, laid on greedy and irresponsible workers, who may have been taken in by Healey's promise to squeeze the rich "until the pips squeak" and were unimpressed in a different way when he revised this, in February 1978, to "there is no way of avoiding (public expenditure cuts) by soaking the rich". Labour’s desperate excuse for their assaults on workers' living standards had always been that the alternative was even worse— mass unemployment. But this argument began to lose its terrors for the workers as, apart from what else was happening, unemployment began to rise—in January 1975 to 700,000 and a year later to well over a million.

Serious doubts about whether the government was losing their nerve were stimulated when, in July 1978, they produced a White Paper, Winning the Hattie Against Inflation, which announced their intention to hold pay rises to five percent and to impose sanctions against companies which settled above this level. In the circles where the pips were not yet squeaking—the CBI and the City—the White Paper's promise of tighter controls on wages got a relieved welcome. In other circles, especially those where the lower paid no longer had any pips worth squeaking, it was regarded as the last straw. At the end of 1978 there was a flood of pay claims way above the White Papers limit. Local authority manual workers put in for 40 percent, road haulage and tanker drivers 25 percent to 30 percent and Ford settled a claim at 17 percent.

The media, where there was general agreement that workers were readier to live nearer the poverty line, illustrated their point with poignant pictures of streets obstructed with uncollected rubbish and stories of bodies lying unburied because of striking gravediggers. Among such workers. whose interests the Labour Party had promised to protect with special tenderness, the bitter realisation came that they had been conned.

By-elections

The Labour government’s excuse for all this was that they were fighting a battle which, provided we all obeyed orders, would result in a final solution to the economic problems of British capitalism and so unprecedented prosperity for us all. The extent to which this was believed can by gauged by the succession of by-election defeats in safe seats such as Walsall North, Stechford, Roy Jenkins’s old constituency (he had shrewdly removed himself to a remunerative and insulated job in Europe), and. greatest blow of all, the mining seat at Ashfield. Labour’s response to this was not to stand by their principles, go down fighting or any of the things mentioned in The Red Flag. Instead they compromised all they claimed to stand for, including that precious manifesto, by entering into a pact with the Liberals. This enabled them to carry on for a while; they were not embarrassed at the price they had to pay for their wretched survival.

By the end of their time in office the Labour Party had proved as conclusively as possible that capitalism was out of their control. Many of the promises they had made in opposition could not be fulfilled; many others, such as the Social Contract, had been tried only to be abandoned as failures. They had failed to do the one thing—eliminate unemployment, which Healey had described when in opposition in 1972 as “by far the biggest single cause of avoidable human misery and suffering”. When they lost power in 1979 there were 1.5 million people out of work. In 1974 they had promised that they could easily deal with such problems. Confronted with their failure to do so they resorted to hysterical attacks on the working class, such as their encouragement to cross picket lines and report over-forceful pickets to the police.

Labour's time in power had prepared the workers into an acceptance of the Thatcher policies of so-called monetarism, cuts in public expenditure, screwing down state benefit claimants, restricting trade union power, and so on. The Tories exploited this situation to the full. Just as Labour had had victory handed to them on a plate in 1974 so the Conservatives had it five years later. There is a lesson in this, about the impotence of capitalism’s political parties in face of the system’s problems and their cynical response to it. Labour’s hope now is that we shall forget those lamentable years when they were the government and trust them to have a new approach, fresh ideas and a reborn determination not to make the same mistakes again. Well, whoever and whatever may be on their side in this, history is not.

Ivan

Running Commentary: Who does Denis menace (1980)

The Running Commentary Column from the November 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who does Denis menace?

Strange things happen to Labour politicians when they are out of office. They begin to get very concerned about unemployment and rising prices and cuts in public services and poverty and slums—as if these social problems had not been prominent while they were in office.

Occasionally they strike rebellious poses—a tired throwback to the days when they were more misled than hypocritical. At such times they are capable of saying the most surprising, or the most dishonest things. Consider, for example, the recent words of Denis Healey, Labour’s ex-Chancellor famous for his axe-swinging, union bashing, wage claim stifling act. All through his time at the Treasury, Healey struggled to hold wages down; his dying demand as Chancellor was that workers should accept rises of at most 5 per cent at a time when prices were going up at something like 10 per cent a year.

But now that his bottom is warming a seat on the opposition benches Healey seems to see things in a different light. Refusing to cross a picket line of striking technicians at Capital Radio, he explained: “I do not believe in strikebreaking”. He did not, as far as we know, add that he also does not believe in upsetting trade unions at the very time that he is in the running for election to the Labour Party leadership. It is not so long ago that the government of which Healey was a prominent member used troops to break the firemen’s strike and was almost daily denouncing workers who were combining to get better wages. Towards the end, such was their fervour in the battle against strikers that some ministers were openly encouraging workers to break picket lines.

Workers should not be misled by Healey’s sweet words now: his interest remains, as it was, to protect the privileged position of the British ruling class. If workers are misled enough to forget recent history and to give Labour another spell in power they will rapidly realise, as they survey the wreckage of their hopes, that nothing has changed.

Not Vestey taxing

The queues at Dewhursts the Butchers must have positively reeled under the weight of the customers’ sarcasm after the disclosure of the massive legal tax-avoidance dodges operated by the Vestey family.

Workers are very sensitive on this issue; seeing on each pay slip an apparent deduction for income tax, and reading on sales tickets the dread words “Plus VAT”, they not unreasonably come to the conclusion that they pay taxes. They further conclude that anyone who avoids paying taxes is thrusting a greater burden on the rest. From these first fallacies they argue that things like roads, nationalised industries and armed forces are actually paid for out of their wages. Some workers go so far as to imagine that they are share-holders in an enterprise called Great Britain Ltd. except that they never actually receive any dividends). What escapes them is the fact that, whatever the size of their wage, it is generally what is needed to reproduce their energies as a class—and this holds good however much or how little tax they see deducted from each payment.

So who does pay taxes? Or who does not when they should, as in the case of the Vesteys? Something of an answer to that question was contained in an indignant editorial in the Sunday Times, which first publicised the Vestey fiddle: 

. . .  its (the Vestey family) members have enjoyed the considerable pleasures of being rich in England without contributing anything near their fair share to the defences which kept those pleasures in being —against foreign enemies in wartime, against disorder and disease in time of peace.

This passage, perhaps unwittingly, illustrates the reasons for the existence of the armed and police forces, for the entire state apparatus: to preserve the rights and the privileges of capitalists like the Vesteys. It also implies that those same capitalists are obliged to pay for that apparatus; after all, even the Sunday Times is not daft enough to suggest that people who try to enjoy being poor in England pay to defend the pleasures of the Vesteys.

Workers who wax indignant at the self-image of them being robbed by the tax man would do better to consider the legalised robbery on which capitalist society is actually based. Much better, to talk about that in the meat queue.

Superboring

To judge from the overwhelmingly popular reading matter on any tube train or in any ’bus queue, many people are not aware that reading certain newspapers can seriously damage their health. One danger, for example, is the development of chronic blind spots about society. At a time when, to take only two facts, some 15 million children die each year from the effects of malnutrition while the nuclear powers cosset the capability to destroy much of what we are encouraged to call civilised life, those same newspapers prefer to devote much of their space to crushingly boring non-issues.

There is, to begin with, the question of who Prince Charles will marry and whether, when he eventually gets to the altar, he will be capable of consummating the union so that the newspapers can have some more fun about a royal offspring. This matter commands a lot of attention in the popular press although it is about as relevant and meaningful as a London Transport ’bus timetable.

Then there has been another battle of suitors of a different kind—the epic struggle between Peter Cadbury and Lord Harris over who shall be boss of Westward Television, settled at last when Cadbury threw in the towel. Support for one side or the other in the non-history making event was determined by which contestant, in the opinion of the voting shareholder, offered the better chance of getting Westward’s licence to print money renewed by the Independent Broadcasting Authority.

Lord Harris was second-in-command at the Home Office during the Labour government; he did not become famous for any tolerant attitude towards the working class while he was there and prisoners hoping to get out a bit early were not cheered when, just before Labour were kicked out of office, the Home Secretary appointed Harris Chairman of the Parole Board. He was given a big job at Westward by Cadbury, in the hope that someone so much in the know would be able to do a lot to ensure the renewal of Westward’s franchise franchise.

The battle between these two representatives of the capitalist class had little promise, not even one to change the style of the TV programmes with which tired workers are wont to renew their energies during their off-work periods. Yet the media found the story of endless fascination, fit subject for much analysis and comment. Do the workers not resent being fed this sort of drivel? Are they satisfied, to be told that this is all they are able to absorb? Is there no limit to the weight of insults which, along with their exploitation, can be heaped on their heads?

That 17 per cent bank rate (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Companies borrowing from banks and householders with building society mortgages naturally like interest rates to be low. So the government’s announcement that the Bank of England minimum lending rate had gone up to 17 per cent, an all-time record, was greeted with an outcry from the borrowers and jeers from the Labour opposition.

But this is only the latest incident in the story of high interest rates. When the rate went up to 7 per cent under the Tories between 1951 and 1964 (then a post-war record), Harold Wilson promised that the next Labour government would “end the present government’s doctrinaire policy of high interest rates”. But under the Labour government between 1964 and 1970 it reached 8 per cent (Tory jeers), making nonsense of George Brown’s hope to see mortgage rates down to 3 per cent. The next post-war high bank rate was 13 per cent under the Tories between 1970 and 1974 (Labour jeers).

Again the Labour Party, in its February 1974 election programme, attacked Tory failure to keep interest rates down; but while the Labour Party was in office between 1974 and 1979 the bank rate went up to 15 per cent (Tory jeers).

It was at the October 1974 general election that Margaret Thatcher promised to keep mortgage interest below 9½ per cent — now it is 15 per cent. So do governments control interest rates and fix them at whatever level they choose? Margaret Thatcher now says no. Replying to Jim Callaghan in the House of Commons on 15 November, she said:

He must not run away with the idea that interest rates are just determined by the government.

She explained that the rates rise when too many people, companies and the government itself are borrowing. She added:

They are determined by the activities of ordinary men and women demanding wages in excess of output and then striking, and also borrowing to keep going.

As the Tory election programme had promised that the government would help to keep interest rates down by borrowing less, Sir Geoffrey Howe had to explain why the government finds itself compelled to borrow more. He said it was due to strikes which had “delayed the collection of VAT and telephone bills. At the peak the arrears on telephone bills are expected to reach £1,000 million.” (House of Commons, 15 November).

The Labour Party has always believed that it could keep interest rates down. A report adopted by its party conference in 1944 promised ‘cheap money’ permanently. “The Chancellor should have statutory powers to require any bank to lend him any sum he likes, for as long as he likes, and on what terms he chooses.”

They appear not to have noticed that the ability of banks to lend to the government depends on offering interest high enough to attract deposits to the banks, which would be impossible if the banks had to lend to the government at artificially low rates.

When Margaret Thatcher says that governments do not determine interest rates she is stating a half-truth. It is true in the sense that Bank of England lending rates merely reflect what is going on in the money market, but it ignores the effect on interest rates of inflation, for which the government itself is responsible.

In the nineteenth century when there was no inflation, bank rate was generally less than a third of what it is now, rising to peaks at times of crisis when companies were forced to borrow at high rates to save themselves from bankruptcy. Inflation has changed the conditions for borrowers and lenders. If prices rise by, say, 25 per cent a year, the purchasing power of money at the end of a year is reduced by 20 per cent.

If someone with £100 lends it at 25 per cent, at the end of a year they have £125, but its original purchasing power is reduced to £100. They will have lent at no real interest at all. To get any real interest they have to lend at something above the rate of inflation. This is why in the past twenty years interest rates have reached record peaks. The responsibility lies with the Labour and Tory governments who have pursued a policy of continuous inflation.

In Germany and Switzerland, where inflation rates are much lower than in Britain, ‘bank rates’ are 6 per cent and 4½ per cent. But in Germany during the hyperinflation of the 1920s people were borrowing at rates of hundreds per cent a month. Inflation, as Marx showed, is caused by an excess issue of paper money. His view is supported by abundant evidence; whenever and wherever excess issue has been stopped, the price rise has been halted.

While Denis Healey was Chancellor, the Bank of England, under his control, printed and put into circulation an additional £4,550 million of notes, and the cost of living doubled. This additional money goes into government revenue and is spent. In 1978 Denis Healey, declaring his determination to curb inflation, made speeches in which he said, “We are not printing money now”. Margaret Thatcher has repeated it in exactly the same words. If inflation results from an excess issue of ‘money’, and if the Labour government in 1978 and the Tory government in 1979 are ‘not now printing money’, why have prices continued to rise?

Here we come to a piece of confusion created by economists and politicians. When governments say they are ‘not printing money’, they are not talking about the excess issue of notes but what they call ‘money supply’, which consists predominantly of bank deposits. In the week in which Margaret Thatcher said “we are not printing money”, the Bank of England printed and issued an additional £150 million of notes. In the first seven months of Tory government the Bank’s note issue went up by £625 million.

In face of all the evidence, they deny that the excess issue of notes has any effect on the price level. So during all the time that governments have been claiming to curb inflation they have gone on promoting it — incidentally causing interest rates to be high.

Workers who think how happy they would be if prices went down instead of up and if mortgage rates were very low are mistaken. They should look at the inter-war years. Prices, including house prices, were only a fraction of what they are now, but so were wages. There were at least as many people homeless, and workers unable to afford to buy a house or take out a mortgage or rent decent accommodation. For the workers, capitalism is just as intolerable without inflation as with it, with high interest rates or low.

Edgar Hardcastle