Doping horses (1960)

From the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Monday, August 8th, five men were accused at Newbury of conspiring to administer drugs to racehorses so as to affect their performance and thereby cheat, defraud and give the run-around to owners, bookmakers and punters. Caffeine, it was alleged, was the drug used. Given between thirty and sixty minutes before a race, it was said to have jacked up the horses’ nerves, muscles and heart, made it more alert and stimulated it to a win. The timing was vital; given six or more hours before the race the drug slowed down the horse, because by then its depressing reaction had had time to work. The chemist who was said to have supplied the caffeine stated that doping of racehorses had been going on for years; he supplied the stuff in return for racing tips.

Of course, this carve up caused quite a fuss and many remedies were suggested. Some people thought that a Tote monopoly of betting would bring a clean up. Others wanted a list of drugs, as distinct from tonics, which it would be prohibited to administer to horses, the trainers to be held responsible for their animals’ conditions. One newspaper showed how deep its love of our dumb friends goes by hoping that, after the clean up has put racing and betting on a sound financial basis, the horses will no more be silent and helpless tools manipulated for sordid and undesirable ends.

Now all this is very touching, as anyone who has lost his lot on the horses will agree. But doping and racketeering are only two of the illegal wavs of making money, if the law can be successfully evaded. There are also legal ways. One is to work for it—not very fruitful. Another is to persuade other people to work for you and to exploit them during the course of production. This is respectable. It also produces some very large fortunes.

The set up here is that we workers work for the capitalists. The capitalists pay us our wages and sell what we produce; they also have to buy materials and machinery. When they have done all this, they have a surplus left over. They have profit. This process continually repeated makes for a fine accumulated sum and it is all fair and square. Not racketeering. Just good, plain exploitation.

When the goods arc produced we do not always find ourselves able to obtain them. They are whisked off to warehouses, stores, shops, and so on, and we can only get them out of these places if we have enough money to meet the price which is asked for them. There they lie in plenty, but alas! for sale only. When people try, by hook or by crook, by fiddle or diddle, to amass a lot of money, what they are really doing is trying to get the power to purchase a lot of these articles which make for a happier and more comfortable life.

Where does dope come into this? Why. for generations, the working class have been doped by capitalism's propaganda. Schools, churches, radio, television, newspapers, political parties—they are all in the act. The Labour Party dished out a large dose of nationalisation, which left the workers' situation unchanged. The Communist Party peddle the dope about the so-called Socialist class emancipation in Russia, which is in fact a ruthless capitalist dictatorship. The Tories tell us that we have never had dope so good.

Amongst gamblers, doping is known as ”fixing ”; if you want to fix a racehorse, give it caffeine. In this sense, capitalists are not fixing workers under the wages system—the whole transaction is fair and above board. Nevertheless, the workers find themselves in a fix by their acceptance of the system. They are perpetually chasing the dream that, if only they can lay hands on a large enough amount of money, they will be able to get all that they need to make life pleasant. It is this bodily occupation and mental illusion that keeps the working class in political ignorance and. consequently, in economic enslavement.

But horses can run without dope and people can live without the artificial incentives of capitalist society. We only need the understanding that all social wealth would be better produced solely for use—made and used how we like. That is the key to the better world which we call Socialism.

However much horse-racing depends upon betting, capitalism is more dependent on the support of the world’s working class. When they have stopped allowing themselves to be exploited, stopped chasing after ephemeral remedies for the many, many unnecessary social problems of capitalism, they will have exposed capitalism's dopers. Socialism will be the surest walk over that ever was.

Joe McGuinness

Fifty Years Ago (1987)

From the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago, in 1937, I had managed to survive three years of life on the dole and, more importantly, had discovered the Socialist Party of Great Britain, offering the only practical alternative to such a life.

The 1929 Wall Street Crash had signalled that capitalism was in for one of its periodic slumps, but despite that in 1931 I landed a so-called permanent job as an LM&S Railway staff joiner. However as Marx said "the only permanence is change" and in 1934 the LM&S reduced its staff, pitching our gang of joiners, plumbers, painters and labourers on to the scrap heap of the unemployed. I found myself signing on at the Albion Street labour exchange in Salford (where Walter Greenwood. author of Love On The Dole had also signed on). My weekly allowance for myself, wife and two children was thirty four shillings out of which I had to pay ten shillings rent. (£1.70 and 50p respectively). The rent was for a bug infested attic flat in Higher Broughton. Many houses in the Broughton area were infested with bugs. Indeed on one occasion I had obtained the keys of another flat from a Mr Lever who then lived in Northumberland Street, Higher Broughton. I had decided to take the flat and had deposited two suitcases there when I noticed something moving on one of the cupboard shelves and to my horror found colonies of bed bugs all over the flat and behind the wallpaper. I quickly removed my suitcases and returned the keys to Mr Lever, declining his offer to have his property fumigated for me.

In an attempt to escape those bed bugs. I fled from Higher Broughton into a house in Lower Broughton as no bugs were to be seen there. I had only been there one night when larger colonies of bugs than ever attacked us. They had been hiding behind the skirting boards. An old man with the longest beard I ever saw sat next door on his doorstep and politely enquired of me . . . "Vell, how you like your house, eh?" . . . I told him how much I disliked it and he waved a hand airily, remarking complacently "Vell, a few bugs".

The gambling "solution"?

Trying to beat the depression with various money making schemes. I finally got hooked on horse racing, although 1 had never gambled in my life before. In those days, the only legal way to gamble off course was to send one's bets by post to Scottish bookmakers and I chose to deal with McLauchlan's of Glasgow and Edinburgh who accepted bets so long as they were time postmarked prior to time of races concerned. To my delight my very first two commissions won me £40 and I decided to study the game from all angles, even sending over to Dublin for a copy of The Irish Horse (an excellent book on breeding) and burned the midnight oil studying systems by the dozen, many of them my own invention. Some of those were successful for a season, but the next season something would inevitably go haywire.

Incidentally, the racing programmes in the daily press in public libraries in the mid-thirties were erased by black ink so that the unemployed, who could ill afford the price of the Sporting Life were denied something so readily available to those frequenting Ascot's Lawns. Also the Black Maria police vans used to prowl around Britain's back street betting dens before 1962 when betting became, for working class punters, a respectable activity. After a period of successful bets with McLauchlans. they placed a restriction on my bets by writing to tell me. that. . . "In future your bets must be in our office before racing" . . . I was torpedoed because that meant posting my bets the day before actual racing which was really restricting me to ante post betting, which was useless to me. So I joined the back street "tapes on the wall" dens from then on, moving from one area to another to evade the Black Marias.

Non-union exploitation

The official union rate for joiners when I joined the ASW (Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers) in 1929 was 1/7½d an hour (about 8p) but the railway rate, when I joined the NUR was l/4d. But there were other benefits such as a guaranteed week with no loss of time for being rained off or foggy weather plus quarter fare travelling facilities anywhere on the railway. After a year of the dole queues I decided to try a non-union firm of cabinet makers situated in the old Ford Auto works in First Avenue, Trafford Park. I was offered 10d an hour which of course I refused and after haggling with them I agreed to start at one shilling an hour. In that factory, many men were doing the same job for different rates. My mate on the other side of the bench was getting 10d; I was getting a shilling - considered a top rate there. We worked from 8am until 8pm with two half hour breaks for tea snacks and they charged us ½d for hot water to brew up. On my first day there a foreman came over to me and shouted in my ear above the din of the machinery: "Any more talking and you're outside". So we became silent automatons, trying to meet the target rate of twenty minutes to fit five drawers in a cabinet by planing off a quarter inch of American oak from each drawer, an impossible task set by management and none of us did better than a half hour minimum. It was of course planing by hand with one's own tools, not machine planing. I got home at 9pm and sank into a chair too tired to wash until later. After six months of that the firm laid us off for a temporary period which I decided to make permanent, so I said goodbye to Trafford Park and its hateful environment of wage slavery which I've no desire to re-visit.

But we've come a long way since those days haven't we? Today there is Social Security. acid rain, nuclear bombs and three million on the dole. Berlin Walls, Belfast ghettos and apartheid . . .

G R Russell

A word in season. (1927)

From the October 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

The London society season is in full swing. It is an event of importance to the ladies and gentlemen of the class we work for—when permitted. It is an event by which we can measure their prosperity and our poverty. In that respect it is of importance to you : as working men and women you have been taught to believe from childhood that they are so very clever, and brainy, working with their brains sort of thing (sic). There is, therefore, reason to believe that in your simplicity the following will appear to you evidence of their ability. The event, it says :—

“Is one which promises to be the most brilliant, and crowded, and interesting of any since prewar days. . . 300,000 people are coming to London. . . . They will be doing Henley, which is so very gay, and Ascot, which is so very smart, The Derby, the Horse Show, the Royal Tournament, all the fetes and functions, until they run off to Goodwood in tailor-mades and leave those green woods and scented Downs for Cowes and the “white wings” on the Solent” (“Sunday News,” May 8, 1927).

And very nice, too ! And what of you fellow workers? You will be doing the same old round of toil which makes such luxury possible. When, with the passing of the summer months, your masters and their ladies depart for the moors, the country house, or the Riviera, you will remain the occupants of the murky, mud-plastered cities of industry. Still, you will argue, who are we, anyway? They’ve got the brains. What is the real contrast? Indolence and parasitism—revelling in splendour. Usefulness and skill exercised in every department of wealth production rewarded with penury, insecurity, and often premature death. Chasing the seasons around the earth in a mad whirl of never-satisfying pleasure may exercise these people in many directions ; it is obvious that, miles from the seat of operations, they can play no part in wealth-producing processes. That part is the workers’ part, including the real directing, the organising, and even the collecting of the profits which flow on during their absence. Still, some sort of excuses have to be made as these contrasts become more pronounced. The contempt that the master class have for your political intelligence is shown from the following clap trap which appeared in a leading article (Westminster Gazette, June 13th, 1927) in the very midst of this welter of wealth. They say :—

“The fact is that no policy other than strict economy is possible for a country such as ours.”

One wouldn’t have thought it, would they ? Some may think that we overdraw the picture: that though there may be a greater flaunting of wealth, the worst forms of squalor have been removed from the workers’ life. Have they? Not a stone’s throw from London’s fashionable and wealthy centre are conditions that would disgrace savages. Seven Westminster citizens, headed by a gentleman who preaches the blessedness of poverty, visited 490 houses in the Victoria Ward (Rev. Francis Boyd, report Evening News, June 6th, 1927). Here are a few of the things that they saw in this rich residential area :—

“In Aylesford Street a woman, her son, his wife, and their boy of 14 were found all living in one room. In another house where four families shared eight rooms there were 14 adults and 10 children. In a court in Wilton Road a husband, wife, five daughters aged 20, 16, 15, 13 and 5 and a son aged 18, had only two rooms in which to live and sleep. Yet another instance in Gray’s Inn Court is given where, in two rooms were a grandmother, man and wife, girls aged 14, 13 and 7 and boys aged 10, 3 and 1.”

“The list could be extended indefinitely,” says the report. “Particularly numerous are the families of six, seven, and more members living in two rooms in tenement houses.”

Of an address in Alderney Street it says :—

“There are sewer rats so numerous that within 24 hours of the laying of a new board it was eaten through. The children are terrified of the rats and refuse to go to bed. One boy was sent to Westminster Hospital suffering from nervous exhaustion.”

And this after one hundred years of reform, within the precincts of the Houses of Parliament. Every London district and every large town could show similar plague spots. The workers being content with the scraps and the offal, the gloomy hovels, and excluded from life’s real pleasures, have allowed their masters to take full advantage of their contentment. Blame or sympathy in either case is waste of time : nothing but the recognition that the removal of all social evils is their mission, and theirs alone, can rid society of such glaring contrasts in wealth and squalor. Experience is a hard and often a slow teacher, but there are signs that it has slowly but surely been doing its work. Awaken, workers, to the possibilities of Socialism, so that you may join with us for the Social Revolution.

W. E. MacHaffie

Press cuttings (1942)

From the April 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

Men and Horses

“Peterborough,” writing in the Daily Telegraph on Captain Margesson, who until recently was Secretary of State for War: —

  “Handling men seemed to come naturally to the old cavalry officer trained to handle horses.”—(Daily Telegraph, March 28th, 1942.)

* * *

Don’t Travel by Rail

“Trainers will welcome the decision to lift the ban on the transport of horses to meetings by rail from the opening of the flat-racing season on April 14th.”—(Daily Telegraph, March 18th, 1942.)

* * *

Piety and Beggary in Moscow

“As evidence that nobody hindered worshippers, I can say that the newspaper queue was nearly 100 yards long that day, and not one person in the queue even turned the head as I and others broke through it to enter the Bogoyavlensky Cathedral. It was only the beggars, the lame, the halt, and the blind, mewling their woes and thanks, who paid any attention.”— (From an article, “Moscow Crowds fill the Churches,” by Negley Farson, Daily Mail Moscow correspondent, February 28th, 1942.)

Action Replay: Dog Days (2012)

The Action Replay Column from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The American TV series Luck, starring Dustin Hoffman and dealing with the seamy side of horse-racing, has been cancelled after three horses died during production. You might say, though, that this was simply a case of unintended accuracy from the makers of the series, for horses dying during actual racing is by no means rare.

No fewer than five horses were killed during this year’s flagship Cheltenham Festival. The number of deaths fluctuates from year to year.  There were nine at Cheltenham in 2006, though fewer in the years since then. But the Grand National is the biggest killer, with twenty-three horses dying in this one race since 1984, including two last year and another two this year. There are constant attempts to make the Aintree course ‘safer’, but these are sometimes criticised as encouraging greater speed and so making any falls even more dangerous.

The figures for racehorse deaths are far greater than usually claimed. According to Animal Aid, ‘around 420 horses are raced to death every year. About 38 per cent die on racecourses, while the others are destroyed as a result of training injuries, or are killed because they are no longer commercially viable’ (http://www.horsedeathwatch.com/).

Greyhound racing is another sport where animal welfare comes well behind human enjoyment and betting interests. When their useful racing existence comes to an end, or because they are just not good enough, many are simply killed – probably at least a couple of thousand a year in Britain, though the exact figures are not known. And many owners will not pay a vet to have a dog killed humanely but prefer to have them drowned or otherwise disposed of in some unnecessarily cruel manner.

It’s ironic that the TV series was cancelled for causing deaths, while the activities it depicted are responsible for far more deaths, and they continue.

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: The City and the World (2013)

Mahmood al-Zarooni

The Action Replay column from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of April, racehorse trainer Mahmood al-Zarooni was banned for eight years after admitting that he had injected anabolic steroids into horses in his charge. This has been claimed to be the biggest doping scandal in the history of horse racing, but it also tells us a lot about the general social setting of sport.

Zarooni worked for Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates. Godolphin, the sheik’s enormous racing and breeding concern, has enjoyed great success in winning top races. But it’s not just a matter of an expensive hobby or a money-making enterprise. Dubai presents itself as a modern city, built on ‘a foundation of innovation and uninhibited achievement.’ And ‘Godolphin, in encapsulating those same values, exemplifies Dubai and plays a meaningful role in representing the Emirate to the world’ (godolphin.com/about-us/about-godolphin/). So it is a gigantic PR exercise, one that could do without the nasty associations of this scandal. Just as it could do without publicity about the impoverished immigrants who build the skyscrapers and work as domestic servants to the Maktoums and their relations.

The doping scandal also reveals a great deal about how the globalisation of production and distribution under modern capitalism has affected sport. Most Godolphin horses are trained in Newmarket, but many of them spend the winter back in Dubai, enjoying the warmer climate there. This, however, may have been the source of Zarooni’s problems, since anabolic steroids are allowed to be used in Dubai, as long as they are no longer in a horse’s system by the time it races. In the UK, though, they are prohibited completely. This sort of thing has created problems in the past – in 2009 even one of the queen’s horses was found to have raced with a drug (not steroids) that had not cleared its system in time.

Global capitalism sometimes has problems with differing regulations in different countries, so truly global corporations have to make sure that they fit in with whatever rules apply where they want to manufacture or trade. Ah, the trials of being a multinational company . . . 

Paul Bennett

Action Replay: Horse Voices (2011)

Insert picture of horse here.

The Action Replay column from the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

All is not well in the Sport of Kings. The owners and trainers want more money for 2011–12 from the bookmakers, via the levy or tax on their profits, but the bookies are unwilling to pay up. Consequently the government will have to make a decision, in the person of Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport.

Of course there is a lot more to this than just a squabble about how much is paid over. Attendance at race meetings is more or less holding up, but otherwise racing is feeling the force of the recession. Trainers are going out of business regularly, and one prediction is that barely a quarter of the 85 who currently train at Newmarket will survive. The owners are in most cases wealthy individuals who see racing as a hobby that can sometimes make money but is mainly indulged in for fun. This hasn’t stopped them threatening to strike in order to get their way in this squabble, though. 

Then there are the bookies, who maintain that horse racing is becoming less and less important as a source of income for them, with it now contributing less than one quarter of the money they get from punters. Moreover, racing paraphernalia take up a lot of space in betting shops, and TV coverage has increased in price. But in particular it’s on-line betting that has caused the problems. If people can bet on roulette, bingo and football over the Internet (including while a football match is being played), there is less left over for the gee-gees. The traditional bookmakers have in some cases moved their operations offshore to avoid paying the levy.

One bookie said, in a nice phrase, that the top owners and trainers, were ‘shooting themselves in both fetlocks’. But really it’s a typical row between groups of rich individuals that will see many workers in the racing industry suffer as the powers-that-be argue among themselves and the whole industry struggles to cope with economic and technological changes.

Paul Bennett