Colston verdict – the big picture (2022)

From the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tory MPs were spitting feathers last month after four Black Lives Matters activists were acquitted of criminal damage by a jury at Bristol Crown Court after pulling down the statue of a 17th century slave trader and chucking it in the harbour during the BLM protests in 2020.

The verdict will have come as a surprise to some who expected an open and shut case, as the defendants were filmed on CCTV and so were scarcely in a position to deny the deed. Their somewhat tenuous defence was that the presence of the statue was in itself a ‘hate crime’ and that therefore its removal was in line with current legislation. Even more dubiously, they argued that as the statue was public property, and they were members of the public, they had a right to dispose of their own property as they saw fit. It’s hard to imagine any jury being persuaded by either of these arguments, but they were probably more exercised by the prospect of appearing to endorse slavery if they went the other way, so delivered an acquittal verdict anyway.

Unsurprisingly the prosecution case was that it didn’t matter who Colston was, that the law was clear: people couldn’t run around wrecking monuments they didn’t like. This was also the line taken by government ministers and Tory backbenchers, who are always the first to leap nobly to the defence of a set of laws which protect their wealth and privilege.

Transport minister Grant Shapps spoke for many of them, saying ‘we live in a democratic country. If you want to see things changed you can get them changed, you do that through the ballot box, or petitioning your local council, etc. You don’t do it by going out and causing criminal damage’.

The problem with this is that there had already been legal campaigns, for no less than 100 years, to remove this statue, but from 1920 onwards these had resulted in no action because no government had ever bothered to establish a framework for the democratic removal of a public monument, on whatever grounds.

Tory yahoos immediately fulminated that ‘the result of this ruling will be that mobs will seek to tear down statues across the country – it gives a green light for mobs’, and that ‘as a country we need to protect our heritage from mob rule’. Note how quickly ‘the people’ becomes ‘the mob’ in government parlance when they do anything the establishment doesn’t like. It’s democracy when it pleases our masters, it’s ochlocracy when it doesn’t.

Respect for venerable monuments did not stop Shapps from muttering darkly about changing the rules of jury trials to prevent juries delivering verdicts that upset the government. Possibly sensing that red-eyed zombie rage was taking over the Tory camp, arch-Tory Jacob Rees Mogg felt obliged to state that, when it came to great monuments, the British jury system was up there with the best of them, and loose talk about pulling it down just because of one trivial verdict was not hugely constructive. Boris Johnson meanwhile, showing as ever his forensic grasp of historical matters, opined that it was wrong for people ‘to go round seeking retrospectively to change our history’.

The big picture

This echoes the recent furore engulfing the National Trust, whose current policy of daring to mention slavery in connection with the history of landed estates and country piles has provoked allegations of ‘wokeism’ and even death threats against its senior figures. But it seems clear to anyone who has ever visited these estates that slavery has been largely airbrushed out of the pretty picture to spare the blushes of the current owners. All that NT bosses have tried to do is restore the real truth about where the money came from that paid for these country piles in the first place. The argument that this is somehow ‘historical revisionism’ is as transparent as it is hypocritical. Many of Britain’s rich got to be rich through slavery, and consequently many of the monuments, palaces and public buildings of Britain’s cities, and of the former slave ports of Bristol and Liverpool, deserve to be understood in this context. This being so, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that statues of slave owners are a continuing and blatant affront to human decency which should have been removed decades ago. If the state wasn’t going to do it, then individuals would have to instead, and as it turned out, the Bristol jury had no problem with that.

The even bigger picture

But this is not what’s really bothering the frothing Tory MPs. They couldn’t care less about history, gesture politics, or statues. What worries them is that a jury can take such a cavalier attitude to the destruction of property, because property is what makes the rich rich. If the mobile vulgus can take down a statue today, what’s to stop them taking down Buckingham Palace tomorrow? Or taking over the lands of the Duke of Westminster, or any private mansion? Property is a concept that underpins capitalism, and it has acquired a fetishised totemic power in the minds of workers. It demands to be respected, worshiped even, as a sacrosanct and inviolable thing. But like all fetishes, its power is only apparent, not real. Once people stop believing in it, it ceases to exist. It is like a vast bubble of magical nothingness which holds society in its thrall. And, shock horror, the Bristol jury went and stuck a pin in it.

Not that capitalism will implode just because of that. But the rich are terrified of workers losing their awe of private property. Once they do that, they might start asking themselves why there are rich people at all, and why they, the workers, are obliged to be poor and waste their lives as wage slaves in order for those rich people to enjoy luxury and idleness. As socialists often say, the rich are much more class-conscious than workers, at least for now. They know that they owe their wealth to the despoliation of the planet and the utter subjection and exploitation of the overwhelming majority of the population. They also realise that workers, organised collectively, have a real and irresistible power that could sweep them away utterly, while their own power as a tiny minority resides in nothing but fetishised symbols, rituals and customs. In short, they know how weak they really are.

Society now accepts that slavery is an indefensible crime against humanity. The Bristol verdict suggests that workers now take a dim view of public monuments glorifying it, regardless of who the monuments belong to or what laws are in place to preserve them. But many of the arguments against slavery also apply to the practice of wage slavery, which is part of the machinery of capitalism and which condemns billions to relentless misery. We look forward to the moment when workers stop respecting its monuments and institutions too, and start pulling down more than a few statues.

Paddy Shannon

World at Work: Slaughter of South American Indians for Oil (1971)

From the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Slaughter of South American Indians for Oil

Oil has been called ‘black gold’. Not an inapposite comparison with the precious metal since it has meant the enrichment of a few, has been fought over by many and has reduced human beings to the most degraded levels of behaviour in the endeavour to get their hands on it.

The blood-stained hand of capitalist violence is now poised ready to deal a death-blow to a small tribe of South American Indians in Colombia. The systematic attempt at extermination of the Guahibo tribe in the Planas region by the Colombian army and settlers came to light as the result of certain Colombian clerics writing for help to the World Council of Churches. Subsequent enquiries on behalf of the Sunday Times (15 November 1970) has substantiated the truth of the letter, which the Colombian Government at first tried to discredit.

To the misfortune of the Indians “their” lands may have oil underneath and it is for this that they are being slaughtered. Many of the seven thousand Indians are virtually the slaves of the settlers and their condition and treatment at the hands of these unscrupulous men is very harsh. Their numbers are also being decimated by disease and malnutrition.

A number of Indians took refuge in the Jungle with a former police inspector sympathetic to them and resisted the settlers with violence. This seems to have given the Colombian government an excuse to crack down on them. As one settler put it: “There will not be any peace in this region until the Indians are gone”— a sentiment echoed all over the world today and in the past to justify the grabbing of the world’s wealth by a few and one to be heard in the future for as long as capitalism lasts.

Trading in the sword for a plough-share

To banish strife and discord from among the nations of the world, as capitalist politicians might put in their more lyrical and biblically inspired moments, has long been one of their dreams, and it was at one time believed that all that had to be done to achieve this happy state was to liberalise trade between countries by abolishing tariffs, import quotas and other barriers to commerce. The principal exponents of this doctrine in Britain were the Liberals. A new variation on this antique theme has been composed by an international lawyer named Samuel Pisar and he has dedicated it to Russia in a book called Commerce and Coexistence.

In Pisar’s opinion the best way of countering and prevailing over the threat posed by Russia is to demonstrate the West’s superior capacity for economic progress. Presumably what Pisar has in mind is that when and if the Russian consumer tastes the fruits of American affluence (no doubt Ralph Nader and Vance Packard can give them some advice on what to choose) the aggression in those breasts will be soothed and lowering brows unknitted by having a good splurge.

So far from bringing peace to the world it is trade and commerce which give rise to the tensions and conflicts between nations, the military conflict of war merely being an extension of the economic struggle going on all the time. One 19th century economist bluntly stated that “When goods cannot cross frontiers, armies will.” Sebastian de Ferranti, chairman and managing director of the electronics firm of Ferranti, also used strong language in describing the real situation when he referred to the support which Britain gives the U.S.A. in a speech at the opening of a new plant in Dundee. “It is an extraordinary state of affairs where our enemy in these advanced fields is encouraged and given financial support to come particularly to Scotland to compete with us” (Times, 23 April 1969). In the same article it was also reported that he had said that in the more advanced fields of technology Britain had only one enemy, that was America with whom we were at war.

The economic causes of the First and Second World Wars have been well documented for all to read, as have the admissions of capitalist statesmen on this subject. Perhaps when Pisar takes off his rose coloured spectacles he may discover this too.

Conserving Conservation

As might be expected in European Conservation Year, no positive steps have been taken to preserve the natural environment from further depredations of industrial expansion. In Britain we have been regaled with news that members of the capitalist class, anxious to make more profit and to help their sacred cow, the balance of payments, are turning their rapacious eyes to one of Britain’s most beautiful areas, Snowdonia, with a view to open-cast mining.

So far all that has been done to this end by Rio Tinto Zinc International Mining Co., the industrial concern involved, has been the placing of two applications for mining tests to be carried out at Coed-y-Brenin Forest and in the estuary of the Mawddach river.

There is considerable unemployment in the area and RTZ are playing upon this to gather local support. Furthermore exploitation of national natural resources could be said to be in the “national interest” by helping the balance of payments which is the concern of British capitalism generally. One of the ploys regularly used in getting new and controversial industrial projects accepted is to emphasise the increase of jobs, and to the unemployed this probably has very great appeal. To the socialist it reveals the degradation and servility of the worker in welcoming his own exploitation and the destruction of natural and social amenities which he and his fellow workers enjoy on rare occasions and then only briefly as a respite from the tedium of everyday life in capitalist society.

What is ultimately at stake here is the entire concept of national parks as areas of countryside of outstanding and unique natural beauty set aside for leisure and recreational purposes and accessible to anyone who cares to visit them. The Conservationists fighting the threat may win the day, but it will not be the last battle they will have to fight against the rapacity of capitalism.

The Elusive Millionaire

They seek him here, they seek him there,
The pressmen seek him everywhere.
Is he in Nassau or has he come back?
Or is he in Vegas playing Black Jack?

The most publicised man in the world today is an American multi-millionaire who has been seen by very few people during the past 13 years (he was last photographed in public in 1957) and has attracted more sensational publicity by trying to avoid it, so it seems, than any film star getting divorced for the umpteenth time.

Howard Hughes first gained a reputation as a film producer and then as a record breaking aeroplane pilot and designer. His fame now largely rests upon his withdrawal from, and lack of contact with, the world outside his hotel suite. The story of Howard Hughes’ career is not the usual romantic one of a man who went from rags to riches but of a man with a wealthy father who went from riches to super riches. No doubt Hughes could always have counted on his father to supply him with a pile of dollars on which to have a soft landing in the event of a fall.

Today Howard Hughes is the owner of a vast business empire whose value runs into hundreds of millions of dollars. To help him run it he employs an army of minions— lawyers, accountants and other experts, such is the complexity of its financial structure and so extensive are its ramifications.

Some of his minions were involved in a "who controls what” dispute which broke out (or, at least became publicly known) early in December over his Las Vegas gambling operations. Hughes, the only one who could settle the dispute, was reported to have gone to the Bahamas. He is said to have disappeared mysteriously on a previous occasion at a time of crisis in his business empire. At one stage the governor of Nevada intervened and personally contacted Hughes. No doubt the break up of Hughes’ gambling and other interests in the state could have had serious repercussions, there, since Hughes is the owner of numerous gambling houses, the state’s largest landowner and one of the largest employers (Times 7 December 1970) as well as having other property interests there.

Howard Hughes’ fortune, like the entire wealth of the rest of the American capitalist class, and elsewhere for that matter, is solely deprived from the exploitation and dispossession of the vast majority of the people by whose labour wealth in all its forms is produced.

The extremes of luxurious living and destitution can nowhere be more clearly seen than in America. Howard Hughes is just one of many Americans possessed of immense wealth, perhaps it can all best be summed up in these words "One man’s wealth is many men’s poverty”.

Spectator

News in Review: Brothers for George (1966)

The News in Review column from the January 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Brothers for George

It is apparent that George Brown is not the only capitalist administrator in the world who is worried about wage claims.

This year promises to be a stormy one for the trade unions in West Germany, for it will see the expiry of wage agreements affecting some twelve million workers. 

The unions are of course planning to get a new agreement which will give them higher wages and shorter hours; the Metal Workers, for example, are asking for a nine per cent increase in wages, a cut in hours and other benefits.

All this, however, comes shortly after Chancellor Erhard has appealed for all German workers to work another hour a week, and after the Institute of German Industry has issued a forecast of economic difficulties during 1966, when one source predicts that German balance of payments will be in deficit by about £623 million.

Storm warnings are being hoisted, too, in Sweden, where the employers’ organisation recently broke of negotiations with the unions over their demand for a ten per cent wage rise.

The reasons given in both Germany and Sweden for these clashes bear a remarkable similarity to each other, and to those being given by the British government for its current disputes with the unions. Consider these statements:

  Germany. “. . . estimated that in the third quarter of (1965) hourly wages paid by West German industry were up by 13.2 per cent over the same period of last year, while productivity rose by 5 per cent." (The Guardian—2/12/65.) 

  Sweden. “The wage raises in Sweden during the last years have been bigger than the industrial growth and it is not realistic to think that this can continue for ever.” (Spokesman for the Swedish Employers’ Association—20/11/65.) 

  Britain. “Despite the injunction and the signatures on the declaration of intent, earnings are still going up much faster than productivity.” (Mr. Callaghan, Chancellor of the Exchequer—30/10/65.)

If these statements show anything, it is that the same problems are confronting the capitalist class in many countries at the same time. Many of them are trying to keep wages in some sort of check, and to bargain higher wages for more intense exploitation. At the moment, however, the acute shortage of labour ensures that the unions can push their claims with a fair amount of success.

Once more, the signs are appearing that governments are trying to put pressure on the unions, which may mean that 1966 will be a turbulent one for industrial relations.

The statements also show the problems of the working class are international too —as are the methods by which they try to solve them.

Dare we wish the unions in Germany, Sweden and Great Britain, as they prepare to go over the top to meet the concentrated resistance of the employers, a Happy New Year?

Middle East flashpoint

The assets of yesterday have a habit of becoming the liabilities of today.

Throughout the world, strung along the main trade routes, are many once prized jewels now destined for the diplomatic dustbin. Colonies that were once vital to a Great Power to be defended at all costs, become expensive liabilities once changes in the balance of power rob them of their importance.

Strong points that could command narrow straits with their heavy guns, naval bases from which fleets could operate, or victualling and coaling stations, no longer matter in a world of nuclear armaments.

Sometimes the colony was of no great value in itself, but in the power scrambles of the time it was feared that a rival could make use of it.

Today that world has gone and ideas of Colonial freedom and the “rights” of peoples to govern themselves, become more attractive to the occupying power than to the inhabitants themselves— especially where an artificial settlement has been built up around a naval base or port, and withdrawal would mean economic distress.

Governments who not long ago would have opened fire on a mob demanding Independence, now often cannot grant it quickly enough.

But occasionally other forces come into play and then the liability becomes a flashpoint. Such an area is the Federation of South Arabia with its major port of Aden.

For a century Aden has been the strong point at the southern end of the Red Sea, leading to the Suez canal. It was seized from the Turks in 1839 and became an important coaling station, but its importance has declined. Britain is due to get out in 1968.

But the Federation of South Arabia is part of the Arabian peninsula, which is in a state of political ferment. The Federation's next door neighbour—the Yemen—has been in the grip of civil war.

Rising nationalism and the growth of Pan-Arabism, plus the efforts of Egypt—the strongest Arab State in the Middle East—have helped to produce a situation that periodically explodes into violence.

Then again we hear the sad and familiar story of terrorist bombs and troops firing in the streets.

We also have the familiar story of a suspended Constitution, of Ministers coming and going and of questions being asked in Parliament.

Another suffering chapter is added to capitalism’s history of conflict and. bloodshed.

The price of a bride

What is marriage?

Exploited to the hilt by the insurance companies, the car hire firms, the caterers and the photographers, and worked to death by the advertising agencies who seem to be able to match any message to a picture of a happy couple coming out of church, it is certainly one of capitalism's money-spinners.

It is also one of capitalism’s great  deceptions.

Marriage may seem rosily romantic to a plain working class couple the day they take the vows. There’s the ceremony and the people all around and the expensive get-up and the chance to be the centre of attraction. Much more exciting than the factory line or the typing pool.

But the reality which follows is something different. There is the struggle to find somewhere to live, to balance the family budget, the fear (it is very often no less) that children who cannot be afforded will be conceived.

There is also, perhaps, the eventual reality of the Divorce Courts.

And when a marriage reaches the Divorce Courts another side of it is often revealed—the fact that it can be almost a business deal between husband and wife.

Everyone knows that a husband is under a legal obligation to provide for his wife, and for any children born of the marriage. A divorce settlement usually requires him to keep paying his ex-wife a sum fixed by the court.

On the other hand, the woman also has her price, and if a man loses her he can often claim that price from the third party. This requires the court to assess the woman as a domestic, economic and sexual asset. And how is this done? In the only way capitalism knows—in terms of money.

Last month, for example, the Divorce Court heard a case, in which a company director was cited by a quantity surveyor, who alleged adultery with his free-lance fashion designer wife.

The husband at first claimed that only damages of ten thousand pounds could compensate him for his loss, but the judge thought that was too much.

He awarded four thousand pounds to the husband, but more significant was the way in which he justified this decision: the husband, he said, had “. . . suffered a serious loss of a valuable wife, both professionally and domestically”.

This is only one of many such cases. A couple of years ago a divorce judge awarded one hundred pounds and explained this comparatively small amount: “I don’t think this young lady would ever have been a very satisfactory wife. I don’t think the husband's loss in terms of money is very high”.

This sort of case always gets wide coverage in the press, but no newspaper ever asks whether the wife objects to having a price ticket put on her, nor whether the men in the case think it undignified to be engaged in a sort of auction over a woman of whom they are, presumably, fond.

It is typical of capitalism that while it glorifies the institution of marriage it also puts its own sordid standards on it.

Against the tide

For almost every problem capitalism produces there is a bunch of well-meaning reformers, heroically swimming against the tide, who are trying to do something about it.

They sing more often than they swim.

Enterprise Neptune is the National Trust’s name for its effort to save what remains of the British coastline from being wrecked by what the property and building companies like to call Development.

The Trust has produced some convincing—and disturbing figures. The Kentish coast, where so much of recent British history began, was 29 per cent built up in 1958; now it is 50 per cent built up. Each year, six miles of coastline falls to the developers, to their bungalows and holiday camps and petrol stations.

Only nine hundred miles now remains of any worth as a place for recreation and relaxation. The National Trust is trying to raise £2 million to buy up the best bits of it as they come on the market.

But they are up against an enormous problem. Once development permission is granted—or sometimes even when it has been applied for—the price of a piece of land shoots up. A Trust spokesman recently gave the example of an Essex island which was sold four years ago for £1,750 and which is now back on the market, with permission to build one bungalow, at £20,000.

This is no more than an example of the working of one of capitalism’s laws. The Trust’s secretary recently complained that the wrecking of the coastline was caused by “. . . greed for financial profit and . . . enormously conflicting interests . . .”

That is undoubtedly true, and anyone who knows the exhilaration of fine coastal scenery, and who fumes at its destruction, may find themselves keeping their fingers crossed for Enterprise Neptune.

But they should ask themselves why it is all happening. Where does “greed for profit” come from? What causes “conflicting interests”?

The social system we live under is based upon production for profit, and in that very fact it produces a mass of conflicting interests. Sometimes these interests are asserted in planning inquiries—and sometimes they are asserted in other, more spectacular, ways.

Capitalism has been responsible for untold destruction, distortion and degradation—of human beings and of their environment.

This is a desperate situation, and it needs more than charity, however well- intentioned to deal with it.

The Evans affair

Ghouls, and those students of something or other who so carefully study the most revolting details in all the murder cases, must regard the case of Timothy Evans with a special affection.

First there was the original case after which Evans was executed—not very exciting in itself. Then the Christie case, which had everything a reader of the News of the World can ask. Then there was the Scott Henderson Inquiry, to say whether Christie was responsible for the crime which cost Evans his life.

Then there were all the books, and now yet another investigation, by Mr. Justice Brabin.

It is a terrible story. Ten Rillington Place was a hellish house, with its crumbling plaster, its rotten woodwork and the mouldering washhouse where they found Mrs. Evans’ body.

And there among the damp and the decay lived poor simple Evans and his ill starred wife and his pathetic baby. There, too, lived the frustrated, tormented killer under the lash of the deficiency in him which made him do what he did.

They have renamed Rillington Place now, and a West Indian family lives at Number Ten. But such changes cannot eradicate the memory of it; the place remains a festering eyesore in more ways than one, and there are plenty more like it.

There are plenty more people, too, like Evans and Christie. People who are ill and tormented or what the official reports call “backward”—people who are too simple to survive in the clawing world of capitalism, no matter what obvious deceits they resort to.

These people are inadequate, and they are tortured and miserable for it. But by what standards are they inadequate?

There, is little time for such people in a society dedicated to ownership, to exploitation, to the fast sell and the big profit. Social workers battle with the problem but their efforts are puny beside the monster they are fighting. They often give up the struggle, and think themselves lucky if their charges keep out of the courts, or at any rate out of the more serious courts.

Evans never really had a chance and that is something which no bewigged inquiry will ever investigate. Whether he killed his wife and child or not, there is no helping Evans now; the penalty which was supposed to be a cornerstone of our civilisation in his case worked in a particularly barbaric way.

And if the Evans affair is ever settled, what hope will there be for the other misfits of capitalist society? The people who have campaigned so long and hard to clear Evans’ name show no signs of having any adequate answer to that question.

Part of the campaign has been to persuade the Home Office to remove what they say are Evans' remains from Pentonville and rebury them in ground consecrated by the Roman Catholic Church.

This is perhaps the most hopeless part of it all. For the effort spent in restoring to Evans the mythical and worthless graces of religion would have been better used in working for a world where it will be no disadvantage to be less cunning than the man downstairs who has a rope.

Pathfinders: How the Rich Suffer With Their Piles (2017)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The news late last year that Buckingham Palace was to receive a makeover to the tune of £369 million of ‘taxpayer’s money’ was greeted with outrage by that section of the press which thinks it will sell more papers by simultaneously fawning over celebs and royals while also striking populist poses against wealth and privilege.

As we’ve often said in this journal, this taxpayer’s money may appear to come out of workers’ wages, but really it bypasses those wages altogether and flies directly from the employer to the Treasury. Thus it is not with outrage but with equanimity that socialists look upon the prospect of the capitalist class being forced to rewire and replaster Brenda’s Royal Shed at their collective expense. Let them buy the old trout a gold roof while they’re at it, and a new Xbox with the latest Call Of Duty and Grand Theft Auto pre-loaded, if it makes her happy.

Buck House isn’t the only stately pile in need of remedial work. Many great houses in Britain are in a decrepit state as their former lordly owners pissed their inherited wealth up against a wall and left the bills to their descendents, who are now unable to keep up with the upkeep. Many have thus been donated to (or dumped on) The National Trust, though being a business like any other the NT isn’t keen on taking on the huge repair bills these estates bring with them.

One grand mansion with hidden problems is Highclere Castle, the Hampshire location of TV’s Downton Abbey and lately doing a roaring trade in visitors. These visitors have to pay handsomely to see the house, and extra to see the Egyptian collection in the cellar, so they will probably assume that the Carnarvons who own the place are running a pretty lucrative racket. However Wikipedia reveals what the Highclere website doesn’t, which is that the milords are stuck with a £12 million repair bill, that all but the ground and first floor, and at least 50 rooms, are uninhabitable, and that the owners have been living in a cottage in the grounds for the past seven years. A similar state of affairs can be found at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, currently swathed in scaffolding and where rooms are closed to visitors not because they are private spaces for the owners but because they are derelict. Likewise Castle Howard in the Yorkshire Dales, still unrecovered from a devastating fire in 1940 and now suffering serious water damage, with the south-east wing an empty shell. Go to just about any large stately home in Britain and talk to the staff, and you’ll hear variants of the same tale of woe.

Some visitors who tour these gorgeous estates with their manicured lawns, sophisticated collections, exquisite furniture and priceless paintings will likely find themselves sympathising with the ‘plight’ of the current owners, whom they suppose to be as sophisticated as their surroundings. Socialists however would view this as a form of Stockholm Syndrome. The rich are nothing to look up to, and indeed, when you look at their histories, rather the reverse.

At Blenheim Palace, known to at least one unhappy wife as ‘The Dump’, the 9th Duke of Marlborough inherited a bankrupt estate and coldly married into the American Vanderbilts in order to siphon their money into it. The Vanderbilts, dazzled at the prospect of buying a real English title, locked up their daughter Consuelo until she consented to the marriage. The Duke thereafter treated her so appallingly she later divorced him, and his second wife dined with a loaded revolver next to her plate. Eventually he had the water, gas and electricity turned off to force her out of the Palace.

Why therefore should socialists care a jot about the condition of these estates, whose existence continues to rub our collective noses in our own poverty while celebrating the crass self-interest and obscene luxury of the exploiting class?

Well, we should care, because in the future socialist society, these places are going to belong to all of us as part of our collective world heritage. You might imagine that country houses, castles, palaces, stately homes and genteel manor houses are not particularly numerous, but in fact they’re everywhere. In England alone, and not including those in a state of ruin, there are around 2,700. Many have been converted for charitable uses or as museums, but a great many are still in private hands. Think what we could do with them.

Call it educational or call it art, but heritage matters. Nobody in their right mind would destroy the Pantheon in Rome simply because its first owner was a Roman emperor with despotic powers ruling a slave empire. Nobody would pull down Versailles just because Louis XIV was an autocratic ruler with a large ego. Unless revolutionaries are seized with some insane Mao Zedong-like mania for destroying all the art and culture of pre-socialist times, people are going to want these towering hulks to be in reasonably good nick. So if you love architecture or sculpture or you just like poking round posh people’s houses, you don’t need to feel you’re betraying any socialist principles. Relics of oppression they may be, built on misery and blood and injustice without a doubt, but still beautiful works of art for all that. And once we’ve got socialism, you won’t have to gyp at the price of admission.

Paddy Shannon

National Trust (1983)

From the August 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The National Trust, formed long before concern for the environment became fashionable, is one of Britain's conservationist organisations. Founded in 1895, when people began to be aware of the spreading tide of ugliness and squalor, it today owns more than 400,000 acres, with covenants over 71,000 more, and hundreds of properties ranging from prehistoric and Roman remains to relics of the industrial revolution.

Many people think of the Trust as a government body, a misconception reinforced by woolly statements in the press of gifts to “the nation". This is not the case, for although from time to time the Trust receives some government assistance in the form of tax benefits, grants for repairs and gifts of land and buildings, it is in no way controlled by the state. Its powers and rights are laid down by Parliament, and only Parliament can rescind any of them. In 1907 Parliament declared the Trust lands inalienable, meaning that they cannot be sold, mortgaged or compulsorily acquired without the consent of Parliament.

The National Trust fulfils what is essentially a modern need. The idea of keeping land unproductive would have seemed strange, if not crazy, to earlier generations. The idea of not draining wet lands or not ploughing up downlands, in order to preserve flora and fauna, would have made no sense at all. Improvement to obtain maximum production would have been taken for granted. Not until the end of the eighteenth century did wild scenery begin to appeal; and then only to people like Wordsworth, whose private means gave them time to stand and stare. But today, when millions of people live in overcrowded cities, divorced from the land, a romantic view of the countryside prevails. The desire to preserve and lovingly restore ancient buildings is comparatively recent; they were once knocked down quite merrily and bigger ones erected in their place. Even the Victorians, with their romantic love of the Medieval and the Renaissance, demolished ancient buildings and put up bigger imitations with all modern conveniences. The Industrial Revolution made hideous large areas of once beautiful countryside. But the mills and factories, with their rows of cheap, mean houses and tenements, still left the greater part of Britain untouched. Conditions for the agricultural workers were often grim; roses round the door could hide a squalid slum, and people escaping to the towns might refer to the country as a “green prison". The railways spread like webs from town to town and development followed them, clustering around the new stations.

It was the car which caused the dam to burst. People could now leave the railways and the inner cities and spread out. Suburbia was born. The new suburbs were much more spacious than the old cramped urban areas which they replaced. Wider streets with trees and gardens were much more pleasant and healthy than the grim “bye-law" houses and the even grimmer "back to backs" of the industrial areas, but they did eat up the country at an alarming rate. As people could now joyride more easily into the country, the charabanc was a familiar weekend sight and well-known beauty spots came under pressure. Many of the properties acquired by the National Trust at this time were of such a nature.

The 1960s saw the launching of the highly successful Enterprise Neptune, a special fund to purchase as much of the coast as possible and save it from ruination. Until the decision during the eighteenth century that drinking or bathing in sea water was good for you. the sea was shunned as dangerous and hostile. Only those who gained a living from it. or who needed to travel abroad, went there. People lived as far away from it as possible. (Old Hastings runs up a valley protected by hills on either side; Portsmouth is sheltered by the Isle of Wight and Southampton lies at the head of an inlet miles from the sea.) The seaside resorts began in the eighteenth century, but only in a small way as the railways brought in the day tripper to the sea and popularised the seaside holiday. New resorts grew up and old ones expanded, but they were still compact. So the coastline of Britain entered the twentieth century still largely unspoilt. Again, the car was to change all that. Between the first and second World War, hundreds of miles of coast were taken for development, much of it cheap and nasty. Beautiful scenery is often agriculturally poor and this, combined with a major slump in farming, meant that land could be obtained cheaply. Isolated areas were controlled by parish or rural district councils with few powers, and even less inclination, to control development. So cheap bungalows and shacks, old railway carriages and buses were strung along the coast. Costlier developments were also largely unsuitable — suburbia stuck on top of cliffs or on downland. stark and treeless. Post war planning powers slowed down this process but did not eliminate it.

In a sane society people will travel or stay put as they wish. But today, when people have to take their leisure to fit in with the requirements of their employers, they are forced to crowd together. This brings pressure to bear on areas, with car parks and refreshment facilities and over-treading. By far the most popular and the most visited of the National Trust properties are the stately homes — huge houses and castles of a bygone era. At any time certain sections of the capitalist class command the lion's share of the wealth produced. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the British ruling class made vast profits from the slave trade, the plunder of India, and the lead that the Industrial Revolution gave them, enabling the building and maintenance of palaces full of art treasures and paintings. They stood in huge estates with extensive gardens helped along, of course, by cheap labour. Today it is the Arabs, sitting on vast quantities of oil.

Times have changed; the British capitalist no longer dominates the world. Not that there is any need to start a fund for Distressed British Capitalists who may now have to scrape along in houses or a mere 20 or 30 rooms, standing in a hundred acres or so. with a luxury flat in town and a couple of villas on the Med. Their former houses, however, are ready-made museums and art galleries, and often themselves works of art. Some, like Woburn and Longleat, have been turned by their owners into circuses, but the Trust has restored theirs with great care and maintains them in excellent condition.

An ironical twist is the way in which the ugliness of yesterday can, with the passage of time, become the quaint and charming of today. The dark satanic mills arc now industrial museums. The canals dug by gangs of brawling navvies and the scene of serious, often fatal, accidents when speed took precedence over safety — are now green oases where only the chugging of the odd pleasure boat or barge breaks the silence. The railway with its noise and filthy black smoke is now a hobby for the enthusiast. Windmills and watermills, warehouses and old mineworkings, lime kilns and beam engines are all included in the Trust list of properties.

An unexpected enemy of the countryside is modern agriculture. The landscape that we know, the country of Constable, was the creation of the enclosures and the Agricultural Revolution. The last thirty years have seen drastic changes. Hedges have been grubbed up and small woods bulldozed to make miniature prairies. This is to make it possible to operate the huge farm machinery. Green lanes have been churned up and ugly farm buildings allowed to scar the country. Orchards of big trees, once a feature of Kent in spring, have given way to bush trees — easier and more economical, but much less picturesque. The trust has vast areas of farmland where it tries to balance farming needs of profit with preservation.

Like all such organisations, the National Trust has its controversies, and one such erupted last autumn. On 6 November an Extraordinary General Meeting was demanded by a section of the members on the subject of the Bradenham Estate. This is an 1100-acre estate in the Chilterns. near High Wycombe which at one point adjoins Ministry of Defence land. The ministry want 12 acres for an underground communications centre for the RAF, and the Trust agreed to lease this land under strict conditions. The crux of the matter was that a group of protesters, claiming that the council should have fought the matter to the bitter end, demanded the special meeting. In the event, the vote of No Confidence was heavily defeated. Whatever action had been taken, the government would have had its way. Although the land is inalienable, Parliament can override this and, with its present majority, the government can bulldoze anything it likes through Parliament. This, of course, illustrates the dilemma faced by all people who strive to mitigate the effects of class society. If capitalism really wants something then wild life, natural beauty, peace and quiet, or anything else, will take second place.

Les Dale