Greasy Pole: High Noon In Southall (2001)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ealing was once known, by those who were adept at ignoring the large chunks of serious impoverishment there, as the Queen of the Suburbs. As might be expected of a place with so impressive a name, it regularly returned Conservative MPs to the Commons. It’s all changed now though; other bits of west London have been tacked on to the original area and all three of the recast constituencies elect Labour MPs. The safest of them is Ealing Southall, at the western end of the area, where the sitting MP is Piara Khabra.

Southall was a railway town and there is very little left from how it was before Brunel pushed through the line to the west. The railway brought immigrants from Wales and Ireland, to work in the factories which sprang up along the line. It was not the railways which brought the Asians, in the 1950s; the first of them were recruited by a rubber factory which had difficulty in persuading the locals to work in its sulphurous confines. Few of the Asians who came then thought they were making a lifetime commitment; they imagined making enough quick money to set themselves up to go back to the place they called home. It didn’t happen like that and the population of Southall is now about 50 per cent of Asian origin – the second largest in the country.

Piara Khabra has been the local MP since 1992. Before that it was Sydney Bidwell, who had emigrated from the Revolutionary Communist Party when they disbanded and advised their members to infiltrate the Labour Party. Towards the end of his time in the Commons Bidwell seemed to be not entirely in touch with reality, although that was not what caused him to be de-selected. Khabra had long been prominent and influential locally, through being chair of the Indian Workers’ Association (Southall is teeming with community support organisations), a local councillor and so on. There was a flood of new members into the local Labour Party, which simply washed Bidwell away. Miserably, hopelessly, he stood against Khabra as “True Labour” – there were rumours that he did this only to qualify for his ex-MP’s pension – but got only 4,665 votes against Khabra’s 23,476.

Swing

In 1997, in tune with the rest of the country, Khabra tightened his grip on the seat. By then there was no Bidwell, who had retired with his revolutionary delusions and his pension and Khabra benefitted from a 15.1 per cent swing against the Tories, racking up an astonishing 32,791votes and, at 21,423, the country’s second largest Labour majority. In some ways this was surprising because the constituency boundaries had been extended eastwards to include older, posher parts of Ealing more accustomed to voting Conservative. But of course that was an exceptional time, with widespread anger against the sleaze and complacency of the Tories, their in-fighting and arrogance. A lot of voters really thought that things could only get better. But in Southall that was not the whole story for there was disquiet, not about Khabra holding the seat but about him being the Labour candidate in the first place.

For some time Southall has claimed to be the largest constituency Labour Party in the country. Of course this could mean that it is populated by people who have carefully examined the party’s policies and decided that these are in tune with their own principles. If that were true the place would surely be unique. Before Khabra ousted Bidwell there was some restlessness in the party – and outside it – about all those new members and about how genuine many of them were – or even whether some of them actually existed. At one stage Khabra faced a legal challenge from Valerie Vaz, sister of the embattled ex-minister Keith Vaz (who was rumoured to have tried to help rig the selection procedure against Khabra) but this came to nothing. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that Valerie Vaz – who, as a forceful, articulate lawyer and media presenter could be expected to be picked out for a plum Labour seat – has only ever been nominated for more hopeless prospects such as Twickenham. Recently, for example, she was considered to be the front runner for the by-election in Betty Boothroyd’s old constituency of West Bromwich West but Labour headquarters had other ideas.

Ineffective

So far Khabra has shrugged off all the opposition to him; “I have been misrepresented in the press,” he said just before the election “but that doesn’t bother me, nothing does”. But with the approach of this year’s election the opposition against him has gathered strength as an electable rival came on the scene with the resources to air popular criticisms about him. Khabra has an established reputation as one of the most inactive and ineffective MPs, who is reliably evident only when he sits behind Tony Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions, which gives him some valuable TV coverage. Occasionally he stirs into action, as he did in 1993 when he tabled a Ten Minute Bill to legalise voluntary euthenasia only to withdraw it at the last minute. In February this year he asked a question which conveniently enabled Paul Boateng, who was then a minister in the Home Office, to give some detail about the planned enquiry into the coroner system. In December 2000 he wrote to Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in support of the Hinduja brothers’ resistance to being extradited for investigation in India over an arms-sale scandal. In the light of recent events, this was not entirely wise of him. (Cook promised “full consular support” for the Hindujas).

Meanwhile there has been a burgeoning discontent in the constituency about local problems – traffic congestion, crime, decay and a massive heroin problem among young people. In face of this Khhabra has been hard put to detail any intervention on his part which has been to any degree effective. The local Socialist Labour Party (of course, hardly an objective observer) calls him “congenitally demented” and rages at his “self-seeking careerism…his inability to be even an effective bourgeoise politician…” One constituent old the AsianXpress newspaper : I’ve never seen Mr. Khabra but I know of him and all the scams he’s done over the years”. And on 15 February this year the Daily Telegraph put the boot in:

“Piara Khabra…confirmed himself as surely this Parliament’s weakest performer…His question was near inaudible and his delivery laughably weak. Perhaps because he is Indian, or perhaps because he is old, the House listened to him with a straight face. How patronising. Mr Khabra deserved a loud and long raspberry. If he cannot lift his game he should make way for someone better.”

Stranglehold

And when it came to the elecetion there was someone who claimed to be better. Avtar Lit is a Labour supporter, the multi-millionnaire owner of Sunrise Radio whose personal fortune is put at £60 million. “Money,” he said recently, “to me isn’t everything “. . . and then again “I am known as a man of the people”. Lit complained about Khabra’s “strangelehold” on the local selection process and the MP’s “dismal record . . . an insult to the people who elected him”. On the basis of a rather dubious opinion poll, which may not have been any more valid that all those Khabra recruits, Lit claimed that he was about to be elected, after which he would join the Labour Party.

But on the day he managed only a little less than 6,000 votes, to Khabra’s 22,239 which gave a comfortable majority of 13,683. As the evening wore on the bundles of votes for each candidate were in lines on the central table, with Khabra’s stretching far beyond all the others. There was little perceptible difference between Lit’s votes and those for the Tory, whose startlingly young face settled into a bewildered despondency as he contemplated the humiliation facing him. Towards the end a group of Khabra supporters filtered into the room. They were large, groomed men wearing immaculate turbans, exuding influence and privilege and the expectation of always getting their own way. They cheered dutifully – but restrainedly – when Khabra was announced as the winner but it was a fair bet that at the same time they were calculating how best they could do to him what he did to Bidwell – and what advantage they would get from it. These are probably the men Lit will have to best if he is to get the seat.

So Piara Khabra, who says he is 76 years old but who may be 80 or more, is back in the Commons for another spell – four years or maybe five – to hang on to his position and to “represent” the people of Ealing Southall. This is the very essence of capitalism’s politics—the politicians denying the truth of their impotence while they cynically manoeuvre to keep themselves in power and so the system in being.

Ivan

Scargillism or socialism? (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The June elections to the European Parliament were notable not only in having the lowest turn-out ever in a national election but also for being the first national election in which every elector in Britain had a chance to vote for at least one party using the word “socialist” on the ballot paper. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a chance to vote for real socialism.

Only those in the North East had that chance. Apart from the Socialist Party the other parties calling themselves Socialist stood on anything but a socialist programme. Arthur Scargill’s SLP stood on a patriotic anti-Common Market programme. Tommy Sheridan’s SSP stood for Tommy Sheridan and Scottish separatism (the six words they used on the ballot paper were: “Scottish Socialist Party (Convenor Tommy Sheridan)”. An electoral coalition of Trotskyist groups including Militant and the SWP which contested the West Midlands under the name of “Socialist Alliance”, stood on a programme of minimum reforms such as “No to tuition fees and student loans”, “No to private toll roads”, “£5 an hour minimum wage”, “Oppose the Euro”, with no mention of socialism not even as a long-term goal (and not even as their mistaken definition of it as state-run capitalism).

Scargill’s party stood in all 11 Euroconstituencies in mainland Britain and in all but three of them was the only standard-bearer for the word “socialist”. But what a disgrace to the word his programme was!

The SLP’s main electoral slogan was “VOTE TO GET BRITAIN OUT OF THE EUROPEAN UNION”. Socialists know that it doesn’t make any difference to workers whether or not the British capitalist class are in or out of the European Union. Whether or not they stay in this businessman’s club is their problem, not ours. The problems we face as workers are caused by the class ownership of the means of life and production for profit, not by the trading arrangements of our capitalist masters.

The SLP’s election manifesto, however, did not make such a socialist analysis. Instead, it echoed the analysis made by the UK Independence Party and the BNP that all our problems are due to Britain being in the Common Market—and indeed that those of the capitalists are too, since the SLP manifesto expressed great concern about their trading prospects and about how much of the surplus-value extracted from the workers they have to pay over to Brussels.

According to Scargill’s manifesto:

When Britain joined the European Common Market the people were told that membership would protect British industries and British jobs—but the very opposite is true . . . Membership of the European Union has led to mass unemployment, the closure of steelworks and coal mines, engineering industries and the near-destruction of Britain’s manufacturing base.

Or, as the BNP put it in their manifesto:

Being in the EU makes it illegal for us to protect our own industries, including manufacturing, fishing and farming, from the foreign competition which has destroyed millions of jobs. The BNP says ‘no’ to EU insecurity, and—unlike the pro-free trade UKIP—’yes’ to protecting British jobs. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

Well, actually, no, it doesn’t, since the implication of the SLP/BNP position is that if British capitalism hadn’t been in the Common Market these closures and job losses could have been avoided. But how? Since they were caused by changes in world market conditions in the form of a world-wide economic slowdown it would have made no difference whether Britain was in or out of the EU. If Britain had not been in they would still have occurred.

The fact is that we are living in a global economy and there is nothing a government of any particular state can do to opt out of the effects of a global economic downturn. No doubt an SLP government—or a BNP government—would have tried to protect “British jobs” by putting up tariff walls to keep out “foreign” imports. But this is to forget that Britain, as part of the global economy, is also necessarily an exporting country; in fact its speciality has been transforming imported materials into manufactured goods for export. Keeping out cheap “foreign” imports would have meant forcing exporters to use more expensive British-made substitutes, so increasing their cost and making them less competitive on already over-supplied world markets. This, quite apart from the retaliatory action other states would be likely to have taken against imports from Britain to their countries. In other words, if such a protectionist policy had been pursued British exports would still have fallen off leading to . . . factory closures and job losses.

A siege economy, whether under Arthur Scargill or John Tyndall, is no way out of the global capitalist crisis. In fact there is no way out for workers other than socialism which, because capitalism is already a global system, has to be world-wide too. This is elementary Socialist thinking, but it’s the last thing you are going to hear from Scargill’s party.

Instead, we are told:

If a country like Norway—not a member of the EU—can have one of the most prosperous economies in the world outside the EU, why not Britain?

But Norway is an openly capitalist country (which didn’t in fact escape from the effects of the world slump), so the SLP evidently believes that the problems workers in Britain face can be solved within the context of capitalism. This mistaken conclusion follows logically from the SLP’s mistaken analysis: if the EU rather than capitalism is the cause of workers’ problems then the solution lies not in getting rid of capitalism but simply in getting out of the EU.

We suspect we know why the SLP chose Norway as its example of a supposed paradise outside the EU. The examples they normally give in their literature—Cuba and North Korea—are rather less attractive vote-pullers.

Although all this is enough to show not only that the SLP is not a socialist party at all but that it is a petty British nationalist party, the various Trotskyist groups were urging workers to vote for them, except in Scotland where they preferred Sheridan’s even pettier Scottish nationalism and in the West Midlands where they stood themselves, but including the North East where a genuine Socialist list was standing. This doesn’t surprise us as they have more in common with Scargill than they have with us and, in any event, we only want those who genuinely understand and want socialism to vote for us. They too are Eurosceptics, though not as extreme as Scargill, the BNP and UKIP in wanting a complete withdrawal. Their slogan of “OPPOSE THE EURO AND MAASTRICHT”, i.e. stay in but keep the pound, puts them rather in the camp of Thatcher and Norman Tebbitt.

The correct socialist position on the euro was put in a letter from one of our members published in the Newcastle Journal on 14 January:

To euro or not to euro, that is the question. Or is it? Does it really make any difference if you pay your bills with euro, dollars or pounds sterling? Would your life change if the money in your pocket no longer had a picture of the richest woman in England? The real truth is the rich will still be rich and the poor still be poor. Joining the euro will benefit the flow of business capital. Why? Because we live in a global economy. The European nations must compete as a trading bloc against their strongest competitors, the American and Far East economies. If this planet with all its vast resources was owned and democratically controlled by the people, money would be obsolete. Socialism means that the farms, factories, railways, etc are run for the benefit of all. Without the insanity of the boom-slump profit system, the Stock Exchanges of the world will become museums and the floor traders can stop running around like headless chickens wearing blazers.

The North East, in fact, was the one region where voters attracted by the mere word “socialist” on the ballot paper did have a choice between the SLP’s position and the genuine Socialist one. Of the 6021 voters in this category, 4511 voted for the SLP and 1510 for us. In other words, 25 percent opted for real socialism rather than Scargill’s British state capitalism. What is interesting is that in those areas where we had been active in putting over the Socialist case, in other elections and in letters to the press, the percentage opting for socialism rather than Scargillism was higher. In Jarrow it was 44 percent and in Easington 35 percent.

This would suggest that where those interested in socialism are given the opportunity to hear the socialist case on a regular basis they can be won over to supporting the real thing and not just the name. Many of the 86,749 people who voted for the SLP will have voted not for, but thankfully despite, its reactionary, non-socialist programme, as a way of showing that they rejected the Labour administration of capitalism and saw “socialism”, however vaguely defined, as the way out.

There is talk of getting all the various parties calling themselves “socialist” together in an electoral pact so as to win seats under proportional representation. We want no part of such an alliance. The SLP, the SSP and the Trotskyist groups may as well know that we will continue to put the case for socialism, against them and the other parties which all support capitalism in one form or another, at election times whenever we can. We shan’t be forming any electoral pacts with them since their objective of reforms now and state capitalism later has nothing in common with ours of a world community without frontiers based on common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources with production to satisfy people’s needs not profit.

Adam Buick

TV Review: Our Masters’ Voice (1999)

Tyndall (top left) in his younger days.

TV Review from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month’s Euro election campaign is probably best forgotten—just as well, as most of the electorate appeared to have forgotten about it even before polling day. It was not that the political parties made no effort to influence the electorate, it just seemed as if they were going through the motions, well aware that wherever real political power lies in Europe it is certainly not with the European Parliament. The Party Election Broadcasts screened during the campaign must have been among the most hopeless and insipid on record.

The Conservative Party ran with a two-part playlet featuring a young, upwardly-mobile couple whose prose turned with the trivial to overtly political with all the subtlety and finesse of Yasser Arafat gatecrashing a barmitzvah. Labour’s best effort was another risible attempt at the canonisation of Tony Blair, the saintly führer.

The real British führer, of course, achieved a Party Election Broadcast of his own this time thanks to the BNP running a full list across most of the UK. Standing resplendent in front of the Cenotaph in Whitehall was the man who poses as the saviour of the white race, Mr John Tyndall, professional bigot, race hater and petty criminal. If ever there was a case to be made for lengthier prison sentences of the type advocated by the BNP, then this man must feature prominently. Even he, however, looked good next to the “vox pop” type interviews which followed, where stilted fascists posing as “ordinary” members of the public read from cue cards, turning a few minutes of nationalist rhetoric into what seemed like a lifetime of televisual embarrassment. Unusually for the BNP, their broadcast this time around did not feature Tyndall railing against all those impure elements who have taken the Great out of Britain—communists, Jews, blacks, homosexuals, liberals, teachers, Guardian-readers, social workers, feminists, etc. Rather like the Daily Mail, Tyndall now has a greater, more all-encompassing target than these minority groups: Europe itself. Britain must Get Out Of Europe he bellowed, NOW!

For those whose familiarity with the BNP extends beyond a PEB every few years, this is odd. If it is the case that opposition to all things European and support for everything home-grown and British is what now really defines the BNP’s politics then why is it that they have been happy to spend so much time in the company of European terrorists from Italy and elsewhere this last 15 years or so? Why is it that the BNP attends international gatherings in Europe where—bizarrely—other foreigner-haters from all the different nations of Europe are in attendance? And, while we’re on the subject, wouldn’t it be interesting to know how much of the money to finance the BNP’s election candidates (and hence its PEB) actually came from Johnny Foreigner? Questions, there are many, but answers no doubt there will be none.

Left, right

Also in evidence during the Euro-election campaign was that other authoritarian comedy act, Arthur Scargill and his ever-decreasing and increasingly amazing SLP. Like Tyndall, Scargill made sure the SLP put up nearly a full list of candidates so that it would be eligible for a Party Political Broadcast, and like the BNP, the SLP’s broadcast was a homily to the Little Englander political mentality, this time with a bizarre Stalinist twist. Despite their national exposure, it would appear that the SLP now presents no challenge whatsoever to Labour anywhere in the country, despite the massive display of apathy on election day from Labour’s core support. The SLP, shorn of many of the Trotskyist activists which paradoxically both gave it presence and rent it asunder, is now little more than a Stalinist sect with small followings in the faction-ridden Asian working class movement in London. Just like the BNP, it its vote was desultory for a party with national political exposure and a lowest-common denominator political appeal. Like his great political enemy David Owen, Scargill truly has the negative Midas touch: everything he touches turns to shit.

Political mind control of the type manifested in Party Political and Party Election Broadcasts is a difficult and inexact science, though when it works it can infect the minds of generations of the working class. Those who doubt this should take a look at Party Political Broadcasts: The Greatest Hits, a video collection of PPBs since their inception at the end of the Second World War. As you watch it, the carefully planted myths of a capitalist political lifetime unfold before your very eyes. Here are MacMillan, Wilson, Thatcher and Blair, bamboozling the working class with nationalist rhetoric and reformist promises as if their very life depended on it. It is in fact, a monument to political trickery and flummery throughout the ages. Perhaps, one day, Arthur Scargill and John Tyndall will find their way on to the sequel, bearing in mind, of course, that sequels are usually a pale imitation of the original.

Dave Perrin

Promising the moon (1997)

From the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have you ever wondered what we mean when we use the word "reformist" in these columns?

The recent election provided a striking illustration of the difference between our approach and the reformist approach in the contrast between our programme and campaigning and that of the various other parties calling themselves socialist. We advocated a fundamental change in the basis of society. They merely offered reforms.

We stood for socialism and nothing else. We made no promises as to what “we” would do to make things better under capitalism. We simply said that capitalism can't be reformed to work in the interests of the majority and that the way-out was to get rid of the profit system and replace it by a system based on common ownership and democratic control and geared to meeting needs not making profits.

The SLP, Militant, the Scottish Socialist Alliance and the others took a different approach. In a bid to get as many votes as possible they promised the moon. In other words, they played the game of conventional electioneering politics to the full. However all their promises were pie-in-the-sky in the sense that capitalism could not afford them. This didn't stop these parties entering into great detail about what they would do if elected.

Wonderful wages

Pat Sikorski, SLP candidate for Hornsey and Wood Green, had worked out to the nearest penny what the minimum wage should be: “£6.22 per hour or £250 per week is everyone’s entitlement”. That works out as for a 40 hour week. But he hadn’t thought this through as in the previous paragraph he had promised “a 35-hour week for all. Speedily followed by a 32 hour-4 day week”. £6.22 per hour for a 35 hour week is £216.60. only 87 percent of "everyone’s entitlement”.

To be coherent he should have advocated a minimum wage of £7.14p per hour, but perhaps that would have seemed a bit too unreasonable. Not to another SLP candidate though. Councillor Ian Driver of Southwark, standing in Vauxhall (where he faced opposition from a real socialist), promised “we will introduce a minimum wage of £8 per hour”. Perhaps he was anticipating the coming of the 32-hour week.

Militant—using, to our great anger and embarrassment, our name of Socialist Party—was more modest. They promised “a minimum wage of £6 an hour for all workers” coupled with “the introduction of a maximum 35-hour week". That gives £210 a week as the minimum wage, but also the maximum wage for those concerned. This, they said, was “the European Decency Threshold. That’s the rate necessary to take the low paid out of the poverty trap”.

An example of the crude electioneering engaged in by these groups over this issue is the following report from Militants Hitchin branch: 

"The fight against low pay has been our main campaign. At a town centre stall a single mother was asked to sign our petition. “Would your party pay me more than £50 a week?’

‘Yes, we campaign for a minimum wage of £6 an hour, £210 a week.’

‘You’ve got my vote then!’”

Unfortunately for Militant, her vote wasn’t enough to stop their candidate in Hitchin being beaten by the Natural Law Party. It appears that more people in Hitchin believe in yogic flying than in the possibility of a £6 an hour minimum wage. After the election, with the vote-catching over, Militant revealed that it too considered £6 an hour impracticable when the front page of its paper said that “top of the workers’ demands from a Labour government will be a minimum wage of over £4 an hour” (The Socialist, 9 May). Not that there’s much chance of getting that either, at least not until inflation has reduced £4 to the value of £3 today.

But, in Militant’s utopia, some people are still going to get less than the “European Decency Threshold’’. They say that “pensions and benefits should be immediately increased by 50 percent”. But why only 50 percent? With the pension for a single person at £62.45 and the jobseekers Allowance at £49.15 that’s not enough, even with housing benefit, to bring many up to £210.

“We would introduce,” said Militant pompously as if they really had the chance of forming the government, ”a wealth tax—no one should earn more than £100,000. VAT should be abolished and there should be no tax on wages below £10,000 a year.” But if there’s a minimum wage of £210 a week, then there’s not supposed to be any full-time workers earning less than £ 10,000 a year.

These people are jokers, insulting people’s intelligence. They just pluck figures out of the air to make what they consider attractive promises—but which most people consider ridiculous—without even checking that their various promises are compatible with each other.

It is interesting, though, that Militant is prepared to have a 10:1 differential between the highest paid and the lowest paid. Who will be the £100K earners anyway—the new Trotskyist nomenklatura?

Another Trotskyist group calling itself the "Socialist Equality Party” had a more radical tax policy: ”all personal incomes over £80,000 should be taxed 100%, whilst those under £12,000 should be tax-free.” It also advocated a higher minimum wage—£8 an hour—and an even shorter working week, of 30 hours.This gives a maximum minimum wage of £240 a week, still below the level of what the SLP said was “everyone’s entitlement”.

It might have been thought that a party calling itself the "Socialist Equality Party" would have refused a 7:1 differential between the highest and lowest pay and advocated an equal income for all of, say, £80,000. Why not? If you are in the business of making unrealistic promises you might as well go the whole way.

Plentiful pensions

The fantastic promises—and the contradictions—continued over pensions."People should be able to retire at 55 on a full pension linked to earnings,” said Pat Sikorski (SLP). That wasn’t good enough for Ian Driver (SLP). He promised “voluntary retirement at 55 on full pay”. In a later leaflet, perhaps in an attempt to outbid Driver, Sikorski promised “an immediate doubling of pensions”. But to no avail. Retirement on full pay is still better for most people than retirement on a double State pension. You should have promised to triple the State pension or supported the SEP proposal "pensions must be increased to the level of the average wage”, Pat, but perhaps you ruled these options out as appearing too unreasonable.

Perhaps this explains why Driver got more votes (983) than Sikorski (586). Or perhaps not. People are not stupid and clearly do not take these promises seriously. At a meeting in Brixton on 24 April attended by the candidates (including ours) Driver’s list of fantastic promises—£8 minimum wage, 32 hour week with no loss of pay, retirement at 55 on full pay—were greeted with laughter. He might have got a better reception if he had advocated, as our candidate did. the abolition of the whole system of working for an employer with the wages you get determining your level of access to consumer goods and services. After all, didn’t Karl Marx once say to workers: "Instead of the conservative motto, 'A £6-£8 minimum wage’, they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wages system’ “(or something like that)?

As all these fantastic [proposals] would cost millions, no billions, to implement, the inevitable question arises: Where is the money to come from? Who is going to pay for them?

Julia Leonard, Militant candidate in Uxbridge had the answer:

“I say use the profits of big business and tax the super rich to provide well-paid jobs and a decent standard of living for all.” 

Simple. But this assumes that Big Business and the Super Rich are to continue so that they can be milked, i.e. that capitalism is to continue.

The SLP made the same assumption, their candidates declaring that “the policies outlined in this election address can only ameliorate the destructiveness of the present system”. This of course is to imply that their policies could be implemented under capitalism. (We don’t want to be too cruel, but they used the wrong word: they meant “mitigate” not "ameliorate". To ameliorate the destructiveness of capitalism would be to make it more destructive. On the other hand, perhaps it was the right word since any attempt to put their fanciful promises into practice under capitalism would make it more destructive by provoking a massive economic crisis.)

To suggest that capitalism could afford all these things—and many more, a free health service, "the immediate injection of £5 billion into our schools” (Militant), "build a million new homes every year for five years" (SLP), "a multi-billion pound programme of public works” (SEP)—is just ridiculous, not to say dishonest.

Do they take us for fools? The answer is, yes, they do. As Leninists they believe that ordinary workers are only capable of acquiring what they call a "trade union consciousness" by which they mean wanting more under capitalism. So that’s what they offer to provide for workers, knowing full well that capitalism will be unable to deliver, in the hope that they can get the workers with themselves as the leaders to overthrow capitalism because it won’t pay them a full-pay pension at 55. Only the Workers’ Revolutionary Party however had the honesty to come out and say that it was standing in the election "to build the revolutionary leadership”.

It’s an insulting theory and has never worked. It didn’t even get them many votes, not even much more than us. In fact one of our candidates, making no promises and saying that capitalism couldn’t make these reforms, got more votes than 15 of the 19 Militant candidates and 23 of the 64 SLP candidates, as well as all nine WRP and all four SEP candidates.

People are quite capable of understanding the idea of socialism. What could be easier to understand than a society where productive resources belong to no-one but are democratically controlled and used to produce goods and services directly to meet people’s needs and not for profit? People certainly understand very well when someone is just dangling bait before them.

Adam Buick

George Galloway: would-be Populist Leader (2021)

From the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the day the results of the recent Batley and Spen by-election were announced a Labour Party supporter responded to a comment about the meagre majority achieved. He was insistent that the 323-vote margin would have been 8,000+ higher had it not been for the appearance of George Galloway for the Workers Party of Britain.

From a purely psephological point of view the Galloway performance was remarkable for a representative of a small, leftish party. Nearly 22 percent of the vote secured a comfortable third place, a good 7,000 votes ahead of the Liberal Democrat, 5,000 or so behind the winner.

So perhaps the disgruntled Labour supporter had a point, except, of course, there is a large presumption involved. There is no way of determining whether an absence of Galloway and his new party would have resulted in in his 8,000 votes defaulting to Labour. Indeed, the experience of the previous by-election in Hartlepool suggests the Conservative candidate might have been a beneficiary too, especially given Galloway’s pro-Brexit stance.

There is a strong suggestion that Galloway profited from an alienated Muslim vote who may have perceived themselves as being tainted by Labour’s broad brush anti-Semitism accusations levelled at almost any anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian. It must be galling for a community more often the target of racism to feel themselves viewed as racists by the party they traditionally supported.

There is surely little doubt that the impressive vote was for Galloway personally rather than being an ideological breakthrough by the Workers Party of Britain. He has a background of championing anti-Zionism and favouring Islamic causes. There have even been suggestions that he converted from Roman Catholicism to Islam, although he has denied this.

The Workers Party of Britain appears to be a left-wing manifestation of that recent political phenomenon, populism. On its website the Party states it is a response to a need following the defeat of Corbynism. It believes:

• The importance of a planned economy directing the role of the state.
• Free-market fundamentalism has gutted British industry, castrated society and destabilised the working class.
• The state should guide economic life.
• The working class needs to be united on shared class interests to struggle for socialism.
• Countries that have tried to build the socialist new world include the USSR, China, Cuba et al.
• Brexit is a positive move to secure Britain’s independence to pursue fiscal and monetary policies and take key utilities and transport into public ownership.

There is ‘A ten-point programme for workers’ promoted on the Party’s website that sits easily with left-Labour aspirations. It has garnered the support of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which situates itself in the tradition of Stalinism and Maoism. Indeed, Galloway’s deputy leader Joti Brar is from a family closely associated with the CPGB (ML). For the Workers Party of Britain the problem is free-market capitalism, the solution… state capitalism.

Galloway has been here before of course. In 2005 he did even better, winning the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency for Respect, a political grouping backed on that occasion by the Socialist Workers Party. A parting of the ways quickly followed and it would seem he has moved from the neo-Trotskyist camp to the neo-Stalinist one. Either way, the prospects for democracy would be dim should such a grouping ever succeed.

Is it a party at all, or a Galloway supporters’ club? It seems highly unlikely that some John or Joan Smith standing for the Workers Party of Britain in Batley and Spen would have garnered anything close to 8,000 votes and their performances elsewhere have been derisory.

Personality politics blurs the line between those who’d style themselves left or right wing. Thus George Galloway was quite sanguine about sharing a platform at a Brexit rally with Nigel Farage. The public moment being far more crucial than principles.

The charismatic leader, or a leader who thinks himself charismatic, becomes all important. A previous attempt to displace Labour as the party of the working class in Yorkshire was the now less than marginal Socialist Labour Party led by Arthur Scargill who tried to politically exploit the prominence he gained from the 1984/85 miners’ strike. Indeed, the CPGB (M-L) was a split from it.

What these parties have in common is being political cul-de-sacs. Setting aside implications of serious democratic deficit in its politics, should the Workers Party actually succeed in displacing the Labour Party nothing much would change for the working class.

With Galloway as prime minister implementing his 10-point plan the workers would still be working for wages that represent only a portion of the value their labour power creates. After all, ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ has successfully created numerous billionaires while the working masses most definitely do not have control of the means of production and distribution.

In other words, the Workers Party in power would replace capitalism with capitalism, and a less successful version of capitalism if some the models quoted on the Party’s website are anything to go by.

The Batley and Spen by-election is a demonstration that there are no answers to the problems created by capitalism for the working class in any of the parties on offer, major or minor, left wing or right wing.

Kim Leadbeater MP made the usual platitudinous vague promises to serve all the community, bring people together and further local interests. Had the Tory won he would have spouted an almost identical speech. Similarly, the LibDem. Galloway would undoubtedly have been more vocally belligerent, but it would have amounted to the same.

This is because community divisions, Brexit, economic decline and the plethora of other problems are rooted in capitalism. The dreadful murder of Kim Leadbeater’s sister Jo Cox, the then sitting MP, was an extreme example of politics under capitalism. It is a system wasteful of human lives that is immune to political point scoring.

The Labour Party supporter decrying George Galloway for undermining the Leadbeater vote remains politically blind, as presently all too many are. There are no short cuts, no inspired leaders, no previous models to draw on. Only a majority recognition of the need for a system of common ownership of economic means, moneyless and cooperative – socialism – can address those problems people have in common, even as they seem to be divided.

Until popular delusions can be effectively dispersed the people of Batley and Spen and everywhere else in the world will continue to labour for the pecuniary benefit of the capitalist few.

Dave Alton

The Scargill Labour Party (1996)

From the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Socialists have a certain amount of respect for Arthur Scargill's decision to leave the Labour Party because of its now openly and avowedly capitalist aims, but we can only wonder why he has started a new party, the aims of which amount to nothing more than futile attempts to reform capitalism into a system supposedly organised in the interests of the working class — particularly as Scargill himself is on record admitting that this can't be done.

This month sees the launch of a new political party, the Socialist Labour Party, the first leftwing breakaway from Labour at national level since the old ILP disaffiliated itself in 1932. Behind it is Arthur Scargill, President of the rump NUM and possibly the best known trade union leader in Britain today.

What finally led him to tear up his Labour Party membership card and launch a new party was Labour’s decision last year to amend its constitution by replacing Clause 4 with a new aim which committed it to support “the enterprise of the market”, “the rigour of competition” and “a thriving private sector”. We can well understand his repugnance at having to walk around with a card in his pocket with such views printed on it.

Although in a later statement of his reasons for quitting labour Scargill appeared to go further and accept the view put forward by people like ourselves that Labour never was socialist, it is clear that he thinks that Clause 4 did commit labour to socialism at least on paper.

Clause 4, however, was never a definition of socialism. What it was - and was meant to be by the labour leaders of the time who drew it up — was a commitment to nationalisation, or state capitalism, to be achieved “for the workers” by the actions of the Parliamentary labour Party. It was a rejection not of capitalism as such, but only of one institutional form of capitalism (private enterprise) in favour of another (state enterprise). Production was to continue to be for the market and workers were to continue to work for wages, only this was to take place under the direction of the state.

Common ownership is indeed the key defining feature of socialism but common ownership by all the people under their democratic control, with production not for the market but directly to satisfy people’s needs. State ownership is something quite different. The state does not represent the people. As an instrument of political control standing above the rest of society it represents the ruling class. Under capitalism it is “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeois class” (Marx), “the ideal collective capitalist” (Engels).

When the state takes over an industry it does so, not on behalf of the people, but on behalf of the capitalist class as a class and runs it for their collective benefit. The whole history of the nationalised industries in Britain is confirmation of this (as Scargill should know from his experience of the former Coal Board). Nationalisation is neither socialism nor a step towards it. It is state capitalism.

Scargill and the SLP have not learned this lesson, but in readopting Clause 4 repeat the mistake of confusing state capitalism with socialism. In fact, the revised version which has been incorporated into the SLP’s constitution is more explicitly state-capitalist than the original version. That the wages system, which is the basis of capitalism, is not to be abolished is specifically spelt out this time, with references to “employment” and “employees”. Specifically spelt out too is the fact that financial institutions such as pension funds will continue to exist, so making it clear that a money economy and the market arc to continue too.

Chasing the impossible
The SLP is also committed to the discredited view which Labour once held that the effects of capitalism can be overcome by state intervention if sufficiently resolute and far-reaching. Hence Scargill’s claim that a “British government” could abolish unemployment “even within a capitalist society”. This is a fantastic statement from someone who has on occasions given evidence of some knowledge of Marxian economics (after all, it was Marx who showed how an “industrial reserve army of labour” made up of fluctuating numbers of unemployed workers was necessary, and so inevitable, under capitalism). It is, however, an accurate statement of what all those who campaign for “the right to work”, “full employment”, “a 4- day working week with no loss of pay” and the like implicitly believe, even if in the case of the SWP and other trotskyists they are not so honest as Scargill as to say so openly.

It’s all wishful thinking. Let’s suppose for a moment that a “British government” decreed a 4-day working week without loss of pay; in other words, that employers should pay people who now work five (or even six) days a week the same as for working four.

This would represent a massive increase in their labour costs. The money to pay for this would have to come out of their profits. No doubt some firms would be able to do this on a short-term basis, but many would not and would have to declare themselves bankrupt, so increasing the number of unemployed again. And in the longer term the massively reduced profits of those firms that did survive the immediate impact would undermine their competitiveness and so their survival too.

With the rate of profit so low capitalists wouldn’t invest in them. Nor would enough profits be made to invest in up-to-date machinery and productive methods, so that British-made goods would lose out both on export markets and in the home market. The result would sooner or later be—sooner rather than later, in fact—a massive economic slump. Scargill's recipe for reducing unemployment would have failed and have led to the opposite: a massive increase in unemployment.

Unemployment is not the only problem that Scargill and the SLP believe can be solved “even within a capitalist society”. Although the SLP was not officially launched till this month it put up a candidate in the by-election in February in the South Yorkshire constituency of Hemsworth. In getting 5.4 percent of the vote, saving its deposit and finishing ahead of the Green Party they didn’t do too badly for a new party. However, the programme on which they contested the election was pathetic, consisting of a list of attractive but quite unrealistic demands to be implemented under capitalism.

Higher pensions, a free health service, a massive house-building programme, more spending on education and social services, these would be very costly. Although unlike a 4-day week without loss of pay this burden would not fall so obviously and so directly on profits, it would do so indirectly via taxes. To pay for them Scargill's “British government” would have to raise taxes, which would ultimately fall on property and profits. So the result would be the same as with his recipe for abolishing unemployment: a fall in profits retained by businesses resulting in bankruptcies for some and a wounding loss of competitiveness for others—and ending in a slump.

The fact is that you can’t buck the capitalist system. If you choose to work within it—as the Labour Party has always done and as Scargill has the honesty to say his new SLP will be doing—then you have to accept that profits have to be made and that profit-making has to be given priority over meeting people’s needs. Unemployment, poverty in old age, bad housing, inadequate health care, etc, etc, etc cannot be solved within the capitalist system, not even by the most ruthless of left wing governments. Only the establishment of a socialist society of common ownership and democratic control with production solely for use can provide the framework for solving these problems.

No alternative under capitalism

At the moment capitalism cannot even sustain the reforms it was able to afford at an earlier period. Since the postwar boom came to and end in the first half of the 1970s, there have been no beneficial reforms—no improvements in housing, pensions, health care, social services or state benefits. Quite the reverse. Pre-existing reforms have been whittled away and firings have got worse in all these fields. Nor is there any prospect of them getting any better; all the signs are that they will continue to get worse.

The reason for this is the world economic crisis that capitalism entered into after the long post-war boom came to an end and which it has still not escaped from. This has meant increased competition on world markets, which has forced all governments whatever their political complexion—the Labour governments in Australia and New Zealand were just as “Thatcherite” as the mad woman herself in Britain—to give priority to trying to ensure the competitiveness of businesses operating from within their frontiers. To do this they have had to reduce the amount of money they tax away from profits to finance their spending including on reforms.

When Thatcher kept shouting “TINA”—’There Is No Alternative”—to cutting back on spending on reforms, she was right (though to be accurate she should have said “TINAUC”—’There Is No Alternative Under Capitalism”). There was, and there still is, no alternative to doing this within the present context of capitalism.

The Labour Party, under Blair and Smith before him, now' fully accepts this and has reshaped its policies accordingly. Leftwing labourites refuse to face this reality but still imagine that capitalism today can offer social reforms. The only difference between them and Scargill is that they believe in staying in the Labour Party as an irrelevant minority while he believes in setting up a new party to campaign for the sort of reforms the Labour Party used to specialise in.

We in the Socialist Party draw a different conclusion. The fact that capitalism at the present time is unable to offer any reforms, and is unlikely to be able to in the foreseeable future, reinforces our view that what Socialists should be campaigning for is socialism and nothing but. Quite apart from the fact that support gained on the basis of proposing reforms to capitalism is not a solid basis on which to build up a socialist party, what’s the point of campaigning for reforms if there’s no chance of getting them?

The widespread rejection of the Labour Party by radically-minded people docs provide the basis for the growth of a genuine socialist party on sound principles, but Scargill’s SLP does not fill the bill. It has nothing to offer except the failed old policy of state intervention and state control to try to make things better for people. Despite the repeated demonstrations this century that this reformist policy does not work, the new SLP wants to have another go, flying in the face of the inescapable conclusion that capitalism just cannot be made to work in the interests of the majority.

Certainly, the SLP says it wants to replace capitalism with a socialist society but this turns out to be, not real socialism, but the state capitalism that nationalisation represents. This is the past. We’ve seen it and it doesn’t work.

Adam Buick

YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT LABOUR, ADMITS SCARGILL

“New Labour's constitution has not only abandoned socialism but embraced capitalism and the free market. In other words, Labour ceased any pretence of being a socialist party.

Many on the left argue that it was never socialist, that it was at best social-democratic and that people like me were deluding ourselves in thinking we could campaign for socialism effectively within it. I now accept that argument and believe that New Labour can no longer be a ‘home’ to socialists. The changes go beyond the constitution. On all fundamental issues that affect our lives and our society, New Labour has adopted policies that cannot be supported by those who call themselves socialists” (Guardian, 15 January).

Unemployment can
 be abolished within
 capitalism, claims 
Scargill

“On unemployment, New Labour has abandoned a commitment to full employment, with its leader saying yesterday that he could not guarantee that New Labour could eradicate unemployment.

“In reality, a British government could do exactly that, even within a capitalist society—by introducing a four-day working week with no loss of pay, banning all non-essential overtime and introducing voluntary retirement on full pay at the age of 55” (Guardian, 15 January).

Sting in the Tail: Life Wish (1996)

The Sting in the Tail column from the March 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Life wish

Michael Winner, producer of such gore-fests as the Death Wish movies, now writes for the News of the World.

Surprisingly, he made a reference to Marx in his column (24 December). Unsurprisingly, he made the foolish assumption that Marx had something to do with the Soviet Union:

  "Communism contains a vast, almost religions appeal. Its principal slogan from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' is actually a wondrous idea . . . But it fails to take into account a crucial element. Human beings. They just aren't up to it."

Winnie’s view of “human nature” is best illustrated by his film hero, Charles Bronson “blowing away” muggers in the New York Subway. This is the view of a pathetic money-grubber and not the view of anyone who has studied human behaviour.

To Winner, any concept of human cooperation must indeed seem a “wondrous idea”.

A tale of two mums

The Duchess of York is feeling the pinch these days. Reputed to owe £3 million, she recently changed her Concorde trip to New York to first class on a scheduled flight. She and the kids had to rough it with the plebeian hordes.

Not on the trip was Maureen whose plight was reported in the Observer (21 January):

  “Maureen is bringing up her eight-year-old son alone in her former council flat in Devon on £77.97 state benefit a week . . .  "I might go two days without a main meal—I just eat, like, a sandwich at lunchtime or supper if we have enough bread. Tuesday is my best day. I collect my Giro cheque then. I usually buy something like mince and we’ll have spaghetti or something . . .  Sometimes when he has said to me he's hungry I just feel very desperate and alone . . . and a bit of a failure really. "

Maureen is not a failure. She is a worker who feeds and clothes her child on state “benefits”. Maureen is not a failure. Capitalism is. The gap between the Duchess and Maureen is proof of that.

The big knife farce

What a farce the amnesty on knives was. 40,000 were handed in, but this is a tiny fraction of the number of knives in circulation, and the fact that one individual contributed 3,000 proves that.

Indeed, Watchdog (BBC1, 22 January ) showed that there are hundreds of shops and mail-order firms all selling knives.

Of course, the politicians have their “solutions”, among them labour’s call for a ban on the sale of knives to anyone under the age of 16, but similar bans on the sale of lottery tickets, alcohol and tobacco arc simply ignored by many retailers. If there’s money to be made then there will be illegal sales.

Years ago, when the use of knives was considered un-British, razors, lead piping and bicycle chains were in vogue, and even if knives were eliminated then some other weapon will take their place. Capitalism’s poverty, tensions and conflicts guarantees that.

Arthur’s dead duck 

The launch of Arthur Scargill’s new Socialist Labour Party provided him with another chance to demonstrate what a political muddle-head he is. This was evident when, having accused the Labour Party of abandoning socialism, he admitted it never had been socialist anyway.

Even worse was his absurd claim that unemployment could be eradicated “even within a capitalist society” (Guardian, 15 January). Incidentally, his promise that the SLP will “support all the ‘single issue campaigns’” in order to gain recruits, should mean that the various Trotskyists and anarchist groups will face more competition there!

Left-wing breakaways from Labour have never lasted: the Scottish Labour Party headed by Jim Sillars MP in the late 1970s is an example, and Scargill’s lot will no doubt follow them into oblivion.

Going for the Big One

We are often asked why we don’t join in campaigns for reforms of capitalism. To begin with, reforms rarely achieve their aims—for example, laws against racism haven’t reduced discrimination, assaults, abuse, etc.

And reforms which do benefit workers will inevitably provoke demands for them to be scrapped when capitalism’s economic situation worsens, and an example of this is provided by Warwick Lightfoot of the think-tank Politcia, who urges the Tories to

  ". . .  repeal existing rules on redundancy payouts and unfair dismissal, arguing that they damage the labour market" (Guardian, 8 January).

What kindly Mr Lightfoot and many others want is a “flexible labour market” where employers can do whatever they like with workers.

Of course, this would depend ultimately on whether the working class would accept it, but the fact is that even the crumbs we get at present are under threat, hence our insistence that socialists must demand the bakehouse and nothing less.

Living it up in Palm Springs

A party member had occasion to rush to the hospital where his mother had been admitted only to be informed that there was a ten hour wait until a bed became available (in the event it was only six-and-a-half hours).

Whilst perusing the usual jumble of magazines in the waiting room, he happened to pick up a colour supplement which features a grizzled, old chimpanzee, and revealed that this was none other than the original “Cheetah” who could be seen swinging through the trees with Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s.

Now aged 63, this hirsute thespian is apparently living the life of Riley in a retirement home in Palm Springs!

It wasn’t lost on our comrade that in capitalism, even elderly animals, with the right financial credentials, are treated with greater regard than poor members of the working class, retired or not.

An Open Letter to Arthur Scargill (1995)

From the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Arthur,

So at last you’ve come to see through the Labour Party. You now realise that it’s indistinguishable from the Democrats in the United States and the Liberals here in England. In other words, that it’s a left-of-centre party of capitalist reform not a party committed, if only on paper, to furthering the interests of the working class. All its leaders want is to have a go at running capitalism which they say they can do better than the Tories. What took you so long? Still, better late than never.

To give you credit, you arc prepared to go one step beyond Tony Benn. He openly admits that the Labour Party is not a socialist party and never has been, but has said he’ll never leave it. From which we must conclude that he thinks there is a need for a left-of-centre party of capitalist reform and that this is more important than the need for a genuine socialist party. If that’s his view, then he’s welcome to it. Anyway, he’s always been more of an old-fashioned radical democrat than a real socialist, so perhaps his place is in the modem equivalent of the old Liberal Party.

But, you, you are calling for a new Socialist Labour Party to be set up to oppose Labour at the next election. (We suppose you are aware of the historical significance of the name “Socialist Labour Party” but are prepared to run the risk of being mistakenly taken as seeking to revive Daniel De Leon’s confused “socialist industrial unionism”.) If you actually go ahead with this, you will show yourself to be a man of principle compared with other left-wingers, and some amusement will be had from the problem this will cause the Trotskyists and their policy of “Vote Labour till Doomsday”.

We agree with the need for a genuine socialist party, but insist that this should be on a sound basis, namely a clear definition of what Socialism is and a clear refusal to advocate reforms of capitalism. This is where our doubts about your project come in.

What do you mean by Socialism? Although you once told an incredulous David Frost that you stood for a moneyless society, we suspect that you mean nationalisation and state control—in other words, state capitalism. The fact that over the years you gave uncritical support to the regimes in Russia and eastern Europe (remember how you refused to support the Polish miners when they went on strike in 1980 and 1981 and how they returned the compliment, by producing coal for export to Britain, when the British miners went on strike in 1984 and 1985?) heightens this suspicion.

If it is still your view that Russia under Stalin, Khruschev and Brezhnev was socialist and that this is your model for Socialism, you don’t need to form a new party. You might as well join the Communist Party of Britain who still bring out the Morning Star. But, as we suppose you arc well aware, you wouldn’t get much popular support for anything like that, and rightly so. If you have changed your mind about the Russian and the other former state-capitalist regimes in eastern Europe once being socialist, you should come out and state so publicly and unambiguously.

As to reforms, we know you will favour your proposed new party advocating these. We can make a good guess at what they’ll be: higher pensions, more spending on hospitals, schools and housing instead of on war planes and warships. Nice, if you could get this, but you can’t. It’s all been tried before, without lasting success. As you yourself once said: “History is littered with abortive attempts to reform capitalism. You cannot reform this system out of existence. What we need is a complete and utter change of society.” We couldn’t agree more, so why will your new party be wasting its time advocating reforms, i.e. trying to reform capitalism?

We are not saying that workers shouldn’t try to get the best they can out of capitalism, but that’s the job of trade unions and other similar organisations, not of a socialist political party. In our view, the job of a socialist party is to advocate “a complete and utter change of society” to socialism and nothing but this.

History shows that a party that advocates reforms inevitably becomes the prisoner of its reform-minded supporters and eventually ends up giving only lip-service to the socialist transformation of society. Why do you think that instead of the Labour Party gradually changing capitalism, as some of its members once used to want, the opposite has happened and capitalism has gradually changed the Labour Party—into what it is today and which you feel is no longer worthy of support? Why make the same mistake again ?

So, Arthur, before you do this, we hope you won’t think it is presumptuous of us if we suggest you read the enclosed pamphlet From Capitalism to Socialism. There you will find set out the ease against capitalism and the ease for organising on sound, socialist lines. If you find yourself convinced by the arguments then you can abandon your project of re-founding the Labour Party and apply to join the already-existing Socialist Party.

Yours for Socialism,

Standard Socialist.