Observations: Santa on the spot (1986)

The Observations Column from the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Santa on the spot

Playing Santa Claus can be an extremely disagreeable way of contributing to a Christmas party. It's not just that all those robes and false whiskers make you feel like the pudding in the steamer, nor the physical assaults which must be uncomplainingly absorbed from impatient, disappointed or inquisitive children. There's also the fact that you're being set up to work a deception on people who, by their age, are assumed to be nicely vulnerable to it.

Whatever the hazards faced by the amateur Santa Claus they are as nothing compared to those of the professionals, those derelict actors who seem ready to take almost any risk for the sake of a bit of work in the Christmas spending spree. This year it promises to be even worse; if there are any Santas getting job satisfaction by resisting the idea that Christmas is a vast festival of commerce, 1986 should make them change their minds.

The pressure is on, in all the big stores, for the jolly Santas to turn in higher sales figures and some decidedly unromantic methods are being used in the process. Harrods, where Santa has always wandered freely about the toy department chatting with the kids, are now confining him to his enchanted castle because, the store say, the old method was too random to ensnare all the possible children. Hamleys, where they have never had a Santa before, now have three of them working shifts in a magic forest where the time and motion people roam among the clockwork animals. Each child is allocated 25 seconds to state their dearest Christmas wishes and the Christmas sport of mishearing the child's name, traditional but time-consuming, has been eliminated through a system of name cards.

It is worse outside London. In Glasgow and Manchester Santa had to bid perilously for publicity by shinning up a 100-foot ladder, amid exploding fireworks, onto the roof of the store. In Chester he was winched up to a high window by the fire brigade. For all this, of course, youth and fitness are needed; Santa, like so many other jobs, is no longer for the older man.

None of this is calculated to bring a magic sparkle to a child's eyes, but to enliven the sales figures. Selfridges are planning to process a quarter of a million children through Santa's grotto this year — a quarter of a million spenders, that is. Maximising customers, to use the stores' jargon, means maximising profits, which is a nice seasonal present for the shareholders.

It gives a new meaning to the old saying about Christmas being for the children.


Bus de-regulation

The recent de-regulation of buses is absurd even by the warped standards of capitalism It is the latest outcome of the Tory Party's central economic tenet: "If it's profitable then privatise it”. The result: total chaos in many towns and cities outside London as hundreds of private bus operators compete for a limited number of profitable routes; inner city streets in towns like Glasgow congested with hundreds of almost empty buses looking for passengers, while on the outskirts of the city and in rural areas people stand at bus stops waiting for buses that no longer run. paying the price for living on "uneconomic" routes.

For such people some form of public transport will still have to be provided: employers will still expect their work force to get to work on time. So the local council will be obliged to lay on public transport on these "uneconomic" routes. In other words the state will still be involved in public transport provision, albeit on a more limited scale.

The reason why utilities and services like transport, gas. electricity and water were nationalised in the first place was because it was recognised that it was more efficient and cost-effective for the state to run certain essential services than private capitalists. But it looks as if the Tory obsession with privatisation now means that that lesson must be learned all over again. In the meantime it's workers who will suffer as a result of the chaos — capitalists may run bus companies, but they certainly don't have to travel by bus.


Undeserving poor

In the nineteenth century the Poor Law made a distinction between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor. The "deserving" poor, people like widows and the long term sick or disabled, were granted Poor Law relief: the "undeserving", especially the able-bodied unemployed, were subjected to the workhouse test to see if they were really desperate or just shiftless scroungers. The idea was that only the really desperate who had no other alternative would put up with the brutally punitive regime of the workhouse.

That same mentality has always been present in the modern system of welfare benefits (hence the different benefit rates for unemployed and other claimants). So the government's latest "available for work" test is just the last in a long line of methods for sorting the "deserving" from the "scroungers" (with the added bonus of bringing down the embarrassingly high unemployment figures before the next election).

The unemployed are to be required to fill in a new questionnaire when they claim benefit to enable (according to Lord Young) "a proper assessment to be made of a person's entitlement to benefit". The claimant will be asked a series of trick questions: if they give the wrong answer then they are likely to have their benefit suspended. Questions like:

• Are you immediately available for work? (Correct answer: "Yes")
• What wages will you accept? (Correct answer: "I'll take anything, no matter how low, that is offered me").
• Do you have children or a disabled relative to care for? If so can alternative arrangements for their care be made immediately? (Correct answer: "A neighbour or relative has promised, that in the event of my being offered a job. then they would be prepared to step in to look after baby/granny/disabled relative").
• Are you prepared to accept work in another town? (Correct answer: "I'll get on my bike and go anywhere just so long as you 'll give me a job").

Although the government has dismissed claims that they are merely trying to fiddle the unemployment figures Kenneth Clarke. Paymaster General, said that if the new scheme reduced the number of claims allowed by less than two per cent then it would pay for itself, including the £14 million cost of employing 1,400 extra benefit staff. A senior civil servant wrote a letter to all regional benefit managers saying: "We may be able to deter two to four per cent of fresh claimants who are not serious about looking for work and disallow another two to three per cent who are not available".

Between the Lines: Whose Choice? (1988)

The Between the Lines column from the December 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whose Choice?
Were it not for a few armed men taking some accurate shots at British troops in North America in 1776, there would have been no USA and no election for the American media to drone on about for the past year. It is interesting to speculate whether George Washington, were he alive today, would be banned from the media because he was a terrorist. However, Washington won and the battle between the two mega-mediocrities for access to the White House tennis courts has been in full swing. If you ask most workers who it is that chooses the President, they will tell you the electors do. Apart from the fact that about half of the American workers did not vote at all, it is a mistake to imagine that those who did made their own choice. Managing TV election campaigns, including millions of dollars of advertising time, is now one of the principle ingredients of any American Presidential election. Most political advertising conveys images of rivals rather than a candidate's policies, and the election is won on the basis of which millionaire most successfully destroys the credibility of the other. Thus it was that Dukakis lost, a victim of his own inability to show that Bush was a less competent and nastier individual than himself. Bush proved himself to be "the evil of two lessers" and so won the key to the door. Technically the key was handed to him by the workers of America. To be sure, if they wanted to they could use their votes to lock the door of the state to all future Bushes and Dukakises and other front men for the profit system. In reality, ABC, NBC and CBS had far more to do with the outcome of the 1988 Presidential election than the workers ever did. The TV screen did not reflect what the workers were thinking; it told them what to think We had good reason to make the same observation about the British general election last year. And as long as this is the case — as long as a small, unelected clique of politically conservative media controllers are allowed to set the electoral agenda — it is a matter of serious doubt whether the democratic claims of the electoral system can be treated as much more than a sham.


Whose Freedom?
The government has issued a new White Paper (7 November) on the future of broadcasting. They claim to be concerned to make the media freer. More channels, less regulation. greater local service — and of course, that favourite characteristic of capitalist freedom: if you want the extra goodies on offer you'll have to "pay as you watch". The claim of Mr Hurd and his fellow advocates of greater TV freedom is that more TV, with more market priorities governing it, will offer more opportunities for us to see what we want. This is not so. Firstly, the new channels will not open up new opportunities for independent TV production, but will be bought by current media monopolists, such as Rupert Murdoch, who is already making millions out of deregulated TV in Australia. These millionaires will not make exciting new programmes but provide the cheap, shoddy, and vulgar in order to please advertisers. Secondly, new TV stations will continue to cover the capitalist agenda. This is because the only people with a real incentive to produce TV which challenges the capitalists' interests are the working class and. as socialists never cease pointing out. the workers do not own or control the means of production. including means of mass communication. Greater media freedom will come about, not by flogging airwaves to multi-millionaires or by "relaxing" standards so that workers are able to watch dirty movies, but when the media is freed from the necessity of being a business.

Steve Coleman

The Big Bang (1986)

From the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

So that was the Big Bang was it? What revolutionised the Stock Exchange and shook the City actually made no difference to most. Workers woke up one morning to a deregulated Stock Exchange, but would not have had much time to ponder the significance of such a revolution on their lifestyle before they had to get to their work or their place in the DHSS queue.

But of course, such matters must be important mustn't they? After all, it's on the news every evening, after the royal item and before the Granny-parachuting-for-charity, we get the summary of the share price fluctuations, and hear how the Pound struggled, rallied, finished weakly. As one who after a usual day's work (struggled, rallied, finished weakly) cannot see the significance of it all. I sent off for the Stock Exchange's glossy pamphlet An Introduction to the Stock Market. Thinking that "bull" was what economists talked about (rather than a type of market). I needed to see what all the fuss was about.

The cover had lots of photographs of the type of people who, presumably, own shares: all ages from smiling babies to smiling OAPs; all occupations from cooks to builders. welders to fishermen. They even managed to get half-a-dozen different ethnic groups represented on the pamphlet cover, which is about five more than are effectively allowed on the trading floor of the Stock Exchange, to go by recent reports.

Of course it's the same sort of rubbish that we get on TV with every advert for the TSB flotation, the idea that becoming a capitalist is as easy as wearing a bowler hat, everyone can do it. It's a popular notion — borne out by the oversubscription for TSB — that we can drag ourselves free from the varying degrees of poverty and pressures of working-class life. There is nothing wrong with wanting to escape that, but there is everything wrong in believing that a handful of shares in the TSB will free you of anything but a few hundred quid.

It is a popular notion because people want it to be true but it has no basis in fact. Research by London Weekend Television shows that the City is not full of self-made men (or women). Those who reach the top in the City still come, predominantly, from a privileged background. Indeed the class division between rich and poor, owners and non-owners did not end years ago with the nineteenth century, nor the nationalisation of the 1945 Labour government, nor the privatisation of the present government and certainly it will not end with the next stock market flotation (there should be one soon), nor with the next boom period (there should be one sometime), nor with a next Labour government.
The situation today has changed little:

• the top one per cent own some twenty per cent of the total wealth in Britain, which is as much as the bottom seventy-five per cent;
• the 20.000 millionaires in Britain own more wealth than half the population put together;
• the top six per cent enjoy forty-four per cent of unearned income, while two-thirds have none.

(They didn't tell me that in the glossy brochure. I had to look elsewhere.)

The fact that some of those who work in the factories now have a couple of shares in British Gas tucked under their pillows, and a fifty pence reduction in their gas bill, will not upset the factory owners.

But isn't the Big Bang going to change all that? Isn't it going to sweep away the inherited privilege of a lucky few, in favour of real rewards for those with courage, enterprise and a will to work hard? You know the sort of person, a cliche that only exists in the head of a Tory Party speech writer he (not she) is pulling himself up by the bootstraps and pulling in his belt, he's got his nose to the grindstone, one foot on the ladder and is on his bike . . . Well, "yes" is the answer if you have eyes to read the brochure with; no is the answer if you also have a brain to think with. Far from opening up the City to the individual and the entrepreneur, the Big Bang means the deregulation of exchanges and emphasis on high technology, allowing very complex and very fast transactions of commodities all over the world. In the USA, this "programme trading" has produced much larger and more frequent swings in the markets. Judgements are decided by short-term market fluctuations. not on longer term evaluations like the state of the economy in general. Consequently, small investors cannot weather the large swings in the market without large financial backing. It's the big fish that remain.

But regardless of the fluctuations of share prices, the legal business of exploitation is not just a matter of gambling on the Stock Exchange — buying and selling at the right times and the right prices —where you are rewarded for your "courage". All you need to do is sit on your shares and spend the money as it comes in. You don't need talent or guts, just a lot of money. Indeed, a BBC Nationwide news programme a few years ago had an item about a dog (presumably they could not find a parachuting grandmother that day), who placed his paw on the Financial Times and chose the shares for his master. The dog was a millionaire. And his owner looked about as happy as a dog with two million pounds. You can do it too. Try it at home - all you need is a dog and somewhere in the region of £100,000. A trained monkey could do it. Even Gerald Grosvenor (the Duke of Westminster — two billion pounds and two O' levels to his name) can do it.

Most capitalists are the same, they get someone else to do the little bit of work of buying and selling shares. Most hardly even see the Stock Exchange, let alone the factories. land or offices they profit from.

Quite simply, the City cannot be opened up to everyone. As my brochure says (stuck away in the last paragraph on the bottom of page nine), your broker will "tell you honestly if your personal circumstances are such that you would be ill-advised to become an investor". Capitalists need workers but we don't need them. They couldn't tolerate a builder or a manager or a secretary retiring at the age of thirty to live off the proceeds of their work. They need to squeeze as much as possible out of you, from when you are strong enough to work until you are old enough to drop. The rest of your life is your own.

Unfortunately for this scheme of things, capitalism never runs smoothly for very long. The deregulation which has already started has produced some blatant examples of inflated salaries in the City. At a time when wage councils are being abolished and while one quarter of full-time workers in London are below the poverty line, the news that a few miles away in the City salaries can touch £lm cannot help the government's pleas to workers for wage restraint. At least the Queen has set the right example to Britain's greedy workers by accepting a pay rise below the rate of inflation, in the process boosting her earnings last year from £3,850.000 to over £4million.

Then we have the interesting sight of Thatcher criticising the excessive salaries. The champion of the market-place, outflanked by the uncontrollable nature of the system she supports. For capitalism, which periodically bares its "unacceptable face" that no cosmetic can hide, is the best ever advert for socialism.

We could have a society where personal consumption of wealth will not be restricted by your personal circumstances and where production of wealth will not be restricted by the requirement of a surplus called profit.

Socialism will take the information and communications technology that today enables vast amounts of useless information — like market fluctuations and share prices — to circulate the world in seconds, every second, and will liberate its potential for a society based on production for use, as we liberate ourselves in a movement for World Socialism which makes the Big Bang look a damp squib.

Brian Gardner