Running Commentary: Myths of equality (1981)

The Running Commentary Column from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Myths of equality

Do not believe the common myth that we are no longer living in a class-divided society. Class is not about being “classy”. It is not something you can take on or reject. While there is still the institution of property in human society we are all born into families who either do or do not possess it. The Low Pay Unit has just produced Low Pay Review 4, which shows that the lowest paid workers today are relatively worse off than the lowest paid in 1886, when figures were first collected. More wealth is produced today than a century ago, but those who are born to no property and are therefore forced to go out and work, producing that wealth, now receive proportionately less of it.

Mr. Chris Pond, director of the Low Pay Unit, comments: “The government’s assertion that workers could protect their jobs by cutting wages is a cruel deception. It is in those industries in which wages have fallen furthest, precisely because of the reduction in demand for the goods and services produced, that have faced the biggest job losses” (Guardian, 2/6/81). And do not forget the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, which reported in 1979 (after five years of Labour government) that the richest one per cent in Britain own more wealth than the poorer eighty per cent.

Against this background, which is based on a minority class owning stocks and shares and other property, and deriving a vast unearned income from employing the rest of us, the “European Socialists” tell us to pull in our belts still further. On 28 April this year, an Amsterdam conference of the “Socialist International” agreed unanimously that “the time had come to promote wage controls firmly linked to economic democracy” (Guardian, 29/4/81).

Are you trying to escape from this wage-slavery which is imposed upon us? The Pearl Assurance Company has recently been advertising what they call the Capital Accumulator Plan. Basically, this means workers struggling to save up their hard-earned cash for them to spend on a few trinkets just before they die. We can be sure than Pearl shareholders, among others, will be profiting from the process.

But don’t they know there is a far more reliable “Capital Accumulator Plan”? It works like this. You inherit a few million pounds (be sure to choose the right parents) or, perhaps rob a few banks (be sure not to be caught and incarcerated). Then you employ (exploit) a few thousand workers (who chose the wrong parents) and accumulate a few million more. At the moment, there are dozens of annual Company reports being published which illustrate the process. Just take one example. Mothcrcare. Profit after tax: £8,634,000. Earnings per share: 13.39p. Dividends per share: 5p. Mr. S. Zilkha and Mr. E. Zilkha, both on the Board, have between them 11,478,776 shares. Their dividend will be £573,938.80. Their earnings will be £1,537,008. They are not employees, they are owners. They do not produce, they possess. “Profit per employee” is declared to be £4,422 for the year. Each worker, then, was paid just enough to keep them fit to work, and produced about as much again on top for the benefit of their masters. That is what is known as “Civilisation”.

Take power

The Child Poverty Action Group has produced a report. Poor and Powerless, showing how the gas or electricity is being cut off in more than 770 households each day because the families concerned cannot afford to pay the bills. This is in spite of the fuel industry’s Code of Practice introduced in 1976 supposedly to reduce the hardship of those very people. The reductions in the real value of child benefit, unemployment benefit, sickness and industrial injury, and maternity benefits together with cuts in the real value of wages, have contributed to worsen the situation since the onset of depression, For example, [ . . . ] disconnected 37,648 people last year, more than three times as many as in 1978. The report quotes particular cases, such as one low-paid family of six children, one of whom had just been discharged from hospital after a bone marrow operation, who were cut off for a gas debt of £17.

The piecemeal suggestions of the CPAG, such as forcing the fuel industries to obtain court orders for such cases, or raising benefits to low-income families, will not remove the problem. As long as people are dependent on employers or the state for a meagre income, poverty will remain an integral aspect of society. Only in a classless society, where everything is owned in common, and resources are freely available to all, will we be able to feel properly secure. As long as the profit system is retained, workers’ living standards will be cut down to the minimum that the employers can get away with it.

American fuel companies have a mechanism called a service limiter adapter. In most parts of America, it is illegal to cut off consumers’ power supplies, so they have found this simple way round it. The adapter can reduce the supply in varying degrees, so that particular appliances cease to function one by one. One New York official has said: “The great attraction is that defaulters face an uncomfortable time without lives being put at risk in freezing weather conditions”.

Sick society

The Office of Health Economics have reported that work days lost through sickness for March 1981 are 21 per cent below the average for the same month over the past four years. The drop coincides with a one million rise in unemployment and the report suggests that high unemployment has made people so afraid of losing their jobs that they may be going to work even when ill.

If not, however, perhaps they can become ill once they get there. The CBI, the Chemical Industries Association and the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries have mounted a vigorous campaign against proposed regulations to protect workers from dangerous chemicals. Section Six of the Health and Safety at Work Act, if it is passed, would prescribe the testing of certain chemicals used in industry, such as Dioxin, used in pesticides, which causes miscarriages and deformed births. “Tightening controls will involve the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in added cost, and this is the core of their objection” (Guardian, 10/8/81). In a confidential memo to members in June, the CBI stated: “CBI is likely to challenge the philosophy underlying the new controls . . . Industry has consistently opposed over-regulation and unnecessary bureaucratic controls by governments in the field of harmful substances”.

In a society of common ownership, production would be solely to satisfy human needs, and not for the profit of a minority. Under democratic control, work can become a pleasure in itself. But when it is owned and controlled by the likes of the CBI, the slogan is wealth before health.

Housing

Speaking of wealth, the Daily Mail did an interesting profile of Michael Heseltine on 17 July. It showed how the man who was sent to Liverpool to work out for his Prime Minister the puzzle of why people living in slums are frustrated, has four houses himself. One in Belgravia, worth £600,000, a country estate in Oxfordshire worth £750,000, a £100,000 “hideaway” in Exford, and a smaller place in Swansea, “not for personal occupation”.

He took some of his fellow capitalists on a bus-trip round Liverpool to see how the other sort live, and to work out how to buy off their discontent. The same issue of the Daily Mail reported on the court case involving Per Hegard, the “man who could buy everything”. His ownership of several companies allows him to live off the work of thousands, riding on their misery. He has six Rolls Royce cars, three yachts, two jet planes, half a dozen mansions and a £15,000 cigar bill.

Those who work to create Hegard wealth for him have least and suffer most, and it is in defence of the property of such people that millions die in wars fought over the control of markets; and his grasping need for profit causes pollution, industrial danger, poverty, destruction and waste.

The World Bank's World Development Report for 1981 refers to the millions living and dying in extreme poverty, and contains two predictions, one “optimistic” and the other less so. The optimistic forecast is that by the end of the century the number on the verge of starvation will fall from 750 million to 630 million. On the other hand, they say, it may rise to 850 million. But it is in our hands to make it fall to nought immediately, and to end all poverty and war, if we combine to end the profit system and create a community where wealth is produced freely for direct use according to needs.

Clifford Slapper

Greasy Pole: Plain Words (2003)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nobody in their right mind – that is to say nobody who has an inkling of how this social system operates –would have been impressed by the assurances that the Bain enquiry into the firefighters’ pay claim was really “independent”. (There are a number of words in this article in inverted commas. This may irritate some readers, much as it does the writer. The purpose is to encourage scepticism about the use of such words.) As a start, let us assert that the whole concept of “independence” is false, just as the popular idea of a “fair” wage, a “deserved” pay rise are false. These are delusions resting on the assumption that wages are fixed by how useful the wage earners’ work is and that somewhere and somehow out there there is a wage which is “fair” because it exactly reflects that usefulness, or how strenuous someone’s work is and how it compares to other, similar, jobs. There is no way that any enquiry, no matter how “independent”, could make any sense of this, no way it could untangle such a mish-mash of delusions.

So they don’t try. Enquiries into wage claims have a number of other uses. Firstly they are often a ruse by which employers and governments representing the employing class to postpone the time for a decision, allowing them to strengthen their defences. When the firefighters called their first, two-day, strike they were denounced by ministers from Tony Blair downwards for acting with unreasonable haste when they should have waited for the Bain report in the confidence that it would be “fair” to them because it was “independent”. The firefighters were right to be sceptical because what Bain had been set to do was to lay down the case for a lower pay rise while the Fire Service was “modernised” – in other words while it co-operated in cutting its work force.

Firefighters and Bankers

There was much anger during the strike because of the feeling that the firefighters’ pay did not properly reflect their “worth”. In fact this anger, although it was supportive of the strikers, was misplaced. Wages do not rely on the worth of what a person does. If they were measured in that way firefighters and nurses and sewage workers, instead of bankers, currency dealers and royals, would be turning up for work in Rolls Royces. The only way to make sense of this apparent anomaly is to recognise that all wages are essentially determined, at any one time, by the relationship between the forces of supply of, and demand for, the labour power of the workers concerned. If the demand for nurses’ working ability outstrips the supply of it (always providing that the nurses assert their bargaining power) their wages will rise. If the opposite applies there will be a downward influence on their wages.

This reality is often used to justify companies offering big money to their higher management. “We have to do this,” runs the argument, “in order to attract people of the right calibre to run this great company of ours.” And it is used when MPs are debating whether to accept a proposal (from another, but rather different, “fair” and “independent” enquiry) to give themselves the kind of rise firefighters can only dream about, to attract highly qualified and capable people away from industry, commerce or the law or wherever to govern this great country of ours. This was how it was put by Robin Cook, Leader of the Commons, on 5 July 2002 when the Members were discussing (it was hardly a debate) the suggestion that they award themselves a 42 per cent rise:

“I do not think we impress the public if we set too low a value on our own worth . . . if we believe our work here is important we should not shrink from putting a proper value on it.”

This was not the kind of argument which the government would allow for the firefighters. And it was not how Bain saw the situation:

“Even allowing for the risks and dangers of the service, firefighters compare well with similar jobs in the public and private sectors . . .When holidays, pension arrangements and job security are taken into account, they are even better placed. This is borne out by the recruitment and retention figures, which show large numbers of applicants for each Fire service vacancy, even during a period of steady economic growth.”

In other words, the firefighters’ claim was undermined because the supply of their labour power outstrips the demand for it.

Candidates

There is, however, a contradiction here, which goes some way to illustrate the implacable way in which the wage labour economy of capitalism works and the cynicism of the system’s rulers. Because if there is one job in which there is a surplus of supply over demand, it is that of an MP. To begin with there is the matter of the number of candidates standing for each seat; lots of competition there. In the 2001 general election it was a rare constituency which had less than five on the list. Seven or eight was not unusual. There is no record of any heckler suggesting that, as there was such competition in the matter of aspirant MPs, whoever won the seat should take a cut in wages. Then there is the fact that, at least in the bigger parties, there had often been a fierce struggle to get the nomination in the first place, with a large number of runners whittled down to a short list.

This process was illustrated in the case of Ted Heath, who after the 1945 election scratched around from one seat to another in Kent before he was adopted for Bexley. The Tories in Ashford rejected him because he would not agree to give up his command of a Territorial Army regiment and to refuse the offer of a ministerial job in a future government. (The successful candidate later told him that he lost the vote because he turned up for his crucial interview on a Saturday morning improperly dressed, in a dark blue suit and a stiff collar. Heath grumpily recalled that he did not then possess either article.) At Rochester and Chatham they said they wanted an MP who would make it into the Cabinet and “I am afraid,” said the Tory chairman, “that we do not think that you will ever hold an office of any kind.” At Sevenoaks it was rather simpler; Heath turned up late and made a bad speech.

Heseltine and Clark

Michael Heseltine had to show willing by contesting some safe Labour seats – Gower and Coventry North – before he got the chance of a safe seat at Tavistock. Even then the decision hung in the balance because he upset the straighter-laced Tavistock Tories when a men’s fashion magazine he owned – Town – featured that month an Ursula Andress lookalike on its cover. After he had won the nomination he heard from some women that they had voted for him because they liked his wife’s hat. When Tavistock disappeared under the knife of the Boundary Commission in 1970 he failed to get the nod at Mid Oxfordshire, where he was not even short–listed and then Mid Sussex before the Tories of Henley took him – and perhaps his wife’s hats – to their bosoms.

The odious Alan Clark tried to get himself selected from the late 1960s, trawling through what he called “a Litany of constituency names” in his notebook before he succeeded in Plymouth Sutton. This success required his attendance at a cocktail party with his wife – sorely tried, ever supportive as Tory wives are supposed to be. Let us hope they let him off lightly in the subsequent question-and-answer session for it must have been a grave affront to the conceit of that callous, arrogant man who seemed to despise and hate a considerable mass of the human race including – especially including – those in his own party. “That shower” was how he described the Tories at Ashchurch. “Imprisoned . . . by their own guilt” was how he saw the local party executive at Langstone. For the Tories in Plymouth Sutton he reserved some special venom: “Total shits . . . no purpose in life other than to bicker and back bite – degrade everything above a certain level of mediocrity.”

Modernising

It is not only in the matter of failing to accept that their wages should be set by the forces of supply and demand that MPs fail to keep to the standards they try to set down for the rest of us. Nick Raynsford, the minister responsible for the Fire Service, is a man who has outraged some of his former admirers who never thought him capable of the breathtaking cynicism he displayed in his transformation into an ardent Blairite. He was notably brutal and overbearing in his verbal assaults on the firefighters. A recurring theme of his comments was what he saw as the FBU’s refusal to move to “more streamlined, focussed and flexible” working arrangements. Coming from an MP, that was a bit rich. The House of Commons cannot move to its business, which is supposed to be so vital to the interests of us all, without the security of a load of archaic symbolism and rituals – like bowing to the Speaker, going in procession to the House of Lords after someone in knee britches called Black Rod has knocked three times on the door of the chamber – or perhaps he is called Black Door and knocks on three rods – unable to do anything unless the Mace is in its place on the table, never using each other’s names because they must address people they know to be ruthless scoundrels as “Honourable Members”, never calling anyone a liar because they can only refer to “misleading the House”. For outdated practises the FBU has nothing on Parliament.

We can stumble around this maze of apparent contradictions, blind alleys and deceit (which is what wage negotiations often do) for a long time when the matter is essentially simple. This social system depends on wage labour – on the exploitation of one class by the other. The “worth” of what we work at, what we produce or organise, is simply not in the equation of how much we are paid. Neither are “justice” or “fairness”. These are concepts introduced to cloud over the basic fact that capitalism exists in the interests of only the ruling class and that obscure language is too often used to that end.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: The way they tell ’em (2002)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

One year into his leadership of the Conservative Party, how is Iain Duncan Smith to be assessed? There is unlikely to be any point in asking people at large because so few have noticed him. But what about his own party? They may well feel that the traditional “could do better” does not apply because, no matter how pathetic his showing in the jungle world of politics it is clear that Duncan Smith could not improve on it. And if the leader is so little known what can be said about his team of shadow ministers? David Davis, the man he appointed party chairman, gained some transient prominence as a week-end member of the SAS, which means that on Saturdays and Sundays he can kill with his bare hands. In spite of such spasmodic power he showed some unsoldierly sentiments – like envy. Somewhat peeved at being passed over for the leadership Davis turned his back on all those comfortable theories about loyalty being the Tories’ secret weapon and conspired to unseat Duncan Smith. Unluckily for him he did this without a soldier’s due regard for camouflage; Duncan Smith observed it all from his bunker and promptly reduced Davis to the ranks.

The humiliation of Davis is not the only sign that Duncan Smith is getting desperate. Is there no policy, no day-to-day issue, he could exploit to get some favourable publicity? In one ill-advised venture he suddenly claimed that the Tory Party would stand up for vulnerable people. The names at Lloyds, currency dealers and property speculators, all anxious about the remorseless daily slide on the Stock Exchange, may have thought Duncan Smith had some good news in store for them. In fact the poor man was only trying to steal a few votes by promising to take special care of anyone struggling to get by on the lower slopes of poverty – the sick, the benefit claimants, the elderly – who qualify in the Tory lexicon as vulnerable (but who have learned to be wary of Tory politicians bearing gifts). So of course nobody with any sense took any notice of what Duncan Smith said, except to apply it as a measure of his desperation.

Platform

Another attempt to convince us that he has radically changed his party was the decision to keep party leaders off the platform at this year’s annual conference, banishing them to a place among the lower orders in the body of the hall. Now this was serious. A seat on the conference platform is not just a privilege. It is an assertion of rank, of being one of the elite. It means exposure to the blissful publicity of the TV cameras, being beamed into a million homes leading the applause in the obligatory standing ovations. For the very privileged few it means dosing the audience with great dollops of platitudes, half-truths and tantrums which in combination are called a great speech.

An example of the power of a presence on the platform was at the conference in 1991. On the Tuesday of the conference Margaret Thatcher fumed and smouldered in her hotel room, still smarting from the men in grey suits wheedling her out of the job of prime minister. Watching the proceedings on TV she muttered and moaned about the treachery and impotence of the new leaders; none of them were any good, John Major, for one, was all vanity. On the following day she took her revenge. Dressed to the nines in true Tory blue and displaying her finest jewellery she left for the conference. “I’m not going to make a speech,” she promised, to widespread relief, “I’ll just go there.” And “go there” was what she did, taking her place on the platform, which was enough to provoke an ovation from the floor which the leaders she despised had difficulty in bringing to a halt.

Well she was accustomed to holding a favoured place on the platform, to making the kind of speeches so loved by the Tory grass roots that they were a kind of punctuation in her reign over the party. She was accustomed to politically challenged Tories hanging adoringly on her every word, cheering themselves hoarse at every jingoistic allusion and roaring with laughter at every joke, no matter how feeble. They loved it in 1983 when she told them, revelling in her Falklands triumph, that “the spirit of the South Atlantic is the spirit that made Great Britain great”. They brayed with laughter in 1980, when she was under enormous pressure from people who were misled into a belief that governments are able to control the economy, and defied them with these words:

To those watching with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase “the U-turn”, I have only one thing to say. “You turn if you want to. The lady is not for turning.”

Speeches

That leaden-footed attempt at humour was not Thatcher’s work but that of Ronnie Millar, one of her speech-writers. In fact none of her conference speeches were hers; putting them together was a long, tortuous process and not the spontaneous, heartfelt declaration the conference members assumed it to be. To begin with Thatcher and her staff would spend several months collecting a file of ideas and reports of the speeches of other people. During the summer, as the conference drew near, she asked for contributions from her ministers, sympathetic journalists, advisers and the like. All of this was drawn together at Chequers on the weekend before the conference; draft sections of the proposed speech – sometimes as many as twelve – and big files of background material were laid out on a table and put together. With pieces written to link up the sections she at last had a speech to send the members into raptures. (Not that that had anything to do with the content of the speech; they would have cheered almost anything she said.) Spontaneous it was not – and in any case it was finally read from an autocue.

An essential of Tory conferences (although it is not always achieved) is a show of loyalty. Behind the scenes it is rather different. The leaders usually get only one chance in the limelight and they must use it to assert and defend their standing in the party; otherwise there are always plenty of hopefuls eager to challenge for a place at the top. So every speaker needs at some time to attack the Labour Party and the LibDems, with painfully heavy-handed jokes intended to stay in the members’ minds for when the next leadership election comes along. Naturally this can lead to some outrageous clowning. At Brighton in 1957 Lord Hailsham, who was then party chairman, attracted the kind of publicity most politicians would shun by appearing on the beach in the early morning wearing a gruesomely baggy pair of swimming trunks and skipping across the pebbles for a swim. By coincidence this juvenile behaviour was witnessed by a number of newspaper hacks – not people usually known for standing on a cold beach in the first light of day – who kindly arranged for Hailsham’s photograph to appear in the press the next day. On the following morning, perhaps stimulated by the media attention, Hailsham seized the chairman’s bell and began to shake it violently into a crescendo of sound while he boomed out a warning about the impending doom of the Labour Party. It was buffoonery of the highest order and the members obediently leapt to their feet, stamping and cheering.

Heseltine and Hamilton

A similar rapture greeted Michael Heseltine’s 1975 attack on the Labour Party, suitably acted out on stage, as “. . .a one-legged army limping away from the storm they have created. Left, left-left, left . . .” Even opponents of the Labour Party might have regarded such clowning as an excuse for a convincing argument but it did Heseltine’s career no harm and to the end of his days as a leader he was a favourite of the conference. And then there was Neil “Cash For Questions” Hamilton, whose conference speech celebrated the fact that Heseltine, who was his boss at the Department of Trade and Industry, had given him the job of overseeing the drive for deregulation. Hamilton’s climax had the audience applauding wildly as he symbolically ripped up piles of paper (none of it, it is to be hoped, brown envelopes from Harrods). Heseltine, in blissful ignorance of the future, described this episode as Hamilton’s “greatest political triumph”. Well there weren’t many others, were there?

An appropriate end to these examples of the unpleasant, if typical, episodes in the history of the mindless jamborees which are Tory conferences is Portillo’s raving about the SAS in 1995. Even by the abysmal standards of capitalist politics Portillo must have been extremely stupid, or desperate for attention, to have so much as considered such a speech, which caused enduring damage to his prospects. Ted Heath rumblingly denounced it as a speech which “. . . hit new heights of offensiveness”. But then Heath was by no means a darling of the conference. In 1988, after he had attacked the Tory Eurosceptics, he was a victim of a blatant piece of manipulation by the party officials, who changed the order of speaking so that Jonathan “Sword Of Truth” Aitken was put up to reply, contemptuously adapting Heath’s own phrase to describe him as “the unacceptable face of Conservatism”. It was not long before Aitken himself became unacceptable as a minister, as an MP, as a bearer of truth.

A Passing Drunk

In 1984 at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the top Tory brass were staying for the conference, a bomb came close to wiping out much of the government, including Thatcher herself. Among the injured taken to hospital was a man who was clearly not of their class – he had none of the arrogance and the cynicism which are so essential to survival in the world of capitalist politics. So it was assumed that he was the hotel porter and the great and the good of the party came to patronisingly shake his hand and graciously thank and congratulate him for his courage. It is to be hoped that he made a speedy recovery from whatever he was in hospital for because he was in fact a nameless drunk who happened to be passing the hotel when the bomb went off and could not remember why he had been there. The episode was an appropriate comment on the party conferences, for their separation from the real world of analysing and solving society’s problems, for their ignorance of what they actually are or how they came to be there or where they are supposed to be going, driven by the intoxication of power. And making the most of it, before the rest catch on.

Ivan

Rod of iron (1979)

From the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three months after the Tories won power, it is becoming more and more obvious that we are being governed by a curious mixture of people. On the one hand there is Willie Whitelaw, who may be considered by a few ungrateful electors not to have the most agile intellect in politics. On the other there is Keith Joseph, whose legendary brilliance has the political correspondents searching through their Thesaurus for some fresh adulation. When he was last a minister, Joseph startled many of his admirers by suddenly discovering something he called the Cycle of Deprivation and by declaring that he intended to do away with it. This cycle which Joseph had come across was in fact the process by which poor people tend to raise deprived children, who in turn do the same. It may not have been the most original idea ever to come out of a Whitehall office, but it provided Joseph with the material for a lot of speeches, so we should all be grateful.

But any shortcomings in the new government are more than compensated for by the fact that they are presided over by one of the most remarkable women in the entire history of the human race. Margaret Thatcher, it will be remembered, was once castigated as the Iron Lady by the Russian press. Perhaps the Russians were really trying to bring about Labour’s defeat at the election; at all events, their sneer did Thatcher no harm. It has, however, had its repercussions; she now seems to feel the need to act out the role which has been thrust upon her. For example, in a recent article in the Sunday Telegraph, Graham Turner wrote:

. . . Mrs. Thatcher’s own impact has been explosive, both within the Cabinet and in Whitehall, part of which she has turned into a distressed area within the space of a few weeks . . .

Nor is it only civil servants who go in fear of Mrs. Thatcher. Some ministers, too, are distinctly nervous of her. It needs an especially arrogant and assertive personality (one who springs to mind is Michael Heseltine) to stand up to the Iron Lady and, if we are to believe the Sunday Express, this government is not overloaded with such people. Indeed, the Express recently sneered at the Tories as a bunch of vacillating weaklings, with Thatcher the only ‘man’ (sic) among them. No eyebrows will be raised at the sexism in this, typical of the Express, but what should be said about the paper’s abrupt change of favour? It is, after all, only a few months since they were advising us to vote for those same Tory weaklings.

Leader

Perhaps, in attacking the underlings while bolstering the leader, the Express is showing its sensitivity to the fact that the Tories have had some unhappy experiences with their leaders over the past fifteen years. At one time they could go about their business under the comfortable assumption that they were the natural governing party of British capitalism and that this would last for ever. This assurance did not lessen the ferocity of their infighting, in which not a few of their leaders perished, usually because they had failed to win an election. The process by which the leader of the Tories came to the front was once described by one of their MPs:

Great leaders of parties are not elected, they are evolved . . . I think it will be a bad day when we have solemnly to meet to elect a leader. The leader is there, and we all know it when he is there. (Ernest Pretyman, 21 March 1921)

In theory, a leader chosen by that process could hang on to the job for as long as he liked. In practice, his hold was not that secure; if he lost the support of the party in Parliament he was disposed of as effectively as in any formal ballot.

That was what happened when the Tories got rid of Douglas-Home and, to some extent, when Edward Heath was forced to put his leadership up for re-election — and lost to Thatcher. But in calmer times it is usual for the Conservative Party to present the image of a happy, united family, at one behind the leader. It is almost as if the leader had come down from some supernatural existence to harvest the votes; every word they utter is treated with reverence, and when they speak at a Tory Conference they must be rewarded with a prolonged standing ovation, no matter how banal and boring (which it usually is) their speech has been.

This is the treatment which is now being given to us over Margaret Thatcher. Here, for example, is how one Tory MP describes her:

. . .  She has the power of total concentration, an immense capacity for work, and great physical stamina. This is unusual in a woman. (Nigel Fisher, The Tory Leaders)

Nobody need be misled by Fisher’s confident assertions about women’s alleged lack of concentration, industriousness and stamina into thinking that he knows anything about biology. Perhaps his knowledge of politics is also suspect; why, for example, did this woman he praises so fulsomely have such a hard time of it being recognised by the Tories for the unique genius Fisher says she is?

When the campaign for the leadership opened, Thatcher was not among the front runners; likelier candidates were Whitelaw, Joseph and du Cann. Enoch Powell, not noted for his tact, said bluntly that Thatcher’s election was a matter of chance (and therefore, presumably, not of merit); earlier or later, it would not have happened. And it is almost certain that if the Tories had still been choosing their leader under the old system, they would not have ‘known she was there’. An important element in that system was that there should be some sort of consensus in a candidate’s favour among the more influential members of the party. As Fisher points out, Thatcher did not have this:

Before Neave assumed control, there was very little declared or positive support for Margaret Thatcher. Most members were reluctant to commit themselves, many thought she was unelectable and a few were openly anti-feminist.

But all that is past now, and Thatcher is at Number Ten. For the present (which probably means for as long as she wins elections) the ranks are closed behind her and the Tories bend their minds to a relentless campaign to convince us that we are the luckiest people ever to have such a person running British capitalism. Of course we are wearily familiar with this; the late John Davies, for example, could not have been described as a dazzling success as a politician, even by the standards which capitalism applies. Still less should the working class feel any warmth or sympathy towards a man who so openly represented the social system which degrades and exploits them. But when Davies died, the praise for him gushed uncontrolled:

. . . delightful, modest and very able... a person who believed in serving others. (Margaret Thatcher)

. . . a delightful colleague, who never spared himself . . . (Edward Heath)

. . . a genuinely nice man. (Ian Aitken, The Guardian)

This sort of nonsense is depressingly capable of convincing most workers not only that their leaders are an exceptionally able and self-sacrificing lot, but also that leaders of one sort or another are essential. How, without leaders, would capitalism go about its daily business of exploiting the working class, designing slums, regulating poverty, prosecuting war, protecting the privileges of a parasitic minority? How could it convince so many people that it is natural and progressive for the majority to work all their lives for nothing more than the achievement of keeping that minority in their parasitism?

For example, at a recent party of ‘high society guests’ at the Dorchester, the first prize in a raffle was a £1,000 facelift by a top Harley Street surgeon. What sort of person, one wonders, would buy a ticket in such a raffle? Or go to such a party? What sort of ‘doctor’ would agree to be the prize? And what sort of people doggedly, even happily, allow themselves to be exploited to support it, and at election time vote in favour of its continuing?

Perhaps the working class do not object to being robbed and insulted provided that it is done artistically. Thatcher’s success or failure as a politician will be judged by that standard. At the present she is largely an unknown quantity, but one thing is clear: no one will try harder.

Ivan

What about the miners? (1993)

From the March 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent furore over the pit closures has been notable for the number of public figures, politicians, ex-politicians, lords and landed gentry who were desolated by the prospects of unemployment with its consequent hardships and miseries involved for the miners. From the minister himself, Michael Heseltine, interviewed emoting at peak levels in front of his Adam fireplace in his stately home, to Winston Churchill clarifying the issue in typical upper-class fashion by calling for “a level playing field”, the depth of emotion shown on behalf of the miners has been truly touching, or would be if you were daft enough to believe it.

Huge amounts of energy, enthusiasm and work have been expended to gain a reversal of the decision to close the best part of what remained of British Coal. The eventual outcome is not yet clear but it looks as though some stay of execution might have been gained, and possibly some jobs saved. Are these gains of real significance? Has a “victory" been achieved? If the fight is content with that, if it stays at the level of reversing, or attempting to reverse a political decision, the answer must be a decisive “no”.

This is not to disparage the miners or their struggle. In fact one of the most heartening aspects of the whole sordid business has been to see the regeneration of enthusiasm in the miners' movement, but to the extent that some jobs at the pits have been saved at the expense of others in the nuclear or gas power stations we cannot speak of a working class gain. This can only be applied to a fight which benefits the entire working class.

Limited aims

For those miners who blacklegged in 1984-5 the depths of ruling-class perfidy must now be clear, had they thought that crossing the picket-line would give them any guarantees for the future. The message is evident. There is no such thing as an honourable bargain with the ruling class. They can never be trusted.

The other incontrovertibly clear message is: the power of the working class when we wish to use it. Those workers who are doubtful of the possibility of socialism prevailing against the power of the state must surely take heart. The truth is the capitalists have no power other than what is voluntarily given to them by the workers. We don't have to fight them, we only have to stop supporting them. The capitalists can only have power when they are resisting a minority opposition and even then are totally dependent on the support given them by the remaining majority of workers.

In other words, it is only by getting worker to fight worker that the ruling class maintains control and any close study of ruling-class tactics in their unceasing endeavours to maintain their dominant position will show this stratagem to be a consistent favourite. It therefore follows that the only impediment to bringing socialism into being is the lack of development of socialist understanding.

Unfortunately there is no evidence in the coalmine dispute to show that either the miners or their supporters are looking for anything other than very limited objectives within the capitalist system. They are not even looking for changes to the system nor demanding the restitution of past coal rundowns. They merely asked for a “review".

Because the workers are committed to capitalism they cannot press their demands to the point of threatening the stability of the system. If they push too far and go over the edge they have nothing to replace it with. The capitalists know this too and are ready to use this weapon when it suits them: “If you go on strike we'll lose that valuable overseas order which gives you jobs, and then we shall have to shut the factory down".

This situation is happening on a major or minor scale, continually. It is the reason why the heroic struggles of the oppressed must end in comparative failure and it is why trade union struggles of any kind can at best only ever achieve a limited success.

Tyranny of economics

What is possible or not possible in the context of capitalism is dictated by capitalist economics, and not only capitalist economics but the immediate pressing economic demands of the moment. When Heseltine, being interviewed by Dimbleby was asked about the prospects of North Sea gas in fifty years’ time he positively laughed at the prospect of making any decision for fifty years’ hence. The strength and the weakness of the capitalist system is that it is dynamically balanced to respond to immediate pressures and survive, but it cannot do more than that.

Capitalism is a system geared to the demands of the market. It has devised endless techniques to cope with the varying demands of the market, but it can never break away from them to plan a long-term strategy. It can react but can never act. Therefore the only argument which really has any validity for the capitalist politician is the economic argument. Not all capitalists or even all politicians realize this. After all, they do like to have some human illusions and for them to admit that they support a system which is utterly sterile of all human values, and which in the long run is a living nightmare, is a bit bleak for them to face.

But the Heseltines and Majors and Thatchers and Kinnocks and Smiths probably do realize it and usually make a fairly good job of concealing it from their own followers, knowing that if they allow the truth to present itself without the fancy wrapping there may be some opposition. This time Heseltine got so carried away with the beauty of his own arguments that he forgot to bring out the wrapping paper. Major must have been absolutely furious with him.

CYR

Running Commentary: Being prepared (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Being prepared

Ignoring the persistent evidence from the by-elections, the Labour Party is doggedly drawing up its plans to be the next government of British capitalism.

They are well aware that every government faces the difficulty of holding back pay rises. Past Labour administrations have tried to do this through exhortation, threats, legal controls and financial sanctions. Their policies have often brought them into spectacular conflict with the workers and sometimes with the unions as well.

Each time they are in opposition they claim to have learned from these experiences. Never again, they swear, will they attempt a frontal assault on workers' living standards; in future they will organise prosperity for everyone through wage restraint with the unions’ agreement, a peaceable surrender without a shot being fired or an angry word spoken at the Despatch Box.

Harold Wilson called one example of this tactic the Social Contract and the implied promise to bring order into wage negotiations where once there had been fractious chaos helped him back to power. Of course things didn’t work out as Wilson had promised and his successor Callaghan had to muddle through the winter of discontent.

But despite these grim memories, Labour is undaunted. They have a liaison committee with the TUC which has recently negotiated an agreement on wage control with the principal unions. It is all there in a working paper and the policy is called, not the Social Contract any more, but the National Economic Assessment.

This latest piece of trickery promises to give the unions new “rights" while emphasising their “responsibilities” to take account in their claims of economic priorities as identified by the National Economic Assessment.

In simpler terms, this means the unions would agree to hold back their claims if they conflicted with the priorities of a future Labour government. And no one can now be in any doubt about what those priorities are — a more profitable British industry, more competitive British exports, a more intense exploitation of British workers.

Out of office, and looking very unlikely to be in power again for a very long time, the Labour Party is still laying its plans to run British capitalism. Their problem, as ever, is that although this can be done in only one way — in the interests of the British capitalist class — it must be made to look as if it will benefit everyone


Jolly Swagman

If Barry Humphries got it right, Australia is a place populated by excessively bone-headed, obsessively macho sports. And if that is true the well-publicised reputation of their new Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, as a one-time bibulous, roistering womaniser may have helped him win the recent general election. Votes have been cast, and elections won, on flimsier grounds.

But more to the point was probably Hawke's promise to attend to the problems of the Australian economy with policies which would unify the people there. Australia is no longer a golden land of opportunity, beckoning to British workers exhausted by the exploitation and the weather and mistakenly believing that all their troubles would vaporise under the Australian sun. Unemployment there now stands at ten per cent and prices are rising sharply. For the Australian worker, life gets harder and harder.

Hawke’s predecessor, Malcolm Fraser, was a Prime Minister in the Thatcher mould. He did himself no good by imposing a wages pause without consulting the trade unions or trying to win their co-operation.

As we all know from experience, Labour governments aim to do it differently. While it is their object also to keep wages in check they at first negotiate on this with the unions. If they get an agreement, it is usually given some deceptive name like Harold Wilson’s Social Contract, which is supposed to convince us that frozen wages under a Labour government are less icy than the same thing under the Tories.

Bob Hawke, who came up through the trade union movement in Australia, will quickly use his experience and standing to get the unions' compliance in wage restraint. The Australian workers will be told that this is in their interests because, of course, a Labour government would not have it any other way.

Another example of the style in which Hawke will "unify” the country was his statement that the Prince and Princess of Wales will be given a dignified welcome when their imminent visit to Australia takes place. These two parasites personify the dominant class in a grievously divided society; they stand for privilege above the majority’s poverty. To welcome them is to condone a disunited society.

Like all Labour leaders. Hawke came in on a wave of optimism and on the prayer that things will be better hereafter. He has made an unusually rapid start in exposing these hopes for the futilities that they are.

Best forgotten

In the city of dreaming spires, a raging controversy disturbs statuesque scholars at their books. Was Michael Heseltine, when he was a student at Oxford in 1954, a supporter of the campaign to ban the hydrogen bomb? If he was it could be highly embarrassing to the man who now has the job of putting the government case against CND.

According to the Guardian, everybody who was anybody at Oxford at the time was in the campaign. Historian Raphael Samuel, who was then secretary of the university Communist club, says that Heseltine was more than just a member of the committee against the H bomb — he drafted the petition opposing the bomb and was scorned as a stooge of Moscow as a result.

Jeremy Isaacs, who so benefited from his time at Oxford that he now masterminds the production of drivel on Channel 4, says Heseltine attended a meeting but refused any further involvement. Tory MP Julian Critchley does not remember the future Defence Secretary being involved.

And Heseltine himself? "I really don't recall . . .” he said. “If the petition called for multilateral disarmament, well we are all in favour of that."

This problem with the Defence Secretary's memory is unsettling. He is, after all, the politician responsible for the nuclear warheads and delivery systems which have gone on growing worse and worse in spite of all those protests from angry undergraduates. We don't want him ordering them to be fired off in a spasm of absent-mindedness.

But Heseltine's forgetfulness is also understandable. It is common for people who are interested in reforming capitalism rather than abolishing it to become zealous about all manner of causes and campaigns. There is no lack to choose from: nuclear weapons, war, famine, poverty, dictatorships. massacres, demands to free some people and to lock others up . . . 

No self-respecting reformist refuses an invitation to sign up in support of such causes, unheedful of the fact that this is a waste of time which could be contributed to the struggle to abolish the root cause of all the problems.

And of course much of this zeal is expended at universities, where there is youthful energy associated with adolescent delusions about possessing élite intellectual qualities. It is quite understandable, that among all that excitement they should fail to remember every campaign they put their name to, and how and when and why.

If Heseltine was against the bomb in 1954, it need not disturb him now when he wants to keep it. Both attitudes are indefensible and both are best forgotten in favour of the idea of a basic change in society.

Double Act

The Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act is a misnomer because it does not prevent terrorism and. since it has lasted for nearly ten years, begins to look anything but temporary. So unsuccessful is the Act in stopping terrorism (which means guerilla acts committed by the other side) that, according to Home Secretary Whitelaw, 1982 was a very bad year for bomb incidents in England. So untemporary are its provisions that Whitelaw intends to introduce another Bill to replace the present Act — and presumably to give it permanence.

In the recent debate on renewing the Act for another year the Labour Party were quite clear that it is an assault on civil liberty. Whitelaw’s shadow Roy Hattersley protested about the harassment of Irish people which the Act encourages — “. . . part of a movement towards a more authoritarian society. That move is wrong in principle, and as far as combatting terrorism is concerned, wrong in practice".

Labour MP Reg Freeson weighed in with his description of the Act: “. . . the very kind that political terrorists in this country or any other wish to see a democratic state give way to”.

There is of course some validity to these arguments; for example the Act allows the police to arrest and to hold suspects for long periods without charging them or bringing them into a public court. According to Hattersley, some 85 per cent of those arrested and held under the Act are released without being charged.

But the points were just as valid in 1974, when the Act was rushed through parliament in the hysterical aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings. It was no less a threat to personal liberty, no less a political weapon for the IRA, then than it is now.

The only thing to have changed is the party which is in power. It was a Labour government, with a “liberal", "civilised” Home Secretary in Roy Jenkins, which passed the Act and which had it renewed each year until they lost power in 1979. In those days Hattersley felt able to vote for the Act.

In the case of Freeson there may well be another motivation. His constituency has a large number of Irish voters and he is under some pressure in reselection. And of course when they are out of power the Labour Party has always felt free to criticise many of the measures which they took when they were the government.

This latest squalid manoeuvre may win Labour a few votes from workers who are ignorant about where their interests lie. For the likes of Hattersley and Freeson, that is justification enough.

Disarming critics (1983)

From the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Michael Heseltine, who did not get where he is today through any diffidence about upsetting people, is robustly enjoying his job as the government’s scourge of the nuclear disarmers. He could hardly be expected to jeopardise this happy state by publicly debating with CND although the reason he gave for refusing — that CND have closed minds — has the deterring implication that Heseltine has an open mind on the issue and that it is not therefore beyond possibility that he could be converted to CND. That would mean more than the end of his pullulating ambition to be Prime Minister; he would have to exchange all those elegant pin-stripe suits for a demo-battered anorak and trim his hair so that it is no longer a ready handhold for a policeman dragging him away from a protest lie-down.

But until that happens — or at least until the next general election — we must endure Heseltine's audacious claim to be both a leader of the peace movement and a last line of defence against the menace of a Russian dictatorship. For it is unlikely that the government feels it has anything to fear from CND; more to the point is the decision of the last Labour Party conference to support unilateral nuclear disarmament, which may have given the Tories an electoral weapon to extinguish the last twitches of life from Labour’s ravaged body. This situation has its irony, for every Labour government since the bomb first went off have been firm supporters of British nuclear weapons and only the silliest of Labour Party supporters are likely to believe that this gruesome tradition is not safe with Michael Foot who, since that embarrassing conference, has industriously applied his oratorical gifts to fudging the issue.

The Thatcher government, like its Labour predecessors, base their case on the deterrent theory, which appeals to anyone who is able to set aside difficult things like historical facts. The theory begins with the crude nationalist assumption that it is always the other side which needs to be deterred — in this case Russia, no longer a staunch ally in the war to save the world for democracy but a ruthless aggressor:

  . . . as early as 1949 Russia was plainly showing her belief that Soviet ideology must dominate the world, and her readiness to use military force to achieve that. (Government film, The Peace Game.)

No nuclear power has yet admitted to having weapons which are aggressive; they all claim that their bombs are defensive and a contribution to world peace. It has been like that from the very beginning; Truman did not describe Hiroshima as an avoidable disaster but as an "overwhelming success”. The first Russian bomb in September 1949 was greeted by Moscow’s British mouthpiece, the Daily Worker, as "tremendous news” which would encourage "peace loving people everywhere”. When the first British bomb exploded Churchill "warmly congratulated” all those concerned, not forgetting Attlee and his Labour government who had initiated it. In 1964 the Chinese government was exultant about its bomb:

  . . . a major achievement of the Chinese people . . . The development of nuclear weapons by China is for defence and for protecting the Chinese people from the danger of the United States launching a nuclear war.

Then there are the statistics about how many tanks, guns, aircraft, bullets, the Russians and the rest of the Warsaw Pact states have. According to The Peace Game, they outnumber the NATO forces 2½ to one in tanks, nearly 3 to one in guns, well over 2 to one in aircraft. To adjust this imbalance, and so to prevent a "conventional” war, the NATO powers say they need a strong nuclear force:

  . . . the last war was the worst we have ever experienced. It is wars like that which we are trying to prevent with the nuclear deterrent . . . (Margaret Thatcher, Sunday Telegraph, 20 February 1983.)

But it is not just "conventional” wars which nuclear weapons are supposed to guard against; Heseltine sees them as also stopping the "unconventional”, nuclear type: "If we want to be safe from nuclear attack we must possess a nuclear deterrent that is effective”. (Party Political Broadcast, TV. 23 February 1983.)

The confidence in that statement imbued Heseltine's entire performance that evening; he put the deterrent case in a few pointed words: "History shows one nation will only attack another when it is too weak to defend itself". But he then rather spoiled the effect by instancing the Argentinian attack on the Falklands, perhaps forgetting that this was an example of a non-nuclear, and therefore weaker, power attacking a nuclear, and therefore stronger, one. This gap in Heseltine’s argument was soon smothered with a blood-stirring shot of a Union Jack being run up a flagpole. Patriotism is often a handy substitute for logical argument.

But there can be no substituting for reality. The deterrent theory has masked an arms race unprecedented in human history. Since those quaint days of Hiroshima. when there was a bomb which could kill only in tens of thousands, the weapons and their delivery systems have been refined and strengthened to the point when they have the power to kill in millions. Thirty-six countries now have the bomb or the capability to produce it. The world nuclear stockpile represents the equivalent of four tons of TNT for everybody on earth. This, in a rare flash of candour, the nuclear powers call overkill and it exists not to protect human freedom or to make us happier or more secure but to protect the interests of some of the minority class in society who. although their numbers are relatively small, own the world in the sense that they monopolise the means of life.

If the deterrent theory works then major war will have been eliminated, the nations will go on developing more and more horrific weapons and stockpiling enough of them to kill us all several times over but all of this will be a sort of game because there will be no intention, or opportunity, to fire them. Capitalism will have undergone a character change which would have no precedent in human history. Wealth will still be produced as commodities, with the minority class continuing to own the means of production but what has hitherto been an inevitable result of this — international conflicts — will no longer be inevitable. The capitalist class will still have interests to defend but will suddenly lose the will to do so.

The less credulous — or perhaps the more aware — will find it easier to believe that the deterrent must eventually fail; capitalism cannot exist without conflict and sooner or later there will be such a clash as will make the use of nuclear weapons unavoidable if one power or group of them is to hold its own against its rival. If that happens. say the supporters of deterrence, there will be a massive riposte ending in mutual destruction — as if that would be some consolation, among the atomised ruins of our lives. There will in any case be very little time for those who believed in deterrence to realise how wrong they were; the refinements of all those deterring weapons will ensure that they are delivered on target with the very minimum of delay. So what is the theory worth?

Well in spite of what Heseltine said the fact is that Argentina should have been, but was not, deterred from attacking the Falklands by the knowledge that they might provoke a nuclear response from Britain — and there is of course some evidence that the Task Force did carry nuclear weapons. When the 1939/45 war — the sort which Thatcher says she wants to guard against with the bomb — started, there was an expectation, based on the experience of air raids in the first world war, the Spanish Civil War and the Sino/Japanese war, that there would be a swift, crushing air strike which would lay waste to many British cities and kill about 600,000 people. Such was the fear of this that trenches were dug in the parks and commons, 38 million gas masks were issued and plans were laid to evacuate 2 million people from the officially doomed cities. But this did not act as a deterrent to the British government declaring war, when they felt that the interests of their capitalist class left them no choice. When the German air attacks came they did so in spite of the fact that by then the deterrent was operating in the other direction; the British were building the bombers and the organisation which was to wreck far, far worse destruction on German cities and their people.

For the deterrent theory to hold good, it must be assumed that war is an ordered, rational affair which is governed all the time through a series of sage, balanced assessments of reality. Why then did the Germans attack Russia in 1941, landing themselves with massive problems of supply and communication, to say nothing of the hardships of the winter? The motivation for that attack took little account of such obstacles; in 1941 Hitler enthused: “Where is there a region capable of supplying iron of the quality of Ukrainian iron? Where can one find more nickel, more coal, more manganese, more molybdenum?” And a little later he told his generals: "II I do not get the oil of Maikop and Groznyi, then I must end the war".

The war was embarked on over the German expansion into the mineral fields and the markets of the world; from that point it was escalated to a climax in the ruins of Stalingrad, Berlin and Hiroshima. It was a procession of chaos, with its own grisly momentum and with episodes — for example the German policy of antagonising the people of the countries they conquered when a more successful attitude would have been one of reconciliation; for example the profitless destruction of Dresden by the Allied air forces — which fall outside even the requirements of war. If that war had been plannable, on some historical blueprint, it would hardly have moved beyond a stalemate. Today there are still the same basic conflicts of capitalism; only the sides have been shuffled. the uniforms changed, the regions of conflict may have shifted, the armouries are ever more frightful. In a recent advertisement designed (presumably) to encourage young people to join the Royal Navy, we are reminded of the development of the oil and gas fields in the North Sea, which did not exist twenty years ago:

   As a Royal Navy Officer your job would be to keep watch on them; ready to deploy surface and airborne units as well as the Royal Marines company specially trained for anything which might threaten their safety.

Perhaps it is a measure of the confidence which the nuclear powers place in the deterrent theory, that they do not spread the knowledge for the production of the bomb more widely. The effectiveness of a deterrent must be in direct proportion to the number of countries which have it. If every state had the most destructive weapons available then they could all deter each other into a perpetual stalemate. In fact no nuclear power has welcomed the development of the bomb by its rivals. The Russian bomb, said Harry Truman, emphasised “. . . the necessity for that truly effective, enforceable international control of atomic energy which this government . . . support”. When it became apparent that the British were about to explode a test bomb, the Daily Worker damned it as “. . . an unmitigated curse . . . a coward's weapon, designed for the unrestrained massacre of the civilian population". As the Chinese tested their first bomb the Foreign Office, with typical pin-stripe restraint. expressed “deep disappointment".

Capitalism has not changed its character; war cannot and will not be spirited away through the so-called deterrent any more than by an equally miraculous bout of CND-inspired pacifism among the nuclear powers. This social system provides no confidence that the interests of its people are of any consequence beside those of its master class. In fundamental terms, nuclear weapons are significant only as a development in the methods by which modern private property society carries through its conflicts. Here, for example, is how US Vice President Bush — whose finger is a mere coronary away from the Button — describes the attrition theory of the 1980s, in words to warm the cockles of the heart of the late Earl Haig:

  You have a survivability of command and control, a survivability of industrial potential protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you. That's the way you have a winner. (Observer, 6 February 1983.)

Before it gets to that, those citizens, might act; the fact that they have the power to do so, and to stop it all, is obscured by the false securities of both the deterrent theory and the exhalation of their fear and anger in futile demonstrations. The world's citizens could set up and operate a social system in which war could not happen; beside that overpowering fact, the debate between deterrence and disarmament is reduced to an irrelevance.

Ivan

Death in Downing Street (1991)

Artwork by George Meddemmen.

From the January 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

 "The Tory Party can be a ruthless monster when it sees power slipping away" (Lord Prior, former Conservative Cabinet Minister).

Everyone had expected that she would go kicking and screaming but when they forced her out of Ten Downing Street she went obediently, delighting the hordes of media hacks by shedding a few quiet tears. Not necessarily tears of grief: it is possible to weep from anger or frustration or from the humiliation of being forced to face an unpleasant reality.

For some time she had seemed to believe she was invulnerable and could go on as prime minister for as long as she chose. But the day came—after the by-elections in Bradford North and Eastbourne—when the Conservative leadership decided that she had deceived herself too long for the good of the party. It did not come into their calculations that Thatcher had been deceiving millions of people for over eleven years.

Since 1979 Thatcher has steadily dominated British politics so that elections became almost a judgement on the woman in Number Ten instead of on her government and its individual candidates. Thatcher talked as if there was a direct, personal bond between her and the millions who voted Tory. On the fifth anniversary of coming to power she said "I believe that five years ago the British people made me prime minister because . . ." and then "I believe I was re-elected with an overwhelming majority last year because . . .” At that time—in 1984—there was some dismay in the Conservative leadership at her declaration that she intended to be leader in the next election. There was even more when, after the Tory victory in 1987, she told us she would go on and on winning elections and taking prime minister’s questions and humiliating her ministers until her famous energy flagged and she was too frail to wield a handbag any more.

Pop stars and politics
Like many politicians—and pop stars and comedians—Thatcher aroused reactions which were often at one extreme or the other. You loved her or your hated her. as the Sun reader would say; unless you are a socialist, in which case you most likely regard the whole lot with a numb horror. Those who loved her, who wept when she fell, adored her as a person who held staunch principles rooted in that awful cornershop in Grantham, a person who always knew her mind and fought to the death for her beliefs. She was, in other words, just the person, after those years of cowardly consensus-politics, to stop the unions holding the country to ransom, to weed out those scruffy teachers who wreaked such moral havoc in the permissive sixties and to put those impertinent foreigners in their place. These sentiments were encapsulated in a rebuke by Cilla Black one evening when she instructed an ungrateful audience that Thatcher had "put the Great back into Great Britain”.

As many of her ministers found to their cost, Thatcher did not take easily to being thwarted; she liked to have her own way. But this does not mean that she did not at times make U-turns in her policies, even if she tried to disguise them by saying that it was everyone else who had been out of step. The final example of this was when she took the "advice” of the Men in Grey Suits and abandoned the fight for the Tory leadership. Someone of Thatcher’s reputed strength and resolution should not have been so moved by the prospect of defeat on that second ballot as to run away from the battle, especially after she had so bluntly declared that she was still fighting. This was not the attitude which so pleased her admirers during the Falklands war—although of course in the Falklands it was other people who were in the battle, taking the casualties.

Putting the Great Back Into Great Britain meant Thatcher storming into international conferences to cow the foreign statesmen by her ruthless exposure of their deceits. It was calculated to encourage people as confused as Cilla Black and as bigoted as the massed readership of the Sun in their prejudice that there is something historically desirable in all things British and that whatever it is must be defended against the threats from those jabbering, treacherous foreigners.

In contrast, other prime ministers and other politicians—including Conservatives—have for a long time been facing up to the real situation of the decline of British capitalism in the world. This decline has happened in spite of the occasional attempt to conceal it with turgid patriotic nonsense. Some politicians, like Enoch Powell and Nicholas Ridley, have accepted it sulkily, rambling on about threats to British sovereignty from European bureaucrats. Others, like Heseltine, have argued that the best hope for British capitalism is to become part of a large European conglomerate, impaired sovereignty and all.

Ignoring problems
Patriotic workers have applauded Thatcher’s verbal assaults on foreign leaders and her stand as the champion of a Great Britain although these things are not relevant to their lives. They take no account of the cruel waiting lists for hospital treatment and of vital, life-saving treatment being withheld because of a shortage of cash. They ignore the homeless who, according to a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, have doubled in numbers since 1978. They pay no heed to the deepening misery of those on the lower slopes of poverty; one recent estimate by the Institute for Fiscal Studies was that over 12 million people were living at or below the official poverty line. They say nothing about the social despair which causes increasing crime; Home Office statistics record a rise of 17 percent in the second quarter of 1990 over the same period in 1989. These are the harsh realities of life under capitalism in Britain and what really lies behind Thatcher’s regal claim, as she vacated Number Ten. that "we” leave Britain in better shape than “we” found it 11½ years ago.

The standard Thatcherite technique of dealing with poverty in the 1980s and 1990s has been to reassure themselves that it is all a matter of choice. Since 1979, the Tories tell us, they have overwhelmed us with the opportunity to choose between private and state medical treatment, between council services and those tendered out to private contractors, between joining in the great Thatcherite bonanza of making loadsamoney or being poor. We can choose to be like someone struggling to keep a family on the dole or we can be as rich as Michael Heseltine.

They proudly tell us about privatised industry with its opportunities for everyone to buy shares by just filling out a form and borrowing the money to pay for them. It sounds impressive until we realise that many workers who bought shares in that way sold them as quickly as possible. In the case of British Gas, between December 1986 and April 1987 the number of shareholders fell from 4½ million to a little over 3 million. The "public" stake in British Telecom declined from 20 percent to 12 percent between privatisation in December 1984 and June 1987. Both concerns were, to all purposes, in the hands of big investors—which do not include members of the working class.

Mortgage misery
There has been a similar story with the so- called property-owning democracy. The rise in numbers of workers living in homes which they are buying with money borrowed from banks or building societies has been hailed by the Tories (and by the Labour Party) as a sign of immense social progress. In fact it is of little consequence to the workers how they pay for where they live. At times there can be some slight advantage in having a mortgage—in being in thrall to some money-lending institution. At others there may be some small gain in being beholden to a landlord.

The fiction that a worker who "buys” a house acquires greater security and higher social status has been exposed by recent events, as thousands who have been unable to keep up with their mortgage repayments have had “their” house taken over. This is called repossession when in fact the bank or building society never really lost possession in the first place. In one particularly tragic recent case of what has become known as mortgage misery, a father cracked under the strain and, rather than lose “his" house, he burnt it down, badly injuring his pregnant wife and killing the two-year old daughter he adored. He was sent to prison for six years, to reflect on the ruin of his life in Thatcher’s Great Britain. For the building society, who were guilty of no crime, it is of course business as usual.

But in spite of the misery the Thatcher mystique survived and this was partly due to her reputation of supposedly energising a transformation of British capitalism: with a little help from her Chancellors of the Exchequer, she had worked an economic miracle which would soon have its effects on all our lives. Of course unemployed workers, or the chronically sick or the homeless, might have wondered what all this talk about an economic miracle amounted to. Perhaps Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, the Chancellors who were once held in reverence for their miraculous talents but later despised for their blunders. might have thought on the same lines.

The government were always clear on what was meant by economic success. Thatcher set out her benchmarks in her statement on the fifth anniversary of her elevation to prime minister when she claimed the credit for:

  Inflation at its lowest for 16 years . . . Interest rates are at their lowest for six years . . . Profits are rising—and everyone wants to work for a profitable firm.

She was lucky in her timing then but by her tenth anniversary there was a different state of affairs so that among her extravagant claims of triumphant progress there were doubts:

  Yes there are problems. Inflation at 7½ percent to 8 percent is too high . . . The choice before us is a temporary rise in interest rates or a long term rise in inflation.

At the same time British capitalism’s balance of trade is in serious and chronic deficit and unemployment, having fallen, is rising again. These matters—"inflation", interest rates, balance of trade—are of no real significance to the working class and should have no political influence on them except to show how by their own standards the Thatcher government failed to control the economy. The claim to be the originators of an economic miracle was no more than a taking of credit for a particular phase in the economic cycle. Now, when the cycle is in another phase, they are desperately trying to evade the blame.

From all sides the immediate future of British capitalism is gloomy. Thatcher’s talk of more profitable firms must be set against an annual rate of company failures approaching 25,000 and the warnings from organisations like the CBI that Britain is on the brink of the most serious recession since the Tories came back to power. The reason for this is that no government can control capitalism. The reason for the Tory bombast about economic miracles and “temporary” problems in the economy is that no government can ever own up to being impotent.

Fallacies
Let us hope that the Thatcher years have at least killed off the potent fallacy that female political leaders are preferable to male because they are more perceptive and compassionate. To begin with. Thatcher’s campaign to win the Tory leadership from Heath in 1975 was notable for its ruthless manipulations of the truth. After that she submitted herself to a cynical grooming which changed her hair, her clothes, her voice, even the way she sat before the cameras. To protect her own personal position she was ready to dismiss, or force out, any number of ministers while she was publicly praising them as valued colleagues. And in a last desperate ruse to hang on to power she blatantly tried to cripple the Heseltine campaign by bringing forward the nomination date: in other words, by manipulating the rules for her own advantage.

Thatcher was described as unusual—unique, even—because she held opinions honestly and expressed them with a passion based on her conviction that she was right. But she was actually a commonplace politician, running capitalism as it has to be run, against the interests of the millions who are misled into voting for the system. She lost her job, not because of her "principles" were unsound—that is really no more than a side issue—but because she threatened to be an election loser.

As one Conservative MP said a year before, when Anthony Meyer challenged her for the leadership:

  Is she the best person for the job at present and is she going to be the winning formula for the next general election? We are a party interested in being in government.

So in the end it all came down to the same tawdry cynicism as usual. Thatcher was really no different and nothing important will change now that she has gone. It is just that, in his euphoria, John Major should remember that if the day should come when he is an election loser then the Grey Suits will be waiting on him too.

Ivan

They said it . . . (1993)

From the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

• It is tough out there in every industry— Michael Heseltine’s son Rupert after being made redundant 
• Conservatives do not stab people in the back—Rhodes Boyson MP 
• No aristocrat has ever died of this disease—Bert Connor, chairman of Clydeside Action on Asbestos.
• The Prince and Princess of Wales do not have a bottomless pit from which to draw money—Buckingham Palace spokesman.
• To be identified as the child of a politician is just terrible—son of a former Cabinet Minister and Chairman of the Tory Party.
• If a woman upsets you, alright. It's part of their function in life—Judge John Lee, Hereford Crown Court.
• What we see is obscene and should not happen in a civilised society—Director of Kent Social Services on the homeless.

Running Commentary: If Thatcher goes (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the March 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

If Thatcher goes

It may take some time to accustom ourselves to the idea that Michael Heseltine wants to take care of us all — to protect the weak, the sick and the poor — but that is what we may have to face, if Margaret Thatcher should cease to be Tory leader. If it comes to that, not so long ago it would have been difficult to accustom ourselves to the idea of Thatcher losing her grip but now, as the Westland affair swells from a cloud no bigger than an ex-Defence Secretary's hand to a darkness stretching to the far horizon, the unthinkable becomes readily believable.

The opposition to Thatcher within her party is. we are told, to do with her style of government— her ruthless and overbearing pursuit of her ends and her preference for a cabinet full of unquestioning toadies rather than suffer a single stimulating critic. This has left her back benches crowded with what is called ministerial talent who were not however talented enough to prevent themselves being quietly snuffed out or to remember that Thatcher's adopted style was what once, in those heady days after the 1979 and 1983 elections, endeared her to the party.

How gleefully, for example, they all once grasped at the Russian award of that title of the Iron Lady; how approvingly they regarded her forays into EEC negotiations, showing those nasty foreigners that they could not pull the financial wool over her steely eyes; how gratefully they applauded her implacability over the Falklands war: how rapturously they laughed when she scornfully denied to a Tory conference that she wanted to be another Edward Heath: "This lady's not for turning".

If the Tories are deserting her now. this can be for only one reason. Exposed as no different from the rest, as a cynical and deceitful politician whose principles are those of day-to-day opportunism. Thatcher suddenly looks like a disaster. There is panic in the Tory ranks; how else can we explain Heseltine's audacious claim to be a compassionate politician?

And if Thatcher goes, what then? Will she be replaced by a Tory government pledged to introduce the politics of One Nation? Will the Tory wets come squelching back into the cabinet? Will British capitalism become managed by a bunch of landed gentlemen from the shires — Pym, Gilmour, Prior — rather than upstart advertising executives and small business people? Will all of this be bolstered by the sulking Ted Heath and by Willie Whitelaw, desperately plugging the holes in the dykes of party unity?

Such a government would be presented to us as offering new hope for a more humane and secure future. There would be whispers about reducing unemployment, reviving the National Health Service, smoothing the rougher edges of the deepest poverty. It might be a propitious time to overlook the fact that these leaders are already associated with wretched failure, in the governments of Heath, Douglas-Home and Macmillan. There is no reason to believe that they will be any more successful in the future.

One Nation is in any case not an exclusively Conservative idea. Every Labour government comes to power with the same sort of promise, to unite the interests of everyone into a great drive for competitive British exports, full employment, a controlled economy, efficient state services and so on. They may call their policies by different names the National Plan, the Social Contract but essentially they are the same as One Nation and they suffer from the same basic fallacy.

Capitalism is not a society of unity. It is based on class ownership of the means of life and therefore on class conflict. It cannot be controlled or moulded by politicians or economic experts into something which it is not. It cannot operate in the interests of the majority of its people. It must continue as a system of anarchy, poverty, disease and war.

All of that is taught to us by experience and by an analysis of capitalism. Unless the working class act to abolish capitalism, the prospect is dismal — a succession of ineffective governments distinguishable only by their style of empty promises and of the excuses they give for their impotence. We have had time enough to accustom ourselves to that idea — and time to act on what we have learned from it.


Policeman’s brawl

The role of the police is primarily one of institutional coercion on behalf of ruling-class power. Anything else — helping old ladies across the road, for example — is entirely incidental. This being the case, it is plain to see that activities such as we have witnessed on. say, the miners' picket lines, or at Grunwick, are not in any way exceptional but rather conform to the normal expectations of the class that recruits and pays the police. In exchange for these relatively lucrative services the police in turn can normally expect to be shielded from prosecution or conviction should their activities kill or maim. The cases of Jimmy Kelly and Blair Peach are only two of the many instances where this has proved true.

So what about the latest example of protection from the consequences of brutal thuggery for which, in the knee-jerk terms of the Director of Public Prosecutions, there exists insufficient evidence on which to prefer charges? We refer, of course, to the vanload of policemen looking for a punch-up in Holloway who gratuitously attacked five boys, two of whom — the black ones, significantly enough — ended up in hospital.

On this topic, somewhat surprisingly, the Guardian has managed to serve up something a little less bland than its usual jesuitic fare. Its second leader of 5 February. "Police beyond the law", contains much that is unquestionably accurate, including the clear recognition that the government is protecting the police. Of course it is. But what sticks in the Guardian's craw is any nasty revolutionary notion that such partisanship is class-based. The inescapable truth is that capitalism's police, "right" or "wrong", have a bounden duty to close ranks in tribal complicity on behalf of their and our masters.


Kick start

In the month that saw politicians stabbing each other in the back and rival groups of capitalists fighting it out for a share in Westland helicopters, life for the working class went on pretty much as usual.

The number of people registered as unemployed rose to 3.4 million. Shortly before the figures were announced, the Job Start scheme was launched by the government. This is the latest attempt at cosmetic surgery to conceal capitalism's failure to provide people with employment and hence the means to live. It is to be run in nine key areas (not necessarily those with the highest unemployment) and involves unemployed workers being offered £20 a week to "top up" their wages if they take a job which pays less than £80 a week. In other words, the government is subsidising bosses who pay low wages. The rationale is that the long term unemployed lose confidence and need encouragement to go back to work. Of course what they are really worried about is that unemployed workers who realise that they will only be a few pounds a week better off by taking a job that pays very little may decide not to bother. But having bribed workers to take on low paid work with the extra £20. the government will withdraw the grant after six months.

Capitalism depends on workers selling their labour power for the lowest wage or salary that employers can get away with paying. Workers are educated, trained and conditioned into believing that wage slavery is freely entered into and necessary to human dignity: to work for a living, no matter how badly paid the job, is better than "living off the state". But if workers see through this myth and decide that it is not worth going to work for a few pounds more than they can get in benefits, then the state has a variety of ways of coercing people into going to work for low wages. YOPS and YTS schemes have been used to try to instil the work ethic into young unemployed people and now Job Start is to be used for the same purpose with older unemployed workers.