News in Review: The Polls (1964)

The News in Review column from the October 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Polls

Over the past few months, watching the so-called public opinion polls has almost become an obsessive national activity. Glassy, fascinated eyes have watched the graph lines of support for the two big political parties snaking up and down.

Even the Stock Exchange has reacted, becoming more optimistic as the forecast support for the Conservatives has increased.

The two big polls National Opinion Polls in the Daily Mail and Gallup in the Daily Telegraph have differed in their assessments. NOP turning up figures more favourable to the government than Gallup. Both have agreed that the Tories have steadily gained ground.

Who Knows what the polls are worth? Naturally, they protest their own accuracy; they are now big business employed by famous companies and advertising agencies to estimate what razor blades we use, what size washing machine fits into our kitchens.

In the political field, the polls have never really lived down their massive boob in the American Presidential Election of 1948, when Truman won against all their forecasts. They blamed that on to an unsuspected flaw in their method, which they now claim to have eliminated.

But none of them, of course, can interview an entire electorate and inevitably their sampling methods come in for some criticism. When the election is over, the polls do some furious figure juggling and, not surprisingly, claim that their forecasts were accurate.

The political parties welcome or deride the polls, according to whether they are currently favourable or not. Some time back a constituency Conservative Party which was fighting a by-election suggested that the polls were undemocratic, because they actually influenced people to vote for the party which they tipped to win.

In that by-election, need we add, the Tories were doing badly when the opposite is true they do not complain about the polls.

The whole thing is, in fact, a rather amusing game. And. like a game, it has no real effect. We can make one forecast now, without the aid of the polls.

Whichever of the parties wins the election, and whatever the composition of Parliament when the votes have been counted, capitalism will remain. It will be business as usual for everyone, including the pollsters.

Restrictive practices

Sam Goldwyn has long been famous for his super-colossal films and for his snappy wisecracks. He has always been the newspapers' caricature of a Hollywood tycoon expansive, ebullient. But now he is under something of a cloud.

The great Sam recently sold fifty of  his films for showing on television. Now everybody knows that the one word which is likely to make the cinema owners see red, in the most glorious, panoramic technicolor, is television.

So Mr. Goldwyn’s sale is regarded by the cinema interests as a stab in the back or, as Mr. Ellis Pinkney, secretary of the Cinema Exhibitioners' Association, put it. biting the hand that fed him. Goldwyn was not around when this remark was made: had he been, he would doubtless have made another funny crack in reply.

But the CEA are not joking. They are pressing all cinema owners in Britain not to show any more Goldwyn films. As they claim a membership of over ninety per cent of cinema owners, including Rank and Granada, their ban may well be effective.

Now the film industry was once famous for the demarcation rules which its workers' trade unions applied in the studios. These rules were strict; no carpenter would stick up so much as a square inch of plaster, no plasterer would knock in the smallest nail.

The employers complained bitterly about what they called these restrictive practices. They implied that the workers were childish, that the rules would ruin the industry and would deprive the public of their films.

In fact, the unions were using an old established weapon to try to defend some hard won improvements in working conditions. This may mean some tough fights, but that is the way it is jungle of capitalism’s class struggle.

And toughness, and restrictive practices, are not confined to one side. What the cinema owners are now going to do in their fight against Goldwyn can only be described as a tough restrictive practice.

Naturally, they try to justify it by using the same tones of moral indignation as they use when they attack the film workers' demarcation rules. But morality docs not come into it.

Both sides arc only trying to protect their interests and that is something that goes on all over the capitalist world. Even that part which is the preserve of the tinsel unrealities of the film men.

Johnson's fortune

Nobody expects elections to be other than dirty businesses but sometimes, in their anxiety to throw mud the parties of capitalism achieve some strange results.

Consider the case of Johnson's fortune. The exact amount of the American President's wealth has become something of an issue in the election over there, so much so that Johnson has engaged a firm of accountants to report on the matter.

The conclusion of this investigation was that the Johnson family is worth about three and a half million dollars. This estimate has been questioned, because it is based on the original cost of the Johnsons’ interests, whereas their present market value would be somewhere nearer $14 million.

For some strange reason, this dollop of wealth is regarded as a possible electoral liability to the President. The delusion about the barefoot boy who rose from log cabin to the White House apparently persists in the United States, even after all that the Kennedy family did to destroy it. 

Yet why should his wealth lose Johnson votes? A rich man, after all, is capitalism’s highest form of life—he is successful. Does not Johnson, therefore, fit in with the prejudices and presumptions which dominate elections? Is he not the sort of man the American workers would want as their national boss?

Perhaps there are doubts about the methods which were used to amass the Johnson fortune. And these, too, are humbug.

Even the most illegal ways of building up wealth—and there is no proof that the President has ever done anything outside the law—are no worse than the simple, legal method of the exploitation of the working class.

No method is more degrading, more repressive. No method leads to more violence and unhappiness. Property, Proudhon said, is theft and that is it up.

From this we can see that Lyndon Johnson is eminently suitable to administer American capitalism, with all the ruthlessness that it may require. He has also shown that he can accept, and turn to his advantage, any of the system's anomalies.

At the same time as his fortune was being counted, Johnson was pushing through Congress his so-called Anti Poverty Bill, which is supposed to rescue millions of Americans from the depths of destitution.

Perhaps some of them will get the point, and remember it when the time comes in November.

Matter of importance

From the London Gazette of 1st September, 1964:

In future, on occasions when it is desired that decorations be worn invitations should state either “evening dress decoration" (signifying white tie with full orders decorations and miniatures) or “dinner jacket, decorations” (signifying black tie with orders decorations and miniatures as described above).

When “evening dress decorations" is prescribed those not in possession of full evening dress may wear orders decorations and miniature badges and medals as described above with a dinner jacket.

How comforting to know that, in this world of hydrogen bombs and hire purchase, of malnutrition and mental illness, there is still a spark of dignity.

How nice to know that the Queen, ever alert to the onward march of democracy, has graciously consented to unbend the once inflexible regulations on the wearing of decorations with evening dress.

What ease of mind it brings to us all, to know that “. . . orders, decorations and medals may be worn with dinner jackets . . . with shirts having a stiff collar or soft collar.”

What an uplift for the soft collar, to be put at last on a par with the stiff! How satisfying a fruition of human struggle and endeavour.

And how sick it makes you feel.

On the pin (1964)

From the July 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oklahoma City, USA, has the unpleasant distinction of being the site of an experiment in discomfort. Some Oklahomans are protesting at this and there can be little wonder that they are. But experiments on human beings in the mass are not a novelty; they are, in fact, going on all the time.

Each morning for the past five months, jet aircraft have flown backwards and forwards over Oklahoma City, deliberately breaking through the sound barrier about half a dozen times between seven o’clock and about half past one. This will go on, day after day, until the beginning of next month.

The object of these experiments is to find out the effect which sonic booms have upon the people on the ground. Now that the American aircraft industry has entered the international race to build a supersonic airliner, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is trying to discover what would constitute an aircraft “acceptable” to the people it will fly over. There is no doubt that the projected airliner will be an excessive nuisance; the FAA are experimenting to find out the limits to which the nuisance can go. How much noise and other discomfort will people stand ?

There has inevitably been some protest from Oklahoma City, a small part of whose 500,000 people not see why their homes should be damaged (windows have broken, walls have sagged and bulged, plaster has split under the boom), their nerves shattered and their lives endangered (one ceiling which came down in the Negro section of the City narrowly missed a six year old child), in the cause of building a bigger, faster, noisier, more objectionable aircraft than those which already cause considerable disturbance.

The FAA has offered a conciliatory front to the protestors—they even promised to call off the experiments if the City authorities asked them to. But not all of Oklahoma’s citizens dislike the booms (we shall come to the reason for this in a moment), so no such request has been made. In any event, there is little doubt that, whatever Oklahoma or any other community may say, the world is going to be pestered by the supersonic airliners.

The protests of the people who live around London Airport have not been able to reduce the noise nuisance there; in fact, jet flights, which are the main culprits, steadily increase. Occasionally the government pulls off a dishonest trick. As the pace of competition among the jet operators gets hotter, the airlines make frequent application to be allowed to step up their allocation of flights—sometimes night flights. It is not unknown for the Ministry of Aviation to grant only part of such application, and to follow this with such a hullabaloo about their professed concern for the eardrums of the people around the airport that the fact that they have actually granted an increase in flights goes almost unnoticed.

The reason for the popularity of the big jets is that they are one of the cheapest methods of moving people over long distances by air that has ever been discovered. This means that their operator can hope to make big profits from them. If this should apply also to the supersonic liner, then that monster will before long be crashing about over our heads.

The thing which will stop the supersonic project will not be the demonstrations of the people who will be driven to distraction by it. It will not be because the thing is officially considered to be too great an assault upon human living conditions. The airliner will be abandoned if it is proved to be so crushingly unprofitable that the nations who are now racing to build it are persuaded that their economic interests are better served by dropping the project.

This has happened before. The post war years are littered with aircraft—the Brabazon, the Princess flying boat—which did not make the commercial grade. Others—the Vanguard, for example—only scraped in and were immediately an economic embarrassment. The development of the helicopter as an inter city link has been held in check not because it is a deafeningly clacking contraption (which it is) but because its operators have not been able to make it pay.

We may reflect, with a wry smile, upon the fact that up to now the most profitable aircraft have also been among the most objectionable. So we have got the jets, whose throaty scream drowns all conversation as they pass overhead at a height at which the traditional piston engine would hardly be noticed. And we have not got the flying boats, which might have been that much less of a nuisance because their airports would have probably been built on the coast. If this unfortunate circumstance is anything like a constant rule, the supersonic jets will be profitable. And we shall look back wistfully to the comparatively peaceful days when simple 707’s thundered over the roof-tops.

The Oklahoma experiments will then be consigned to embarrassed history. But other experiments, in different fields, will go on. Day after day, for example, we are subjected to investigation by what are officially known as market research organisations. Smooth, earnestly bespectacled young men call at our front doors, flick over plastic pictures of electric shavers, challenging us to identify their makers. (The writer, who has a weakness for electric shavers and who therefore devours all the ads for them, came out with full marks for this, but was disappointed not to receive a prize.)

The same young men may come back again some time later, with other questions about other products. They do not call at every house. They “sample” us, which perhaps makes some people feel like rare sherry, except that rare sherry is more respected by its drinkers than we are by our masters.

The smart young men have even divided us into groups, according to the jobs we do and how much we get for it. A company director is probably in group A or B. A tool maker may be somewhere in Group C. And so on down the alphabet, until somewhere among the E’s are the people, who scrape along on National Assistance.

None of the smart young men seem to see anything wrong in this. Most of them are anxious to identify themselves with the market research herd, dressing, talking and even combing their hair to the same pattern. They could have stepped straight out of those exceedingly irritating advertisements which, by a novel stroke, tell us when not to chew gum. They look out at the world with confident eyes, convinced of their ability to sell it absolutely anything.

The reason for this sort of activity—to use a rather delicate word for it—is that capitalist industry must always be obsessed by its markets. Profit is at the moment the primary objective of production- but although it is made when the goods are produced, profit can only be realised when they are sold. It did not take capitalism long to realise that it had better try to get to know its markets. So they are constantly sampling us, experimenting on us, sending out their smart young men to put us under their microscopes.

They may even try to alter a market, to persuade us to stop buying one type of product and to start buying another. Or they may try to open up new markets, with goods which have not been widely sold before. (Any day now, for example, we shall be swamped with advertisements for central heating systems.)

In Oklahoma, as a matter of fact, some of the business interests descry a market in the sonic booms, The local Chamber of Commerce hope that, if the experiments help to turn out an “acceptable” aircraft, Oklahoma’s airfield will be developed as one of the world's first supersonic airports. Speculating on this prospect, they have already bought up a lot of land around the airfield. Hungrily they look to the business which a supersonic airport would bring them—the contracts to build and to supply, and the extra population which would come to the area. Dazzled by visions of the golden economic boom, the business men of Oklahoma City have no eyes for the distress which the sonic booms will cause to the people of the area.

Experiments are not confined to the commercial field. Everyone knows that the great publicity drive which the Conservative Party launched before their victory in 1959 was managed by one of this country’s leading advertising agencies. This agency did not rush out haphazardly, slapping up hastily designed posters in any old place. They first of all took their sample of what they call public opinion, they made their experiments and they thought around it all. Only then did they decide on the line which their publicity should take.

The lessons of that defeat were not wasted upon the Labour Party. They assembled their own force of high powered admen, who gravely discussed which line they should adopt. Should they plug Nationalisation? Pensions? Roads? Out of all this came the Let's Go slogan, and the thumbs up sign— and is it only coincidence that Mr. Wilson is now inseparable from his pipe?

All of this effort has gone into finding out what the people will bear in the way of election propaganda, in the same way as the Oklahoma experiments are supposed to find out what they will bear in the way of thunder over their heads. It has gone into finding out what political image will appeal most to the voters’ ignorance and apathy. That is why the Tories no longer present themselves as the party born with a divine right to rule and why Labour has stuffed away its cloth cap, which is now worn only at events like Miners' Galas.

Nobody is exempt from such investigations—even the investigators themselves. That paunchy, florid sales executive, poring over the latest market research returns, enunciating in careful accents through his teeth, does not escape. He, too, is part of a market, to be assessed and experimented upon. Even the chewing gum makers are after him, along with the car firms and the people who try to persuade him that theirs is the best way of suppressing his ulcers.

Capitalism exploits and restricts its entire working class. But more than that, it degrades us in a multitude of ways. It has us wriggling on a pin on its observation board, and is carefully noting our every twitch and spasm. Does that spasm indicate that we would prefer another sort of pin? Does that twitch mean that we want one with a different shape head? If there’s money in it, capitalism is interested.

Maybe the working class do not object to this. In moments of despair, it even seems that they actually like it. In which case they do not object to, they like, blatant humiliation.

But, as Vera Lynn never tired of pointing out, somewhere there is a silver lining. Whatever the result of the experiments, and whether any notice is taken of them or not, they do prove one thing. We count. Mass opinion is important At the moment, it is all mass ignorance; but if it were mass knowledge. . .  If the people refused to chew gum, or take plastic spoons with their detergent powder, if they said a unanimous No to supersonic aircraft, all these things would have to stop.

There is one obvious qualification to this. If ever people got around to thinking like that, they would almost certainly be on the verge of saying the biggest-ever No. They would be about to say No to capitalism itself, to its grisly experiments, its cynical posturings and its ruthless degradations. There is a moral in this for us all, for the deafened folk of Oklahoma, for the canvassed, sampled, classified, humiliated people of the world.

Stop wriggling and get off that pin.

Ivan.

‘Socialism’ more popular than ‘Capitalism’ (2025)

From the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Opinion polls are worth what they are worth. In many cases the answers depend on how the question is framed. And they can’t distinguish between a passing off-the-cuff reply and a deeply-held opinion. Still, within these limitations, they are not entirely useless. Selecting a representative sample to question, if done properly, has been shown to be broadly valid.

In December YouGov published the result of a poll carried out in August to find out what people thought of what it called ‘political ideologies’. A representative sample of 2,127 adults in Great Britain (ie excluding Northern Ireland) were asked ‘Do you have a favourable or unfavourable opinion of the following’ — Liberalism, Conservatism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Nationalism, Feminism, Capitalism, Populism, Anarchism, Environmentalism, and Libertarianism. Those polled could answer ‘very favourable’, ‘somewhat favourable’, ‘somewhat unfavourable’, ‘very unfavourable’, as well as ‘don’t know’.

Since none of the twelve isms was defined, those questioned were in effect being asked to give their reaction just to the word. On average about a quarter replied ‘don’t know’, rising to nearly a half for ‘populism’ and ‘libertarianism’ (not surprising in this case as it is not a commonly used word). Amongst those who did express an opinion, the most favoured were Environmentalism and Feminism. The only others with a positive net favourable opinion (more favourable than unfavourable) were Liberalism and Socialism. The remaining eight all had a net unfavourable opinion, the most unfavoured, by far, being Communism, Anarchism and Fascism.

The word Socialism was more favoured, by quite a margin, than the word Capitalism. 38 percent were very or somewhat favourable to Socialism and 36 very or somewhat unfavourable. For Capitalism the figures were 30 and 45 percent. 10 percent expressed a very favourable opinion of Socialism compared with only 5 percent for Capitalism. For very unfavourable, the figures were 17 and 18 percent.

This echoes the result of other polls, even in the United States, but what does it mean? Obviously those questioned weren’t understanding ‘Socialism’ in our sense (otherwise we’d be well on our way there). So in what sense was the word being understood?

Commenting on the result, the US website, UnHerd, pointed out:

‘Each of the 12 -isms needs to be understood on at least two levels. There’s the academic meaning of the words, of primary interest to political scientists and ideological obsessives, and then there’s how normal people react to them as labels’.

And

‘As for socialism, the public perceptions focus on the social part rather than the -ism. Tony Blair was well aware of that and famously redefined Labour’s creed as (note the hyphen) “social-ism”, by which he meant the “moral assertion that individuals are interdependent”. Actual socialists who believe in a centrally planned economy still exist, of course, but for most people it just means security, solidarity and clapping for the NHS’.

Of course ‘actual socialists’ don’t believe in a centrally planned state-capitalist economy such as used to exist in the USSR, but we do exist. But that those who have a favourable opinion of socialism are really expressing a preference for social-reformism seems reasonable. It is understandable that many should prefer this to letting the market rip.

In any event, it can’t be bad for us ‘actual socialists’ that some 45 percent of those questioned had an unfavourable opinion of capitalism (however understood). That gives us a foot in the door.

One interesting result concerned who had a ‘very favourable’ opinion of the word socialism. The top ones were 28 percent of Green Party voters, 19 percent of those aged 18-24, 18 percent of Labour voters, 18 percent of Remain voters and 18 percent of those in Scotland. Even 7 percent of those who voted for the Liberal Democrats. Since there were over four times as many Labour voters questioned as Green Party ones, in absolute terms most of those who had a favourable opinion of the word socialism were Labour voters.

We already knew this from our own experience of doing better on average in elections when we contest safe Labour constituencies and wards.

Adam Buick

Polls apart? (2022)

Book Review from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Polling Unpacked. By Mark Pack. Reaktion Books. 2022.

This is written by the founder of PollBase and traces the history of opinion polls from various ‘straw polls’ in the nineteenth century that were conducted to test public opinion, to the development of what we now know as modern opinion polling. This was pioneered by the US Literary Digest in the early twentieth century, before the game-changing entrance of George Gallup into the sphere, who recognized that the total number of people polled was far less important than how representative these people were.

Opinion polls – as developed over recent decades – have a somewhat mixed reputation, though tend to be more accurate than people often think, at least when the margin for error (typically +/- 3 percent) is taken into account. And of course, sometimes voting systems – especially First Past The Post (FPTP) – throw up vagaries of their own. Trump won the US presidency in 2016 even though he lost the popular vote by a very similar margin to that predicted by the polls, as in 1951 and February 1974 the party with the most votes in the UK did not get the most seats and form the government, which means that even when voting intention polls are broadly right they can sometimes appear ‘wrong’.

But some polling does genuinely go awry, including when Cameron secured a narrow overall Tory majority in 2015 when the polls had predicted a dead heat with Labour and then with the underestimation of the Labour vote in 2017. There are a number of reasons for polling errors and they can be complex, including the wording of key questions, which can provide startlingly differing results based on the smallest nuances (polling on single issues rather than overall voting intention is notoriously problematic for this reason alone). Arguably the most common voting intention issue, however, is the difficulty of getting accurate, weighted national samples when the demographics of society are changing fast. There are also significant allied issues like some types of voters becoming more inclined to turn out (or not) than others, some being disproportionately reluctant to give their real voting intention to pollsters saying ‘don’t know’ or ‘won’t say’ instead, differential willingness among particular party supporters to even participate in polls in the first place, and people being sampled in polls who are not actually on the electoral register for various reasons. Significant polling errors are usually caused not by one factor like this, but by more than one of them working in concert to skew the result.

A new type of polling has recently arisen to address some of these issues for FPTP elections called Multi-level Regression with Poststratification (MRP). This aims to generate constituency-by-constituency predictions from a national poll sample that normally wouldn’t be considered large enough for these purposes. It is based on demographic information in particular seats being used as the basis for projecting a result informed by what the national sample has been indicating about certain types of voters and their probability of voting in particular ways (eg, white men over 65, having say, a 55 percent probability of voting Conservative). Its track record so far – both in 2017 and 2019 in the UK – has been pretty good, including YouGov’s detailed MRP prediction of parts of the Red Wall going Blue, but it is early days.

Pack is clearly an expert and does a good job at unpacking all this (pun intended). How useful polls are is another issue of course, and Pack looks at this too. Echo chambers can have a particular but limited use and many argue that polling is given far too much prominence. There can also be a commercial aspect and a distorting element to polling, especially in the United States where skewed ‘paid for’ polling by political parties and groups is more common. In some countries, polling is banned completely during election campaigns lest it be deemed to influence the result.

Will opinion polling have a use of sorts in socialism? Possibly, though direct democracy and decision-making is likely to feature much more heavily and so the need for polls may well lessen. And hopefully, to paraphrase the late Tony Benn, we will be busy creating signposts rather than following proverbial weather vanes.

Dave Perrin

Why the date is important (1964)

From the May 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Prime Minister has spoken. In the hope that the interests of the Conservative Party will be best served by an election in the Autumn, he has settled for that and the news which has been so anxiously awaited by the M.P.s who hang on to slim majorities, and not so anxiously by those who sit on a fat lead, is out.

Ever since the Profumo crisis, there has been any amount of speculation about the timing of the election. Only a short time ago, some political experts were assuring us, on information from “reliable sources,” that polling day would definitely be in March. Others were equally confident that it would be in late May or June.

But there has also been a persistent story that the Prime Minister himself favoured a later date, in the hope that by then his party’s tarnished image would be looking a little brighter. At the same time, it was whispered, Harold Wilson was hoping for a June election and was working on the assumption that that would happen.

Both Labour and Conservative parties attach great importance to the date of the election; for some time they have based their electoral strategy on their forecast of the date.

In passing, we may comment that the time which Douglas-Home has chosen has a certain interest. Previous Conservative Premiers have often been masters at the political game and have excelled in calling elections at a time of maximum inconvenience to their opponents, and then fighting on a craftily conceived vote-catching gimmick. Baldwin was like that and so was Macmillan. But Douglas-Home has so far done nothing to suggest that his choice of polling day has been handled any more adroitly than the other political matters which he has bungled since he took office.

This is a point of no more than academic interest. While the working class are blind enough to acquiesce in a social system in which they are governed by leaders in the interests of the capitalist class, it is of little consequence whether the leaders are politically skilful or not. Home, up to now, is one of the nots.

It is important to realise why the parties have been in such a dither over polling day. The English political constitution allows the date of an election to be flexible. This would not matter very much if the people who determine the outcome of an election were of different material. In other words, if the working class were politically more mature, the election date would be of much less significance—their votes would go the same way in March as in October, or any other month.

But the working class are not politically mature. They vote in ignorance and in docile acceptance of whatever capitalism likes to dish out to them. Some of them support the Labour Party, although they oppose Labour Party policy. (Aims of Industry claim that 32 per cent. of Labour Party supporters are opposed to more nationalisation). And the same sort of thing can be said for some of the supporters of the Tory government.

If the evidence of the Gallup Poll can be relied upon, the voting intentions of the working class change almost week by week, apparently influenced by all manner of incidents in the daily round of capitalist crisis and confusion. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the politicians attach such importance to the date of an election. If, for example, Macmillan’s government had collapsed last summer, they would probably have lost the election—for the same basically illogical reason that may win the election for Douglas-Home later this year.

In the United States, the pre determined date of an election means that the timing in itself does not have the same importance as over here. But this does not mean that there is any less posturing, any less dishonesty from the politicians, any less ignorance on the part of the working class. For some months before a Presidential election, some American government business almost comes to a standstill, as the two great parties concentrate their energies on the coming campaign — upon the careful statements, the devious attacks on their opponents, the loaded hand outs and promises to voters.

This sort of campaign is widely accepted by most of the people who have a vote to cast. In the same way, they expect a British Prime Minister to choose an election date to suit himself—the date on which, he thinks, the people who are foolish enough to vote for his party will outnumber those who are foolish enough to vote for the opposition.

This sort of cynicism does not damage the politician's image of a beneficent, honest man who would rather die than stoop to a low trick. It does not damage Home's image of a chivalrous aristocrat who longs to serve all of us slum dwellers and millstone mortgagees. It will not damage Wilson’s image of the blunt, sensible lad from Yorkshire who learnt all about life in the days when he could not afford to wear shoes. Yet these images should be damaged—indeed, should be destroyed by the evidence of the politician’s cynicism. That they are not destroyed is just another symptom of the political backwardness of the voters.

One of the most depressing facts about an election is that very few of the millions who cast their votes seem to ask what the politicians want power for. They are generally content to accept the cynicism and the vote hunting and the politician's own assessment of themselves as humane and clever men.

Both Labour and Conservative parties claim that they are opposed to each other. The Labour Party warn us that the Tories are hard headed, ruthless men of business who care not for the problems of the under-privileged nor now that Harold Wilson is in command —for the underpaid men of science. The Tories reply that the Labour Party is full of reckless dogmatists who will ruin the British economy for the sake of a theory and who will allow British capitalism to be bossed by flat capped trade unionists.

What truth is there in these claims? One of the issues on which Labour hopes to win votes is the rise in rents which followed the Rent Act. The figure of the rapacious landlord has always been a politically emotive one. Yet even at the time when the Act was first passed, it was apparent that a Labour government would have been compelled, to some extent, to free rents. Now from the other side, the Conservatives have stated that they are in favour of some measure of rent control. In the House of Commons on March 18th last Sir Keith Joseph, Minister of Housing, made this quite clear: 

. . . the Government do not intend, if returned to power, to propose, during the next Parliament, any further measure of block (rent) decontrol.

This shows how close the two parties are on this issue. There is nothing surprising about this. Housing is an essential part of working class expenditure and as such has a powerful effect upon wages. This means that rents are important enough to capitalism to ensure that the two big parties substantially agree on what should be done about them.

Then there is the favourite Tory bogey of a Labour party which will nationalise everything and drive all the employees out of business. This bogey has always been something of a laugh, especially when we recall what the last Labour government was prepared to do to keep British capitalism prosperous.

Now Sir John Hunter, chairman of the Central Training Council, has had his say on this, to the British Employers' Confederation;—

I do not subscribe to the view that a Labour Government will introduce legislation with little regard for the employers' views. On the contrary, I believe a Labour Government would listen attentively to the views expressed by employers’ organisations on one condition that those views are positive and expressed clearly, forcibly and without reservation. (Guardian, 19/3/64.)

Both the big parties, in fact, stand for capitalism—and so do other organisations like the “Liberals," “Communists” and “Independents,” who claim to be different. They stand for the social system in which war is established and persistent enough to be almost a way of life. They support the economic arrangement in which the mass of the people, who make and distribute the world’s wealth, live in a horror-land of plastic, prefabricated, powdered, poverty, while a few privileged people have an income which allows them the chance to live like human beings. (In the tax year 1961/62 there were just 92 people in this country with annual incomes over £100,000).

In face of their basic agreement over the continuance of this social system, the differences between the Labour Party and its Tory opponents arc quite insignificant. They are no more than differences over the details of administering a world so organised that it enables a few people to do very well indeed while the vast majority get hurt—sometimes literally so.

This is what puts the timing of the election into its perspective. What can we say about the voter who is subject to all the suppressions and frustrations of capitalism yet who will vote Labour in March, Tory in October, perhaps Labour again in January, and so on? Is there anything more foolish? More futile?

Whatever precise date the Prime Minister eventually settles for, he can rest assured that when the election is over and the next government is comfortably in the seat of power, when the newspapers are smugly congratulating everyone on what they call the exercise of democracy, he will still be Sir Alec Douglas-Home with all his property and investments. So will the rest of his class, up the top of the social tree. And somewhere down the bottom will be the people who, at any time and in all weathers, are content to keep them there.

Ivan

The Right to Disinvest (1997)

From the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

This was the right invoked by a leader of the European employers’ association to justify Renault’s decision in March to close its factory at Vilvoorde on the outskirts of Brussels, throwing 3,100 workers out of a job. The French President. Jacques Chirac, was equally explicit. Factories closing, he said, was ‘‘part of life". All this is very true. Under capitalism firms owning factories and other means of production exist to make a profit.They don’t exist to provide jobs for workers. Firms will only go on investing their capital in production if they calculate this will bring them a profit at the going rate.

If they don’t make profits, or calculate that they wouldn’t, they will hold part of their capital in liquid form, either as cash or as money lent for short periods or used for currency and other form of speculation. They will lay off workers and, if things are really bad, they will close down factories, “disinvest". All this is part of normal life under capitalism.

Things have been bad for Renault. There is overcapacity in the European car industry. In other words, all the car firms taken together have overinvested in facilities for producing cars in relation to the market demand. This has led to intensified competition between them. But who says competition says losers as well as winners. And Renault has been one of the losers.

Its sales have fallen and its share of the market, even in France, has fallen. In 1996 it made an operating loss of £200 million. Under these circumstances it had no choice but to disinvest, to cut back on its productive capacity. This was the only chance it had of staying in the running and of restoring its profitability. The French Stock Exchange understood this. The day after the announcement that the Vilvoorde factory was to close, the price of Renault shares went up.

The workers concerned saw things rather differently: that they had been used and then thrown away, just like a Kleenex as they put it. Naturally they protested. So did other workers, who knew what they meant. On 16 March some 70,000 trade unionists, including 5,000 or so from France, marched through the streets of Brussels.

This march was basically a plea by workers to be treated as human beings and not as commodities. But this is not going to happen under the profit system where workers, or rather their working skills, are commodities, bought by employers whose aim is to make a profit out of them.

The view that the present economic system puts profits before people is in fact more widespread than even socialists sometimes think. An opinion poll carried out in France for the magazine L’Evenement de Jeudi (13/19 March) found that to the question "When you think of the economic system as it operates at present what does that incite in you?”, 41 percent replied fear and 31 percent replied revulsion. Seventy percent thought the economic system "considered the human person as a commodity” and 80 percent disagreed that it "prepared well the future of our children".

No doubt this explains the popularity of a recent book by the novelist Viviane Forrester entitled L’Horreur economique—a title that needs no translating—which mercilessly criticises the present economic system for the way it throws people out of work and leaves them to rot.

The hope must be that this disaffection with the profit system will not be channelled into futile attempts to humanise it—that reformist project has been tried many times this century and failed.

Adam Buick

Capitalism ‘bad’, socialism ‘good’ (2021)

Frank Luntz with sadness in his eyes.

From the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the beginning of July two openly pro-capitalist think tanks – the Tory-leaning Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) and the free-marketeer Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) – published the results of polls they had carried out on people’s opinion of capitalism. Both indicated that many people don’t think much of it.

The one for the CPS was compiled by US pollster, Frank Luntz:

‘ …Dr Frank Luntz is testing public opinion in Britain to find an alternative to ‘capitalism’, after 170 years of use, because he fears it is becoming a bad word ( … ) Capitalism itself is already a “bad word” in the US and is fast becoming so in the UK too. “It’s one of the key things I am trying to figure out: Does this country need an alternative to the word capitalism? I think it does”’ (Sunday Telegraph, 19 June).

In the event, he didn’t come up with an alternative, merely noting that ‘voters are almost as fed up with business as with politicians – presenting a huge challenge for supporters of capitalism and enterprise’. Those polled were asked to choose from a list four ‘words and phrases they thought of first when thinking about British companies’. The two most chosen were ‘Profits before People’ (47 percent) and ‘They put shareholders first, not ordinary people’ (44 percent). It is not clear why Luntz felt that these factually correct and easily verifiable statements represent a challenge to supporters of capitalism. Normally, its supporters are prepared to defend both as the best way of organising the production and distribution of wealth.

While the CPS poll was concerned with people’s attitude to ‘capitalism’ the IEA one was more concerned with their attitude to ‘socialism’. A representative sample of those aged between 16 and 34 were presented with a number of statements and asked whether they agreed with them or not, without the option of ‘don’t know’. 67 percent said ‘they would like to live in a socialist economic system’ and 75 percent agreed that ‘socialism is a good idea, but it has failed in the past because it has been badly done’. 78 percent blamed ‘capitalism for Britain’s housing crisis’ and 75 percent agreed ‘that climate change is a specifically capitalist problem’.

What are we to make of these results? Opinion polls are worth what they are worth and as Tory Lord Finklestein pointed out in his comments on the CPS one, ‘You can’t just ask consumers, and indeed voters, what motivates them, and trust what you get back’ (Times, 7 July). Those questioned are only being asked to give a fleeting opinion that commits them to nothing. And the questions can be framed to get the answer the pollster wants.

In these two particular polls, ‘capitalism’ was not defined. The tacit assumption of those who drew up the questionnaires (though not necessarily of those who answered the questions) was that capitalism meant production for profit by private capitalist enterprises. Capitalism is certainly a system of production for profit – in fact, the ‘Profit System’ might be the alternative name for it that Luntz is looking for – but ‘private enterprise’ is only one form of this. Capitalism can also take the form of state enterprises producing for the market with a view to profit. In both cases, the profit arises from the unpaid, surplus labour of the wage workers who are employed, whether by a private or a state enterprise, to produce what is to be sold.

The IEA didn’t define ‘socialism’ either, but the question about socialism ‘having failed in the past’ indicates that they think it is what existed in Russia – or, their current favourite, Venezuela. The concept of state capitalism is ruled out, even though the author of its report, Kristian Niemietz, had referred, in a previous report, to this concept and specifically to us:

‘… There are exceptions to this, such as the Socialist Party of Great Britain. They are not, and as far as I know, never were, apologists of Soviet-style socialism, which they describe as ‘state capitalism’. They are among the few socialists who have at least some idea of what they mean by ‘real’ socialism. They use that term to describe a hypothetical system in which working-class people own and control the economy’s productive resources directly, not via the state; a system in which public ownership is not mediated through a government bureaucracy’ (iea.org.uk/has-real-socialism-never-been-tried/).

Once again, it cannot be assumed that those who answered the question meant the same as those who asked it. Had the question been ‘Would you like to live in an economic system where all industries are state-owned?’ the result would have been very different. On the other hand, had the question been ‘Would you like to live in a system where the means of production are commonly owned and democratically controlled and the principle of from each according to ability, to each according to need applied?’ the result could well have been the same. But this wouldn’t mean that those answering ‘yes’ thought that such a system was achievable, only that it was desirable.

In an 80-page booklet analysing the results, Left Turn Ahead? Surveying attitudes of young people towards capitalism and socialism, Niemietz was more realistic as to what this meant:

‘The rejection of capitalism may never have huge real-world consequences. “We should ditch capitalism, and try a socialist alternative” may well be the political equivalent of “One day, I will learn a foreign language, run a marathon, and write a novel”. It may be an idea that is popular as an abstract aspiration, but less so as a concrete action plan’ (p.17).

Unfortunately, this is fair comment.

However, there will be some significance that, amongst younger people today, capitalism has become a ‘bad word’:

‘Young people associate “socialism” predominantly with positive terms, such as “workers”, “public”, “equal” and “fair”. (…) Capitalism, meanwhile, is predominantly associated with terms such as “exploitative”, “unfair”, “the rich” and “corporations”’ (p.7)

That can’t be a bad thing.

Adam Buick

So They Say: The CP Backs Britain (1974)

The So They Say Column from the November 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The CP Backs Britain

There is a school of thought which maintains that Socialists should view Communists and Labourites, as distinct from the Tories, as having something in common with us.

We don’t, and they haven’t. This was demonstrated in articles on the Election in the Communist Party’s fortnightly review Comment, on 7th September. What was the working-class issue in the Election ? According to Dave Cook, the National Agent:

 In the build up to the General Election, Britain’s economic position is the decisive issue, and it is around the policies to tackle the crisis that this political battle now explodes.

John Purton wrote on the same question—Britain’s Economy and the Crisis in the Capitalist World.

Purton discussed the gravity of the balance of payments situation and the need for economic co-operation with “the poorer underdeveloped oil-consuming countries”:

  Ideally, they should receive large sums of oil money, which would provide larger markets for industrial exports.

However:

  It does not mean that economic relations with monopoly capitalist countries can suddenly be abandoned or completely revised. Obviously, Britain's dependence on world trade would prevent that . . . Furthermore, the contradictions of capitalism provide a basis for a progressive government to bargain with countries of monopoly capitalism for relations which do in fact serve legitimate national interests.

So the “revolutionary”, “Marxist” CP want the working class to accept capitalism’s crisis, world trade, markets and national interests as its “legitimate” concerns. What are we supposed to have in common with this pernicious rubbish ?

Our Father's Up the Poll

The failure of the “opinion polls” forecasts of Election results has provided more talk than the Elections themselves this year. John Akass in The Sun (14th October) argued that they produce cantankerousness: the more predictions there are, the more unpredictability will be cultivated.

Very amusing, but wrong. The opinion polls are not the same as racing tips. Their daily prognoses in the campaigns inform the political leaders of, roughly, where they stand — so that each knows when a new promise or representation has to be made, if he can manage it. It is not the electors who want to upturn the polls, but the politicians.

However, the most recent one is unlikely to be changed. A poll published in the Sunday Times on 13th October found that fewer than one in three people believe that God exists. See what an advantage Wilson has over God. The latter can’t accuse his opponent of having no policy, or promise bigger and better rewards for prayer

A Worse Kind of Jungle

A question to socialists used to be: “What about the backward peoples of the world ?” It is seldom heard now because, like many other questions, it is being answered by capitalism: the tribesmen are becoming factory hands.

A talk on the New Guinea Mission, given at the Royal Commonwealth Society on 24th September, described the head-hunters’ new mode of life. Urban drift “has become a flood”, and started other floods too:

  The move to the towns is dragging in its train all the problems that have long been familiar in other countries all over the world. There is unemployment, inadequate housing, incipient slums and malnutrition. Mental illness, hitherto unknown in Papua New Guinea, is on the increase. So is crime, with juvenile delinquency causing particular concern. There is drunkenness, gambling and prostitution.

The New Guinea Mission’s speaker had a curious explanation for all the crime etc.: it is due mostly to “just plain old-fashioned sinfulness”. If it is old-fashioned, why is it a new phenomenon in New Guinea?

The correspondent who sent this item informs us that Bougainville, one of the larger islands, has a huge opencast copper mine using machines costing £50,000; and because of the copper deposits the island wants — independence. Shades of “Scottish oil” !

The Predatory Process

Some noteworthy facts about American involvement in South-east Asia were given in the Los Angeles Times Business and Finance section on 9th September:

 Direct US investment in South-east Asia was a meagre $200 million in 1950. The total grew to $2 billion by 1970, should reach $5 billion next year, and $10 billion in 1980.
 “It may be that opportunities in Europe have been decreasing but, more significantly, investment returns in Asia tend to be higher than those obtainable elsewhere”, the SRI report said. “One study found US investments returned 13% to 14% profit, and another found the median return on total equity of foreign firms in the Philippines, mostly American, to be over 31%.”

The report also describes the importance of oil in business with Indonesia: “Indonesia’s oil is in great demand due to its low sulphur content.”

Put this information beside the figure of 50,000 American servicemen killed, 350,000 wounded, and 1,000.000 Vietnamese killed to “secure” South-east Asia for “democracy and freedom”.

Superior Claimants

One of the ways in which people stake a claim to be “middle-class” is by running down the “working class” — i.e. manual workers as distinct from white- collar ones — as workshy spongers who milk the welfare services. A survey carried out recently by PEP has concluded that the boot is on the other foot:

  Our finding that managerial and professional workers are the most likely to be drawing unemployment benefit at the same time as both having no intention of taking an official job, and earning from unofficial employment, contrasts strongly with the popular image of the idle, feckless unemployed as manual workers.

(Evening Standard, 18th September)

It sounds revealing, but the revelation should go further. There is an implication that what they are doing should be stopped. We agree. Why should people resort to shifts and subterfuge for crumbs from capitalism when the whole loaf — which they helped to produce — can be claimed ? Managers and professionals need to recognize that they are members of the working class, and that Socialism is the answer.

Robert Barltrop

When Will It Be? (1959)

From the May 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reflections on the Election

Mr. Macmillan's government cannot live much longer. Its term of office expires in May next year, so the Prime Minister must already be thinking about dissolving Parliament. Doubtless, he will try to choose the date most advantageous to his party; he has recently been offered a lot of journalistic advice on this.

Last year, when stating that he would not call a general election for some time, Mr. Macmillan said that he was putting the Labour Party out of their agony. Certainly, they were then very eager for an election, for the Gallup Poll gave them a significant lead and the bye-elections were running their way. Since then, if these things are a reliable guide, the Labour Party has lost some ground. Now, with a general election in the offing, the agony must have returned.

The Budget

The 1959 Budget is the last before the General Election; it was, therefore, widely expected to be a popular one, intended to upset as few voters as possible and to please as many as possible. Mr. Amory came up to expectations. The cuts in income tax, although no worker will benefit by more than a few shillings a week, were soothing balm on a sore spot. Income tax is a constant grievance amongst the working class, who weekly sigh, over their decapitated wage packets, for the days when they were not qualified to pay the tax. The fact which is forgotten is that they were really no better off in those days than they arc now; the source of their poverty is not in any tax but in their social situation. The reduction in the price of beer was an earthy touch, guaranteed to make the headlines and proving that Old Etonian Cabinet Ministers are aware of what the “lower classes” drink.

Another Tory ace is made up of Mr. Macmillian’s journey to Moscow and his promotion of what are called talks at the summit. Nothing new about this—but what better face can a politician show than that of a man of peace? It seems to escape notice that they have often been so described when actually preparing for war. Never mind—it is claimed that Mr. Macmillan’s diplomatic efforts are restoring Britain’s international prestige. This must strongly appeal to those workers who are ignorant of the international poverty and interests of their class and who yearn to see Great Britain again a leading world power, almost as people who live in Highbury long to see the Arsenal at the top of the League.

The Labour Party

The Labour Party has had to work hard to break down these images of Conservative success. Their spokesmen have displayed all the usual ingenuity in attacking the Budget, playing down the parts which they think may win votes and asking awkward questions about the others. In the House of Commons on April 8th Mr. Harold Wilson said that, although the Tories have reduced the price of beer (“condescending” he called this), three years ago they increased the price of school milk. He also made the usual sympathetic noises about old age pensioners and the chronically sick. This must have gone down well in some places but, at a guess, was not generally as effective as Mr. Amory’s Budget.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party has been busily designing its policies to appeal to the voters. At last year's Annual Conference, opposing a resolution in favour of land nationalisation, Mr. Tom Williams, M.P., said:—

  To win power is our first duty . . . Don't commit political suicide by importing additions into this policy statement that may destroy our chances at the next general election.

Mr. Richard Crossman, the party executive's spokesman in this debate, wound up by asking the mover of the resolution, in the words of the Manchester Guardian,” . . . whether she thought her assertion would help to win a constituency."

This cynical attitude is matched by the Conservatives. The fact that the Prime Minister will deliberately time an election to give his own party the greater chance of winning, and that a Chancellor of the Exchequer will always try to produce a popular Budget before a general election, is an indication of their desire to win votes.

Optimistic

Whilst the two great parties are sparring with each other and courting the electors with their peacock programmes, it is as well to face a few facts. Capitalism is capitalism, whether administered to Tory or Labour governments. It has an unpleasant habit of upsetting the best laid schemes of the smoothest politicians and of persisting in throwing up the same problems. Insecurity? A few months back unemployment in this country was higher—600,000. War? Towards the end of this month the dispute over Berlin, which has been going on for more than ten years, may erupt into something more serious. These are not problems which politicians can solve, even politicians like Mr. Macmillan, who is said to be the most optimistic prime minister we have. The late Earl Baldwin also had his optimistic moments; he once said:— 

  If we have not conquered unemployment, we are in process of conquering it, and if there is no great disturbance shall complete its conquest.

Those words were reported in the Morning Post of 5th April, 1929, a few months before the great crash.

Despite their failures—and even though their successes are futile—the appeal of the politicians persists. Workers vote for them in their millions with, apparently, hardly a thought for an alternative They are content to be exploited to keep the capitalist system running, whilst the political parties squabble over the spoils of power. The Manchester Guardian of 4th March, 1957, reported Dr. Charles Hill, M.P., a member of the Tory Government, as saying, ". . . that the most riotous fun he had ever had was in opposition.” The Doctor went on to say:—

  Then we could make speeches without responsibility and make proposals that hadn’t got to be carried out.

Well. Labour have had their fun: if they win the next election the Tories will be waiting to give them the full treatment again .A merry game. Who cares if it’s the spectators who always get injured?

Ivan

Anyone for more of the same? (1997)

From the April 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The four-yearly spectacle called the general election is upon us once again and once again, for a short time at least, the working class — the vast majority of the population — is considered to be of some political consequence. As in the past, the politicians are desperate for our votes, but this time with one difference: it is now almost universally accepted that there isn't the slightest difference between any of them.

Opinion polls are not famous for their accurate forecasts but this one was a bit different. Advertising agency Bates Dorland recently asked a thousand people whether their vote at the coming election would be influenced by the opinion of some celebrity in sport, business or entertainment. And enough of them said yes, they would change sides, to affect the overall result of a general election. Mega-costly footballer Alan Shearer, for example, could allegedly change the vole of about four million people. The Spice Girls, just by saying they would vote Conservative, could bring about a ten percent swing. Richard Branson could influence the way about a third of the electorate vote.

Well anyway that is how the poll (reported in the Sunday Times, 23 February) worked it out. Before we discuss it as a typical example of ad agency buffoonery we should bear two things in mind. The first is that both Labour and Conservative parties regard the matter of celebrity endorsement seriously enough to have units at their headquarters working on it The second is that the poll may have turned out as it did because of a growing recognition that there is really nothing to choose between the two big parties. If their policies are so similar, if Blair, Brown and Straw will behave roughly the same in office as Major, Clarke and Howard there is no point in choosing one or the other party on the basis of micro-differences in their manifestos. Instead of ploughing through their election addresses and TV party political programmes, why not simply vote the same way as your favourite footballer or pop star or tycoon? “When the two parties are so similar,” said Donald Shell, who lectures in politics at Bristol University, "someone like Branson could have a considerable effect.”

Clement Attlee
This widespread recognition that there is no real difference between the Labour and Tory parties may make this election different; in the past there has been little sympathy for the socialist view, that to choose between those parties was a waste of time. Labour Party members argued with some passion that their policies would bring about important, much needed changes in society. Now that party is consumed with anxiety to reassure the voters that they will change nothing that matters. If that makes them seem just another Tory party—well, the Tories have won an awful lot of elections even if we don’t count the last four and winning elections is what Labour is in business for.

In fact the two parties have always stood for fundamentally the same things — for all that is implied by a social system of class ownership of the means of production and distribution. The differences between them were always superficial, even in those heady days of 1945 when Clem Attlee became prime minister on the basis of the manifesto Let Us Face the Future (even then there were those who asked whether Labour’s willingness to have us face the future was rooted in their reluctance to face their past). Attlee did not use one of those big limousines which are now so essential a part of a minister’s life; he was driven around by his wife in a drab, modest family car and that was the style in which he went to Buckingham Palace to see the King about being prime minister. The King knew what was coming: nationalisation, the National Health Service, Keynesian economics and so on. At the time the Labour Party, celebrating the opportunity to put their ideas into practice, assured us that these measures were needed to build a stable, prosperous and secure life for us. But now most of what they established has been, or is being, dismantled—apparently without any official opposition from the Labour Party.

Nationalised coal
A prime example of this is the coal industry. One of the proudest achievements, heavy with an enormous emotional investment, of the 1945 Labour government was the nationalisation of the mines. The history of the coal industry — the terrible working conditions, the “accidents” which killed hundreds of miners, the greed and complacency of the private owners—was awful enough to generate a lot of support for the plan to take the industry into state control (after appropriately compensating those greedy owners). Vesting day was celebrated in mining communities all over the country.

Of course years of privatising Conservative government has since changed the situation but for a long time the Labour Party clung to a stated intention to re-nationalise the coal industry. In March 1994 their shadow Energy Secretary, Martin O'Neill, told the Commons, “The Labour Party is not simply opposed to the [Privatisation] Bill. It is committed to the re-introduction of public ownership of the coal industry.” A lot of Labour Party members, not to mention a lot of miners, must have thought that was pretty clear, except that six months later that same Martin O'Neill confided to a gathering of the industry’s executives, “While we envisage a national role for coal in our energy strategy, we do not intend to re-nationalise the industry.” He did not add, “Because we think nationalisation is a vote loser”, but if he had that would have made it clear to everybody.

Losing votes—or winning them—has always been vital to the Labour Party but now it is their obsession, open and unashamed. It was not always so obvious. In the past, before the spin doctors ruled, Labour was capable of producing policies which seemed not only irrelevant to the needs of British capitalism but also inexplicably suicidal. For example in their 1953 statement Challenge to Britain Labour proposed to take the British Sugar Corporation into “full public ownership". There was a storm of opposition in the industry led by the giant Tate and Lyle. This company was responsible for creating a cartoon character—Mr Cube, a talking sugar lump who appeared on every pack of sugar, going on about labour’s plan to bring down civilised life as we know it, starting with the sugar industry. Labour’s proposal came to nothing and now a state of peace and mutual admiration exists between the Labour Party and the sugar industry. In November 1994, when Tony Blair made one of his many speeches which assure a gathering of high-flying business people that they had nothing to fear from a Labour government, one of his audience enthused:

   ". . . an excellent speech, very focused. If there is a Labour government I don't think anybody is going to be concerned that there's going to be a great vendetta against business.” 

That comment came from Neil Shaw, chairman of Tate and Lyle.

The Labour Party manifesto in the 1987 election had a clear commitment on Child Benefit: “We will increase Child Benefit by £3 a week for all children, raise the allowance for the first child by £7.36 . . . " In 1992 the figures were different but the promise largely similar: “We will increase Child Benefit to £9.95 a week for all children with the full value going to every family.” This was another of those promises dear to the hearts of Labour supporters but now shadow Chancellor, Gordon Brown, has other ideas. He plans to end the payment of Child Benefit to all families, in particular for 16-17-year-olds in full time education. His argument for this, at last year’s Labour conference, was that at present the benefit would be paid for a millionaire’s child but not for an unemployed youngster but he did not say how it helped the out-of-work child to abolish the payment. At present Labour has no plans to keep to its former promise to increase the level of the benefit.

Of course Brown is busily building for himself a reputation as an Iron Chancellor—and this before he has taken hold of so much as one of those red boxes. He is not impressed by Labour supporters’ emotional attachment to schemes for spending out on things like hospitals, schools, houses. Under his unrelenting scrutiny there will, he warns, be only “ . . . costed, hard-headed radical policies . . . No quick fixes. No easy options . . . No wish-list spending solutions . . . “ This sounds just like any Conservative chancellor—in fact a sight more dour than many of them, just as shadow Home Secretary Jack Straw’s promises to be harsher and more demanding than Michael Howard, and shadow Education Secretary David Blunkett more rigid and repressive than Gillian Shephard. And over them all looms Tony Blair, who regularly dispenses the most appalling guff: ". . . Our education system must be guaranteed to serve all our people, not an elite . . . We must ensure that the new technologies, with their almost limitless potential, are harnessed and dispersed among all our people . . . We must create a society based on a notion of mutual rights and responsibilities . . . “

Anyone who has had enough of this kind of empty rhetoric may be asking why. The first thing to say is that there has not been a transformation in the Labour Party. The apparent change is not out of the party’s character, something which can be reversed when the party rediscovers its soul. The Labour Party was formed and developed with the aim of governing British capitalism. That is what they did in those days, the subject now of so much misguided nostalgia, when they nationalised almost everything except the sugar industry, when they set up the National Health Service and what came to be know as the Welfare State. Their record shows that they ran capitalism as it had to be run—as a class society of poverty and riches, of exploitation and conflict. They did not control capitalism, as they had promised, because it is a system out of control. That essential chaos has been the story of every Labour government since 1924.

Opinion poll

After nearly 20 years in opposition, the Labour Party has decided that their best hope of winning an election is to make the necessary changes so that they are almost identical to the Conservatives. After all if Tory policies and images have been so successful why not just imitate them? Of course this may upset a few traditional supporters but they can always join Arthur Scargill’s doomed battalion. But the cynicism may be too obvious; the fact that it is now clearer than ever that the parties are so alike may alert a lot of voters that in this election they don’t have a real choice. Why, it may even occur to the advertising industry.

Which brings us back to that opinion poll, When they told the Spice Girls about it one of them (a Tory voter) was suitably outraged: “What is the state of the government if we can have any influence. I think that’s terrible.” Was this an appeal to the working class to take the election more seriously, to value more highly their political power to change society in a meaningful way? If it really needs a pop star to do this the situation may be even more depressing than we feared. However, we are certainly not mystified by it. Only those who support the market economy can be truly surprised by the weariness and political disillusionment which infects the population at large after decades of posturing and broken promises by the parties of capitalism.

Ivan

Tory chickens come home to roost (2000)

Book Review from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Explaining Labour's Landslide. By Robert Worcester & Roger Mortimore. Politico's.

Opinion polling has been a feature of British political life since 1938. (57 percent of people were satisfied with Neville Chamberlain's performance as Prime Minister). By the last general election, however, the pollsters were on trial as never before. They had, horror of horrors, got the result of the 1992 election wrong.

In the end, their predictions of Labour's victory in May 1997 turned out to be creditably close to the mark. The Tories lost 177 seats. Labour won its highest ever number of MPs, and had a majority of 179. Worcester, who founded the MORI agency in 1969 and has been closely involved with political polling ever since, and Mortimore tell the story of that election through the data the polls provided.

The Tories were doomed long before the campaign began, they argue, because of problems almost entirely of their own making. To any socialist, this is deeply uninteresting stuff. The high point of this part of the book, as it was of the campaign, is the man the Tories paid to dress up as a chicken and follow Blair around. Which of them talked more sense is still hotly debated.

And yet, this is not a boring book. It argues strongly from a position of hard facts supplied by the polls that bias in the press does swing votes. During the 1979 election, two thirds of Sun readers didn't know its political allegiance. (Its front page on polling day consisted of two words: "VOTE TORY"). By 1997, "the print media did . . . have significant influence on the voting behaviour of their readers". In this case at least, greater political awareness seems to be a handicap.

The authors are suitably cutting about the cynical and meaningless astrological "predictions" spouted by several papers. The Express, for example, claimed that "a Tory victory is written in the stars . . . Tony Blair is doomed due to the poor positioning of something called the planet Rahu". Shelley von Strunckel in the Evening Standard was cleverer, taking a whole page to hint at a hung parliament without actually committing herself to anything at all. This under the headline "Forget polls, the result is in the stars".

Most interesting for socialists though, is the section What is public opinion? Clearly for anyone concerned to see a huge shift in human consciousness, this is an important area. The book gives much food for thought. "Public opinion", it maintains, comprises three things. There are "opinions: the ripples on the surface of the public's consciousness, shallow and easily changed; attitudes: the currents below the surface . . . and values: the deep tides of public mood, slow to change, but powerful". Political convictions generally (we are told) come from this third element. To dump our upbringing for capitalism frequently entails a shift in these deep values. It is possible, as the existence of the membership of the World Socialist Movement proves. But it may not always be easy.

The book of course was not written to give us ideas about how to speed up this process of human change. But what is the alternative? A man dressed as a chicken, pecking at the heels of another man who would soon be sending bombers round the world to serve British capital's interests. Pathetic, maybe; but nine out of ten people think it was childish too—the chicken bit, at least.

Toby Crowe

Material World: American Public Opinion and the S-Word:Weakening of a Taboo? (2010)

The Material World Column from the February 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

In April 2009, interviewers working for the Rasmussen agency asked 1,000 people: ‘Which is a better system – capitalism or socialism?’ 53 percent said capitalism, 20 percent socialism, and 27 percent were not sure.

Although ‘capitalism’ came out the clear winner, commentators were shocked that almost half the respondents failed to give the ‘correct’ response on a matter so crucial to the dominant ideology.

‘Capitalism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘the free market’
The interviewers did not define ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’, so we are left to guess what respondents understood by these words. No doubt most of those who answered ‘socialism’ did not have a clear or accurate idea of what it means. Nevertheless, socialists can take encouragement from the evident ability of a sizeable proportion of people to resist indoctrination by the corporate media, which never have anything good to say about any kind of ‘socialism’. Even the fact that so many Americans do not react negatively to the S-word itself is significant: people who do not take fright at the word are more likely to be open to consideration of the idea.

A clue to how Americans interpret ‘capitalism’ is found in another Rasmussen poll (May 2009). Here people were asked: ‘Is a free market economy the same as a capitalist economy?’ 35 percent replied yes, 38 percent no. This result puzzled the hired ideologists of capital, who do equate the two concepts and like to use ‘the free market’ as a euphemism for ‘capitalism’.

Yet another poll (December 2008) asked: ‘Which is better – a free market economy or a government-managed economy?’ 70 percent preferred a ‘free market economy’ and only 15 percent a ‘government-managed economy’. This implies that there is a substantial body of people (about 17 percent) who are in favour of ‘the free market’ but against ‘capitalism’.

In the US ‘capitalism’ is widely associated with big business and ‘the free market’ with small business. Hatred for big business commonly goes along with admiration for small business. In the frequent polls that compare the approval ratings of various occupational groups, small business owners regularly come out on top, while corporate CEOs (together with politicians) end up at the bottom.

Those who are ‘against capitalism but for the free market’ are, perhaps, still influenced by the old populist idea of the good society as a relatively egalitarian community of small independent producers – farmers, fishermen, craftsmen, doctors, etc. This utopia has its roots in an idealised image of early rural colonial society in New England and Pennsylvania, before its transformation by industrial capitalism.

Young people more inclined toward ‘socialism’
The proportion of respondents who say that 'socialism¹ is a better system than 'capitalism¹ varies with gender, age, race and income. Women are slightly more likely than men to prefer 'socialism¹; people with low incomes (under $40,000 per year) more than twice as likely as people with high incomes (over $75,000); and blacks almost twice as likely as whites, with equal proportions favouring 'capitalism¹ and 'socialism¹ (31 percent each).

Variation with age is especially striking. Proportions preferring ‘socialism’ in the older age groups (40 and over) are well below average. In the 30 – 39 age group the proportion rises to 26 percent and in the 18 – 29 age group to 33 percent (with 37 percent favouring ‘capitalism’). If we focus specifically on women aged 18 – 29, we again find an equal division of opinion: 36 percent for ‘capitalism’ and 36 percent for ‘socialism’.

Why?
How might these very hopeful findings be explained?

If we believe widespread stereotype, nothing needs explaining: young people are ‘naturally’ rebellious and older people ‘naturally’ conformist. In fact, this is far from always the case. Rebellious and conformist generations tend to alternate. The young rebels of the 1960s gave way to the young conformists of the 1980s. The pendulum is now swinging back. For three reasons.

First, deteriorating economic conditions. This is the first generation of young people since the Great Depression who have no hope of maintaining, let alone improving on, their parents’ standard of living. They face a grim and uncertain future.

Second, an increasing number of young people pay less attention to the corporate media, preferring to rely on the Internet. This exposes them to a broader range of ideas, including socialist ones.

Finally, the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ were associated with a forbidding external enemy. Advocating them marked you out as a traitor. We protested that what we stood for was something quite different, but our voice was barely audible. We hoped that with the end of the Cold War it would become easier to spread socialist ideas. We felt disappointed that this did not seem to happen. The disappointment was premature. Attitudes do change in response to circumstances – but only when a new generation comes of age. For today’s young Americans the Cold War is ancient history.

Stefan

From the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Material World February issue we didn’t mean to write that the poll showed that people with high incomes were more likely to be favourable to the word “socialism” than those with low but the opposite, so:

“Women are slightly more likely than men to prefer ‘socialism’; people with low incomes (under $40,000 per year) more than twice as likely as people with high incomes (over $75,000); and blacks almost twice as likely as whites, with equal proportions favouring ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ (31 percent each).”