Caught In The Act: Slogans (1991)

The Caught In The Act Column from the November 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Slogans

Connoisseurs of political slogans will have more than their fill during the long, wearying months leading up to the next general election. When it is all over they may well need a period of abstinence, to recover from gorging themselves on the concentrated nonsense poured forth from the fertile minds of the slogan-composers.

Labour and the Liberals, as the parties out of power, will be hoping the voters will fall for an appeal to a brighter future. The Liberal Democrats have already settled on Changing Britain For Good and in the last election Labour went down to defeat when the voters did not accept their invitation to Meet The Challenge—Make the Change. On the other hand the Tories will be trying to scare us with the prospect of a Labour government wrecking the prosperity they have so carefully organised on our behalf, as they did in 1959 with Life’s Better Under the Conservatives, Don’t Let Labour Ruin It and at the last election when they warned us Britain Is Great Again— Don’t Let Labour Wreck It. This last kind of slogan may not appeal to the unemployed, the homeless or social security claimants fretting over their meagre benefits but never mind.

Patriotism will certainly feature in the slogans for nothing goes down better with the voters than stimulating their pride in this grand old, polluted, crime- ridden, poverty-stricken country of ours. In 1950 the Labour Party, which was once thought to be internationalist, assured the voters that Labour Believes in Britain; in 1959 they startled the propertyless working class with Britain Belongs To You (it didn’t then and it doesn’t now) and in 1974 Britain Will Win With Labour which by 1987 had been slashed to Britain Will Win. Of course the Tories are not to be left out when it comes to patriotism; in 1974 they promised Firm Action For A Fair Britain and later that year Putting Britain First.

It is unlikely that any of the 1992 slogans will be more memorable than Labour’s battle cry of 1945—Let Us Face the Future, which was not so much an encouragement to look ahead as to divert attention from the embarrassments of their past. In 1970 the Tories under Ted Heath promised Action Not Words, by which they did not mean the kind of government policies which brought about the futile struggle with the miners and the inertia of the three-day week.

But this is all good clean fun and it keeps the advertising and media people happily busy. The people who should worry are those in the sloganeers’ sights, whose intelligence is so grievously insulted by their being the target of so much rubbish but who react in the only way the politicians understand—with their votes.

The voters will doubtless make their choice, either way, for callous Kinnock or malevolent Major. After the election everyone—or almost everyone—will be convinced that by choosing one or the other they have done something significant.

In fact whoever is in charge of capitalism, and whatever their personality, it makes no difference to how the system operates nor to its effect on its people. To change the world in any fundamental and permanent way we need to dispense with leaders and instead to rely on ourselves and our ability to run the world in our own interests.

Between the Lines

Watching Margaret Thatcher being cheered ecstatically—a six minute orgasmic ovation by the assembled Tories, to be precise—was an unnerving experience. I had watched leaders being wildly cheered for saying absolutely nothing on previous occasions, but in those eases their lips were clearly moving and audible world-like phrases were being emitted. Watching the Thatcher silence on BBCl’s Conservative Party conference coverage (Tuesday, 8 October, 2pm) offered a short flash of what it might have been like to have seen Stalin sit at an opera and have all the party hacks watch him suck his toffees while the performers sang to themselves. Mind you, with John Major as the Tory Pavarotti, watching Thatcher suck a mouth ulcer would be exciting alternative viewing.

At the event advertised as a Labour Party conference—in fact, a stage show for viewers with votes but no thoughts—the assembled players sang "We Are The Champions of the World" (BBC2, 4 October, 4pm). These lyrics were more Hitler than Stalin; the song by Queen, who play to chanting mobs in football stadiums, was one of the more embarrassing pieces of political indignity that Labour has stooped to in its bid to convince the electorate that it is harmless and toothless. In this respect, Roy Hattersley sang particularly well, winning second prize in the contest for the most foolish singing performance of the week. First prize must go to Kinnock for his leading part in this year’s Gang Show when he led a hall-full of pathetic-looking Labourites in a pathetic-sounding rendition of "We Shall overcome—Some Day". Kinnock neglected to sing the obscure fifteenth verse of this hymn which adds that unless "we" overcome next time round, i. e. the next election, there will be endless daggers heading for the back of the smiling leader. But that was what everyone was thinking as they underwent this humiliating televisual ritual.

By contrast, there was something quite cute about Eugène Terre Blanche, the Leader of the South African AWB. Nick Broomfield’s superb documentary The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (C4, Monday 7 October, 10,30pm) did not waste its time on the easy job of highlighting the foulness of the racist ruffians of this little outfit. Instead, the programme concentrated on the silliness of the AWB Leader (known to his followers as The Leader) and the sad way in which workers like The Leader’s driver JP and his soppy wife Anita were taken in by Terre Blanche’s amateur dramatic bid to become the new Boer Fuhrer. Terre Blanche showed himself to be a boorish Boer: arrogant, thuggish and with the kind of delusions of grandeur which makes some people imagine that they alone will determine the outcome of history. Hitler was never interviewed by Jeremy Paxman and exposed as a dopey little twit (there was no Newsnight in those days, but only Charlie Chaplin who carried out the same mission in The Great Dictator), but Terre Blanche was interviewed by Broomfield; it was like a smiling cat "interviewing" a mouse with a low IQ.

Terre Blanche claims to represent "the master race"; Kinnock claims to be a "democratic socialist" (what exactly is an undemocratic socialist? A non-socialist); and Major claims to stand for a "classless society". They are each as big liars as the next one. The Socialist Party is hostile to the lot of them.

Ivan

Blogger's Note:

In the original Standard this column was actually unsigned but Caught In The Act was Ivan's (Ralph Critchfield's) column, so I presume it was just a mistake at the printers that month. It happens.

Caught In The Act: Major operations (1990)

The Caught In The Act Column from the November 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Major operations

Among the many gifts to a not-always grateful nation, Margaret Thatcher has appointed a succession of extremely clever Chancellors of the Exchequer. Nobody should underestimate the importance of this because Chancellors have the job of running the economy and Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson and John Major have thought up many clever schemes to make us all prosperous and secure. Chancellors say that by cutting or increasing taxes, or by raising or lowering interest rates, they can cultivate industrial growth, stimulate an enterprising spirit among business people, bring the balance of trade into surplus and control what they call inflation (which is really rising prices).

They have had so much practice at this you would have thought they would have got it right by now. But another part of their job is to make boring speeches full of technical jargon telling us that they have not got it right — that we are still in an economic crisis and that, although they have failed to cure the problem, we must still have confidence in them. They make it sound very intricate and delicate, in the hope that we will begin to understand why Chancellors need to be so clever.

At this point we meet a problem because both of Thatcher's previous Chancellors are now written off as failures whose policies — which were so emphatically approved at the time — are now condemned as responsible for many of the present economic difficulties. Geoffrey Howe is now remembered as the Chancellor who almost single-handed engineered an economic recession. The fact that this can hardly be true does not prevent him having to fight a rearguard action for his political survival, of an obstinacy to surprise those who despise him as a moribund sheep.

Nigel Lawson, who now has such a lucrative living in the City that he doesn't have to fight for anything (his two-day-a-week, £200,000 a year job at Barclays Bank has just been supplemented by one which will take up another two days advising East European governments on how to privatise their industries) is now discredited as the instigator of wild extravagance at the Treasury for which there had to be a day of reckoning.

It's all our fault

So the Tories have been hoping that John Major will make a better showing, by which they mean that he will produce the kind of budgets to persuade workers that the best way of running British capitalism is to keep the Conservatives in power for ever, with Margaret Thatcher as prime minister until John Major is ready to take over. There could hardly be a greater contrast than that between Lawson and Major; the one overweight, arrogant and self-advertising, the other mouse-like, colourless and reticent.

In one way Major is just like all other Chancellors. Even if he has nothing new or promising to offer, he offers it with conviction and optimism. For example, there is the matter of "inflation" which all Chancellors have agreed is the main obstacle to their plans for our welfare. Unless "inflation" is beaten (they usually use such words, as if a physical struggle was in progress) nothing else will work. So severe is the problem that the Treasury itself seems confused about it, because while the Chancellor claims to be able to control "inflation" he also tells us that it is caused by influences outside his control like world oil prices and extravagant wage rises — which does not apply to people like Nigel Lawson but workers like ambulance crews and miners and teachers. But whatever the battering he receives in the fight against "inflation" the Chancellor has to keep coming back for more, in case we begin to doubt that victory is in the offing.

Ups and downs

Geoffrey Howe, in spite of his reputation as a colourless plodder, was responsible for the most extravagant boast in May 1981 that "zero inflation is possible" — that we could have a situation in which prices did not rise.

Tom King, who was not Chancellor of the Exchequer but obviously wanted to get in on the act, said in May 1984 that the government was ". . . on course to get inflation down to 4.5 per cent by the end of the year". It was then at 5.2 per cent; a year later when it was at 7 per cent King, unabashed, was declaring, "inflation will be on the way down again by the end of the year". As it happened "inflation" did come down so that in June 1987, when it was at 4.1 per cent, Nigel Lawson could promise that it would be ". . . below 4 per cent by the end of the year". A year later Lawson's way of dealing with another rise was to promise that "inflation is now likely to edge up in the second half of the year before coming back down again".

When this promise did not work, in June 1989 when "inflation" stood at 8.3 per cent, Thatcher declared "the Chancellor will get the inflation rate down. It will fall over the rest of the life of this parliament". When Lawson resigned, with "inflation" still rising, John Major admitted in July 1990 that it was ". . .  taking longer than we expected to get down. It is near but possibly not at its peak". Since then it has risen by a full one per cent, which means that Major has felt the need to speak up again; in October he told us that "the prospect is for a substantial reduction in inflation over the coming year . . ". Perhaps impressed by his own performance as an "inflation" fighter, a few days later Major told the Tory conference, which is not famous for being intelligently selective, "I am now in no doubt that inflation will fall sharply over the next year". As if that forecast were not dangerous enough, he then set his sights on the same target as Geoffrey Howe in 1981: ". . . most importantly to reduce inflation and then eliminate it entirely".

Confidence

The level of "inflation" — whether prices go up or down — is of no lasting concern to the majority of people, who depend for their living on employment. Whatever the effect of "inflation" it can only be short term and makes no difference to our standing. Nor does it make capitalism a more acceptable way of running human affairs.

It says a great deal about capitalism, and about the people like Howe, Lawson and Major who win votes on their promises to be able to control the system, that after so many florid claims by so many politicians, they are now making the same promises about eliminating it as they made nine years ago. There has been no progress, which raises a wider question. If politicians are unable to control prices, what confidence can there be that they can do anything about the other problems of the modern world — war, famine, disease, poverty? Answers to John Major and his colleagues please — on your ballot paper.

Ivan

Caught In The Act: Time for a change (1991)

The Caught In The Act Column from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Time for a change

Who is Margaret Thatcher? It is necessary to ask the question because it seems she has disappeared. Only a few months ago she was the indestructible Iron Lady, terrifying her foes, doing all her minister's jobs herself and ruthlessly squashing out any of them who fell from her favour. But now she is hardly mentioned.

For example the Gulf Crisis simmered and burst into war without any stimulus from her; she might have been expected at least to make a speech about the wishes of the Kuwait people being paramount (provided, of course, the dictatorship there allowed the people's wishes to be known). British capitalism is sliding into another recession but she is not expected to launch into one of her searing damnations of the Moaning Minnies who refuse to acknowledge that millions unemployed and an unprecedented bankruptcy rate are actually signs of a booming economy.

When one of Thatcher's Ministers left — or was ejected from — her government it was usual for the Downing Street media manipulators to quickly spread the word that the ex-minister was not much loss or even that the government was better off without them. The more prominent the ex-minister and therefore the more threatening their absence — the more violent was the campaign to undermine their reputations.

So it was that the likes of Howe and Lawson were on the receiving end of particularly malicious stories. Of course we couldn't expect that Thatcher would now be treated like that — John Major is supposed to be a much nicer, much less obsessive personality. In fact a rather gentler and more subtle technique has been used. Thatcher's standing now was expressed by a Tory grassroots member in the Ribble constituency: "I'm grateful for all she did for the country", said this patient, malleable blockhead, "But it was time for a change".

But whatever the style employed the fact is that Thatcher is the victim of an exceptionally efficient demolition job. The Tories have a long history of these things, often plotted in some bastion of chivalry such as the Carlton Club or the discreet offices of City merchants.

When the knife was wielded it was done with due regard for the Tory reputation as the Gentleman's Party. For they are the most single-minded bunch of political operators, who thoroughly understand that politics is about getting power to keep capitalism running in their way, at whatever cost. In the business of fighting elections and disposing of leaders who damage their chances of winning they leave their opponents standing. Ask Douglas-Home. Or Ted Heath. Or Margaret Thatcher.

Labour in change

It is ironical that Thatcher may eventually be seen to have left more of a mark on the Labour Party than on their own side. As the Tories have shown that they could win enough votes from politically deranged workers to keep them in power for a long time, the Labour Party decided that their best hope of winning a general election lay in imitating the Tories as closely as possible. The new Labour policies have provoked anger and confusion among those grassroots members who joined the party under the mistaken impression that it took a principled stand for a basically different society.

Their anger is based on the recent policy statement Meet The Challenge, Make The Change, which openly accepted market forces and private industry and was aimed solely at winning the next election. But how much of a change is this from the Labour Party of the past?

In October 1964 the Labour President of the Board, Douglas Jay, assured a dinner of the International Chamber of Trade that "the new government starts with no prejudice or bias whatever against private business and industry". In May 1965 George Brown, who was then head of the Department of Economic Affairs, told a meeting of company directors and managers that "the profit motive has an ' important role to play as an incentive and test of efficiency". In April 1966 Harold Lever, who later became a Treasury minister, wrote "Labour and business are already moving towards a mutual understanding".

And what about Labour's leader then, Harold Wilson. How does he compare to Neil Kinnock? In September 1964 — just before Wilson won the election — Anthony Howard wrote that ". . . he has already transformed the Labour Party from being primarily an ideological movement into being an election-minded organisation". Lest you misunderstand — Howard was one of Wilson's admirers.

Disappointed Leader

It could be that Kinnock has misled himself enough to be disappointed, were he to learn that he has not really changed anything about the Labour Party. It is some years now since he was a rebellious, CND-marching, fiery left winger; he dropped all that to concentrate on the serious business of exploiting working class readiness to disregard their interests and to vote parties like Labour into power.

To do this Kinnock must associate himself with, and defend, election programmes the attraction of which lies in their unrealistic claims to be able to solve capitalism’s problems and to reconcile essentially conflicting class interests.

In this Kinnock must upset his old friends, outraged by what they see as his change of course. In fact the real problem lies with them for Kinnock is following the inexorable route of a party which stands for a reformed capitalism and which must therefore compete for power over the system, cadging for votes with policies and promises which are as false and as cynical as they need be. This is as ruthless a business as the Tories getting rid of Thatcher; that is the nature of capitalist politics.

So it is not only incorrect to give Thatcher the blame — or the credit, depending on how you look at it — for Labour changing its policies and its style. It is also unfair: the Labour Party have always been as they are now only at times they are less effective in their campaign for capitalism. In any case, to be charitable to Thatcher: in the depths of anonymity of wherever she is, hasn't she got enough to answer for?

Ivan

New Page: Caught in the Act column (1989-1992)

As promised, new pages for the blog. These new pages of old Socialist Standard columns will eventually be grouped together in one page at the head of the blog alongside the pages for the current Socialist Standard columns, film reviews and theatre reviews.

The clue to this series of columns is in the title of the first piece. This was very much 'Ivan's' (Ralph Critchfield) first incarnation of the long-running Greasy Pole column. Month on month, Ivan primarily covered the vicissitudes of British domestic politics, focussing on those career politicians who had made it their lifetime work to climb over their colleagues in order that they ascend to the top of political greasy pole. Both this column and the latter Greasy Pole columns are excellent introductions to post-war Britain and its political life.

1989

• July: The Greasy Pole
• Aug: No, No, Nigel
• Sep: High Hopes
• Oct: Back to Work
• Nov: Cutting Up
• Dec: Breakdown

1990

• Jan: The Loyalty Game
• Feb: Also rans [Article on Denis Healey, Kenneth Clarke and Willie Whitelaw.]
• Mar: Punishers and Moonlighters
• Apr: Missing a stroke
• May: Out of touch
• Jun: Who's afraid of Labour?
• Jul: Mad Politicians Disease
• Aug: Check out
• Sep: One of us
• Oct: Oil and carrots
• Dec: Brylcreem Boys

1991

• Jan: Two Of A Kind
• Mar: Goodbye To All That
• Apr: Chequered career
• May: A Matter of Timing
• Jul: Eric Heffer
• Aug: Relief for the Rich
• Sep: On the agenda
• Oct: Review of Tariq Ali's novel Redemption by Steve Coleman
• Dec: In the raw

1992

• Jan: Whimper, Whimper, You're Dead
• Feb: At Issue
• Mar: Politics and Sex
• Apr: Future Uncertain

Caught In The Act: Politics and Sex (1992)

The Caught In The Act Column from the March 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics and Sex

Where were you when you heard the earth-shattering news of Paddy Ashdown’s affair with his secretary? If you can't remember where you were, do you care that you can't? Do you care about Ashdown's affair? Or about all the others which politicians are said to be continually involving themselves in? Well, it's perfectly healthy, from the point of view of a rational attitude to politics, that you shouldn’t care, except that this should not blind you to some illuminating aspects of the matter.

To begin with, Ashdown's dramatic confession enabled him to pose as the kind of clean-cut, honourable person to be expected of an ex-officer in Her Majesty's Royal Marine Commandos who, as we all know, are a fine bunch of men who would never stoop to anything mean or underhand. The truth is rather less clear-cut. Ashdown owned up, after an unusually determined effort to stifle the news, only when he knew the game was up. If it could have been managed, he would probably have continued with the deception. What worried him was not the deception, or the effect of it on his family or his ex-secretary, but the possible damage to his political career.

Media

Then there was the indignation, so supportive of Ashdown, aroused by the activities of the media — in particular of the "popular" newspapers who rampaged on the ruthless intrusiveness which is almost instinctive to them. It was not a pretty sight but then neither is a politician exposed as a hypocrite. For news is what sells the papers and. however we look at it, Ashdown's private life — like that of any other political leader — is news. As a supporter of capitalism and its commodity economy he can hardly complain when he is inconvenienced because the sellers of one particular commodity jazz up their product with details of his sex life to make it more saleable, more competitive.

In any ease the media interest was that much more excited by the fact that they had uncovered a scandal involving the leader of a party which presents itself as morally superior to the others, as an alternative to the muck-raking, back-biting and blackmailing which is the very stuff of politics. A lot of Ashdown’s embarrassment was due to the exposure of him as really no different, no belter, than the others. Of course it would have been worse for him if the publicity had cost his party a lot of votes. But the anti-media campaign which instantly counter-attacked when the news broke seemed to have had the opposite effect and Ashdown's position as leader of the Lib Dems looks safe. At least, for the immediate future — which means until the general election results are in.

So how far should the media intrude into the private, family life of politicians? On this there is a large balloon of hypocrisy which needs to be pricked. Social attitudes being what they are — distorted by capitalism's property-based relationships — it is to the advantage of a politician to be married. Having a husband or a wife prevents awkward, vote-threatening, questions about any deviancy from what is defined as sexual normality. Constituency selection committees arc favourably impressed by a candidate who presents as someone with a stable marriage and two or three bright, well-groomed children. It is the image they are interested in, before the reality — the sort of image which can guarantee a sugary photograph of the candidate at home with the family which looks good on an election address. As often becomes apparent, reality can be rather less united. If politicians set themselves up in this way, using their family in order to win support, they cannot complain if the family — its stability and their loyalty to it — becomes an issue. So if there is a hint that all at home is less than idyllically happy it is not unfair for that to be used to expose the politician as a hypocrite who tries to persuade the voters to give their family the loyalty which they themselves don't give it.

Votes

What really concerns politicians in these situations — what really concerned Ashdown and his party — was what effect the news would have on the voters. For the Liberals, the memory of Jeremy Thorpe is too close and too damaging for them to take another scandal lightly. The effect of the exposure on the people concerned — in spite of the mock concern for Ashdown's wife takes a very low priority compared to the party’s preoccupation with what the voters may think. For capitalism's politics is not about consistent principles but about taking advantage, however and whenever it is on offer, and about stifling, as far as possible, any disadvantages. It is about ruthlessness before caring, about cynicism before sustainable standards.

To take this point a little further, it was reported that the exposure of Ashdown's affair brought a rush of support for the Lib/Dems. Could this mean that, as we approach a general election which threatens to be historically dirty and irrelevant. John Major and Neil Kinnock will try to attact the voters by bringing out some skeletons from their own cupboards — or, if none exist, manufacturing them? The mind, in an exceedingly unpleasant way, boggles.

Economy

More real than the Ashdown affair is the economy — or rather the current recession — which is likely to be a dominant issue in the election. Is the recession really the result of a deliberate policy by the Tory government? Could a Labour government cure it or should this be left to Major's crew, who say they are about to cure it anyway? In the Commons recently John Major, under pressure from Kinnock's argument that the recession is all the fault of the Tories, shouted that many other industrial countries are going through a slump at present. The Tories can hardly be blamed for that, can they?

Well no, they can't. But what they can be blamed for is the pretence, when it suits them, that there is something separate and unique about the recession in Britain so that it can be "cured" by some clever fiscal juggling by Norman Lamont or whoever happens to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. In fact Lamont has rapidly climbed to fame as a persistent exponent of false promises and quickly discredited economic forecasts. If the Tories refuse to accept the blame for the slump, on the grounds that it is a world wide problem, they can't claim the credit when, as world conditions change, the slump recedes to be followed by a boom.

But, of course, they will claim that credit; Lamont claims it now. even as all the economic indicators say there is no sign of an end to the slump. Because, as we said about Paddy Ashdown, politics is not about consistency of principles. And come to think of it, a few years back there was a flurry of scandal about Lamont and a disappointed woman . . .

Ivan

Caught In The Act: Oil and carrots (1990)

The Caught In The Act Column from the October 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oil and carrots

Some time ago Ken Livingstone said that anyone who enjoyed being in Parliament was in need of psychiatric care. But he was in a minority; almost every other MP is convinced that parliament is an essential contributor to our safety and welfare and that without its debates the nation would be like a ship without a rudder. So it was that as the crisis in the Gulf developed there were many people who thought that in so grave a situation nothing less would do than the immediate recall of parliament.

The government agreed (Margaret Thatcher takes only brief holidays in any case, and then grudgingly) and the Members selflessly left the grouse moors and the sun-soaked beaches to hurry to London. After a couple of days of well-publicised talking they resumed their holidays, leaving us with the question what was it all about? Was it worth it?

Tyrant

At the end of the debate the Commons voted, more or less, in favour of Britain going to war with Iraq — to go to war, in other words, over a border dispute between two other states — something which, when it suits them, government will decline to do. Of course tho Members were excited by the sudden discovery that Saddam is a brutal tyrant, after all those years when he had been our friend for whom we could overlook one or two minor aberrations such as his ordering the use of chemical weapons to slaughter thousands of helpless Kurdish villagers.

In fact so dose a friend was Saddam that his tyranny was sustained by armaments sold to him by Western powers (in the debate Denis Healey referred to "stuffing arms down tho throats" of powers like Iraq, although he was a member of a government which did not demur at doing just that) Any British, American or French soldiers who have to do the fighting will not be consoled by the fact that their governments supplied many of the weapons being used against them. Margaret Thatcher, who is contemptuous of history, summed up the debate when she told the house that "History has many examples of perfidy and deceit" — an unconscious warning that the Honourable Members were providing another example.

But parliament is nothing if not adaptable about these things How else could it have coped in the past with the changes in its assessment of Stalin, Ceausescu, the unity of Germany, the resurrection of Japanese power?

In tune with the times Thatcher was belligerent, Kinnock statesmanlike, Ashdown cautious in tho soldierly way befitting someone trained to kill with their bare hands. Except for a handful of MPs who put their confidence in the shaky delusions of the United Nations the House was united — Tory, Labour, SLD, SDP all jostled into tho lobby to vote for a war in which they have every reason to believe they would not be killed nor even fight.

At times the perfidy and deceit in the Commons became so intense that reality was lost sight of. Thatcher spoke as if Britain was a major factor in the crisis. She harped on the ‘legality’ of the action against Iraq as if the British and American ruling classes (or any other, for that matter) only indulge in "legal" military enterprises which meant that she had forgotten what had happened in Grenada and Panama and what the Israeli forces have been up to recently. She warned that the Iraqi take-over of Kuwait affected " . . . world security, world oil supplies and world stability" — which is either untrue or extravagant with the truth.

War fever

The real purpose of the debate, the reason which brought those MPs back from their holidays, was to gird up tho British workers for war. We have been subjected to a stream of vicious propaganda about Saddam, who is the latest bogeyman after the likes of Hitler, Nasser and Gadaffi, to provide lurid headlines in the gutter press. All these leaders, we are told, were mad along with their other personality problems — which ignores the fact that someone like Saddam needs a kind of sanity to survive in the volatile politics of Iraq

One Tory MP blustered that he wanted Saddam "politically humiliated and militarily castrated" which hints kinkily that Westminster has its personality problems as well. Once more the world is divided into goodies and baddies. Foreign Office Minister William Waldegrave drooled that "Democracies are slow to anger, but once angered they will go right to the end of the road". Again there is a general unity among tho capitalist parties that "our" interests demand that "we" go to war to remove some evil force from the world so that we can live in peace, at least until the next war

What cements that unity is the interests which are actually at stake in the Gulf. These do not include tho welfare of the people in Kuwait or Britain who, as members of the working class, are readily expendable and so not fit subjects for emergency debates in parliament. A former American Assistant Defence Secretary pointed out, as the crisis began, that if Kuwait grew carrots nobody — by which he meant no member of the ruling class — would give a damn if the place was invaded.

The crisis revolves around the fact that Kuwait is oil-rich and that Iraqi ambitions threatened to upset tho pricing structure of the world oil industry The former Labour Cabinet Minister was not talking about the world supply of carrots when he said ". . . it is a world necessity that we have access . . . at a reasonable price".

Short-term

In these kinds of situation — like Suez in 1956 — there is very little scope for capitalist powers to take other than a short term view. In 1956 a long-term assessment saw how wasteful and unproductive for the capitalist class was the assault on Egypt by the French and British forces The same view now sees that, again from the standpoint of the capitalists, there is an enormous amount to lose by going to war with Iraq, among it lasting damage to the oilfields and the replacement of Saddam by a government more hostile to Western interests. That is the logic of the situation; but even by its own standards capitalism does not always work logically

So what the emergency debate demonstrated was that at present parliament does not operate to deal with the interests of the majority who elect it. Its role is to pass the laws which are needed to ensure the most effective exploitation of the working class and the most powerful defence of the profits of the exploiting class. Occasional showpiece debates encourage us to believe that parliament is concerned for our welfare and this perfidy and deceit is called democracy

A saner way of running human affairs would not be profit-motivated and productive of social schisms. It would have neither wars nor smug politicians to urge us to die in them. It may even, if it made sense from the point of view of human welfare, shut down the oilfields in the Middle East and grow carrots there instead — which would be a neat and conclusive way of proclaiming that somebody at least gives a damn.

Ivan

Caught In The Act: One of us (1990)

The Caught In The Act Column from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of us

One of Parliament's discarded traditions was that the Labour benches should be thickly strewn with men whose roughened hands and accents betrayed their antecedents as coal miners, dockers, steel workers and the like.

Some of these Honourable Members were so uncouth as to make caustic speeches about the archaic rituals, the ambitious toadying and the cross party amity which seemed so necessary to life in the Commons and to wonder how these things could be endured by a party which was supposed to stand for social revolution. Others were so struck by what they saw that they could hardly wait to kit themselves and their wives in the finery needed to participate in revolutionary activities like Buckingham Palace garden parties.

Among these vacillating members were some points of stability — people whose wealth and heritage gave them an immunity against the rampant naivety. These were the MPs who tried to deceive themselves that they were impelled by their consciences onto the side of tho class whose exploitation provided their exalted status, who tried to avert any accusations of patronising their less wealthy Labour colleagues by outdoing them in outrageous left-winging — or rather eccentricity.

One frequent outcome of this was promotion into government rank, which quickly emphasised to them that they were in Parliament to protect the interests of the ruling class and not to sympathise with a sentimental jumble of misconceived substitutes for political principles.

Electioneering

In the first Cabinet of the 1945 Labour government there were five ex-public schoolboys (including two Old Etonians) amongst them Hugh Dalton and Stafford Cripps, whose opinions and work as managers of the finances of British capitalism disqualified them from any claim to be socialists. Both were enthusiastic propagators of the ruling class message to the British workers, that they had to work harder and receive less so that their exploiters could win back their place in the world economy of capitalism.

If at times rich people sat uneasily alongside ex-miners and dockers it was because they were not considered to be One of Us. They winced as they kissed voter's babies (employing a nanny to bring up their own children, they could never be sure they were holding the child the right way up); supping obligatory pints of mild in the constituency working men's club was little short of agony to a sensitive soul longing for the sanctuary of evening sherry among elegant friends who did not speak with those dreadful accents.

That, at least, is one agony that time and political developments have eased, for as Labour has established itself as the alternative government for British capitalism its MPs are more likely to be economists, barristers, doctors or journalists than toilers by hand. The eccentrics are now members like Dennis Skinner, who performs the intellectual juggling act of supporting capitalism by being a member of the Labour Party while having a reputation for making irreverent and penetrating comments on the essential hypocrisy of the system

Tory trade unionists

The Tories have not been free of such problems After their defeat in 1945 party chairman Lord Woolton decided that the way back to power lay in getting out among the people All over the country the Tories took to the streets at outdoor meetings 

Among their London speakers was Bob Bullbrook, a thick-set man (which could also be said of his brain) with a voice like an injured buffalo. Because he was a trade unionist (he liked to introduce himself to his audiences as a gas worker, which was not liable to pacify them) Bullbrook was something of a protected species in the Tory Party so they adopted him as their candidate in some constituency where Labour sat on an Everest-like majority. Of course he failed to scale it and. unlike other Tory hopefuls, he was not rewarded with the candidacy of progressively winnable seats. When the Conservatives came back to power their interest in outdoor propaganda faded and with it Bob Bullbrook. In spite of his energy and misguided commitment Bullbrook was not One of Us.

But one example of the threatened species did survive, at least for a while, Ray Mawby was more or less forced onto the Tories in his constituency Totnes — by the party hierarchy in their eagerness to reassure all trade unionists that their interests were close to the hearts of Conservatives in even the poshest, most secure of parliamentary seats.

Educated at a council school and trained as an electrician, Mawby's dour and unappealing personality grated on the Old Etonians and ex-officers who sat alongside him. He lacked what are politely called the social graces, speaking like an electrician who has just had a nasty shock from a wrongly wired up plug and probably shovelling his peas in with his knife. His fellow Tory MPs. on the assumption that so charmless a bounder must be Labour, would sometimes ask him to pair with them (what Mawby replied was not recorded and in any case was probably not suitable for a publication intended for family reading) This treatment did not reduce his ardour for capitalism nor for corporal and capital punishment for those who offended against the system's law and order

After holding a couple of minor jobs under the Postmaster General (which hardly helped to sustain the propaganda about the welcome awaiting trade unionists in the Tory Party) Mawby was contemptuously and relievedly deselected by the Totnes Tories and, no doubt to the satisfaction of a lot of trade unionists, he was then forced to sign on the dole. It was as much as he could expect he was. after all. not One of Us.

Madness

A lot of energy is expanded in analysing the collusive aspects of capitalist politics and the effect this has on the way the system is organised and governed. Bitter, rejected people like Mawby are prone to develop ideas about how much moro efficient — more repressive, predictable, exploiting — capitalism would be were it not for irrelevant prejudices that power should be wielded by those who went to the 'right' school and university or who wore in a ’good' regiment — or active in an ideologically right trade union. That neat, simple theory has led the outraged sensibilities of many a political reject. The snag is that it does not match with reality.

Whoever has been in charge of capitalism, and whatever their origins, the effects on the system and on the working class whose exploitation nurtures the entire set-up, has been unnoticeable. At one time it may be a languid. superior Trollope-addict like Macmillan: at another a professed meritocrat like Wilson or Heath: at another a philistinic small town grocer like Thatcher

These leaders offer material enough to assuage the appetite of the hungriest sociologist searching for an illusory insight and solution for capitalism's desperate problems. One vital fact fails to engage their attention: by its nature this social system cannot satisfy human needs, it must produce schisms.

Ray Mawby once said it would need a psychiatrist to discover why he went Conservative. Well yes — that goes for them all: it is not absolutely necessary to be mad to support capitalism but it helps 

Ivan

Caught In The Act: High Hopes (1989)

The Caught In The Act Column from the September 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

High Hopes

There is little doubt that the Labour Party’s mood of self-congratulation at what they see as their impending take-over of power is premature. Whatever optimism they can dredge from recent election results it would still need the kind of swing in voting preferences unknown in recent times for the Tory majority to be overturned. This last happened over forty years ago. after the exceptional intervention in capitalism's affairs which was the 1939-45 war. To begin with this postponed at least one general election and then wreaked havoc on Tory strongholds and on the complacency with which they had been defended. Even the most fervently deluded of Labour supporters is unlikely to think that it is worth another world war in order to get Neil Kinnock into Number Ten.

Another factor is that the recent rise in Labour’s electoral fortunes may be an effect of the Tories going through a bad patch; there is no reason to suppose that this will necessarily affect mass voting patterns at the next general election. Most governments in mid-term are assailed by doubts and desertions among its supporters. Trying to run capitalism, unpredictable and crisis-ridden as it is, means that every government upsets the people who have voted for it. However much these supporters may kick over the electoral traces, this is expected to be little more than a nudge of discontent which can be indulged in while there is no chance of turning the government out. It is a different matter, when a general election comes and the party faithful return to voting for the method of running capitalism with which they feel most comfortable.

To be blunt. this is all a matter of ignorance. Not that the people who vote Labour or Tory or SDP or whatever are unable to read or write or do their sums. It is a matter of failing to come to grips with the realities of capitalism. Class conflict, poverty, environmental pollution are typical of capitalism because they are rooted in the system's basis of private ownership of the means of production and distribution. That is why the system is out of control; no matter how fervently a government may wish to abolish social problems it is powerless to do so. Anyone who grasps that fact will almost certainly join the struggle for a social revolution. Those who—like the Tory doubters, like the Labour celebrants— have not grasped it will continue to misunderstand how capitalism really works and so will devote their time to a futile pursuit of the unattainable. In comparison, a kitten chasing its tail is a model of sanity.

Sellafield sex symbol 

The Labour Party stand to gain, or lose, from that ignorance according to which direction the prejudices are pointing at any time. At present, for example, they are assuming that the growing Green vote can be persuaded without too much difficulty to switch to supporting Labour. If that were true it would indicate a serious lack of consciousness. not to say of consistency, among the Greens, for the record of Labour governments on the issue of pollution and the environment is no better than that of the Tories and should certainly not impress anyone with any concern about the planet and its survival. Indeed, when Labour was last in power there was a general failure even to acknowledge in any useful way that the environment was under threat. While the Labour government was obsessed with the more intense exploitation of the workers, the more efficient production of goods and the more competitive bid to capture markets, it was left to a few derided eccentrics to voice warnings about what all this was doing to the environment and to socialists to carry this case farther, to the conclusion that it was one of the counts on which capitalism stood indicted and one of the reasons for abolishing the system.

So the Labour Party—not for the first time—is in some difficulty over a matter in which human interests really leave no room for argument. Their problem is neatly encapsulated in the person of their Shadow Environment Minister, Dr Jack Cunningham. A few years ago. in a fit of desperation remarkable even for them, the Labour Party publicity machine tried to inflate Cunningham as a public persona with gusts of spurious glamour. Here, apparently, was Labour's next election winner In what was clearly meant to be its master stroke, the campaign described Cunningham as a political sex-symbol (Saatchi and Saatchi would have been aghast). The problem for the sex-symbol, however, is that while he is Shadow Environment Minister he is also the MP for the seat covering the Sellafield nuclear power station which, after its disastrous fire in 1957 and its consistent murder of the local beaches and of the Irish Sea, is not considered to be environment-friendly. As his job is to police the environment Cunningham might be expected to support the move to shut Sellafield down but to do so would assuredly cost him the votes of the workers there, who would have to find some other employer to exploit them if the plant shut. So Cunningham has to walk a thin, swaying tightrope on the issue—and, it must be said, does it with the kind of skill required for survival in the cynical and degrading art of deception Sexy Jack's job is to keep one eye on the environment and one on his votes and it is all too clear which of these has the higher priority for him.

Low Tories

While we are on the subject of sexual allure—or rather what passes for it—we might remember that it is not long ago (during the last election, actually) that we were being told about Thatcher's sexuality and how she applied it to get her own way. Those were the days when it seemed she could do no wrong in the business of capturing votes for capitalism, even lecturing the Russians on their own TV about how to run the system over there. Things have gone somewhat awry for the Tories since then so that their present preoccupation is with stiffening their wilting supporters, who suddenly have doubts about the glories of the Thatcherite paradise of privatisation. Thatcher's contribution to this process of stiffening has been, in spite of her reputation for being daringly innovative, rigidly traditional. She has. in other words, reshuffled her government, sacking a few ministers here, promoting a few there and stringing the process out over two days so that it got the maximum publicity. The idea behind this, apart from clearing away a few more dissidents, is to convince the workers that Downing Street has the situation under control and that whatever the current problems, it only needs some changes of personnel for them to be alleviated.

Also traditional is the Tories explanation for the reshuffle: that their policies remain effective but have not been properly publicised so that the people have misunderstood what is happening to them. The unemployed have been imagining that they are out of a job: people who depend on state benefits for their survival have not really experienced cuts in their income or found it even more difficult and baffling to get the money. The growing army of homeless workers are not actually without anywhere to live. It's just that the Thatcher government have been let down by their public relations. Now that bumbling Geoffrey Howe has been replaced as Foreign Secretary by thrusting, self-made John Major we shall all be consumed with gratitude for the bounteous age of Tory government

The ministers sacked by Thatcher went on their way in remarkably compliant mood. Not a hint of thwarted ambition nor of jealousy for preferred rivals disfigured the letters in which they grovelled in gratitude for being chopped. In reply. Thatcher wrote to them with great dollops of praise for their brilliance, their skill, their strength and deep regret at their departure from the government. It was almost as if Thatcher had not been responsible for them being sacked. And if they were so successful and indispensable, why were they thrown out?

In fact the letters were not written to the sacked ministers but to the millions of workers who are regularly duped into voting for capitalism and considered to be fit subjects for this kind of blatant deception.

Ivan

Caught In The Act: On the agenda (1991)

The Caught In The Act Column from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the agenda

As the nights start drawing in, we are reminded that soon it will be time for us to be amused, bewildered or outraged — or perhaps all three — by those annual excursions into fantasy called the party conferences. This year the minds of the party faithful (if that is the right word for the intriguers, back-stabbers and manipulators who infest the chosen seaside towns on these occasions) will be that much more concentrated by the prospect of a general election. It is strongly rumoured that John Major will allow the voters to choose between the Labour and Tory methods of running British capitalism in early November and will use his party's conference as the launch pad for their campaign.

There would be nothing unusual in this. Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher are only two recent examples of remorseless exploiters of the publicity given to their party conferences, with an eye to the next election no matter how far away that might have been. So in 1969 Wilson attacked the Tories: "We are promising change: theirs is a prescription for decay". So Thatcher, year after year, fertilised the uglier tumours of nationalism among the sillier of her fans. It was all aimed at a wider audience, beyond the conference hall, watching it happen on their TV sets or reading about it in their newspapers and, it was assumed, deciding thereby how they would vote.

This is all good fun except that conferences are supposed to be events where members of an organisation confer. That means they review past activities, debate current issues and decide about the future. Of course the Tories have never been impressed by that. They never have pretended that theirs was a democratic conference. An all-controlling chair, an overbearing line-up of party heavyweights on the platform and a carefully sifted parade of speakers ensured that controversy reared its unwelcome head only in complaints about party policy being loo indulgent — in calls to bring back hanging, or to bash more foreigners or to turn the screw more tightly on the poorer members of the working class. Stage management was the name of the game, with its climax in Thatcher's exit to the boneheaded chanting of Land of Hope and Glory.

Much as they might sneer at these substitutes for thinking, the Labour Party of the 1990s seems keen to imitate them. Time was when their conferences were freer ranging, but this caused a certain amount of embarrassment when the delegates, under the impression that they were laying down policy for a Labour government, voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament or some other idea which no government in its right mind would entertain. Faced with this, the Labour Party tactic has been to ignore any conference decisions they did not like as glowing examples of a great democratic movement at work.

Either way. and for either party, it amounts to the same thing — a waste of time. When there is work to be done to change society fundamentally, nobody should be deceived by the spewing of words, the reams of promises and the gushing of public relations hype which is what the conferences really are.

USSR Unemployment - Official

In those good old, bad days when Stalin glowered over the cowering people of Russia, apologists for the murderous regime there always had a last line of defence when they were forced up against reality. Unable to refute the hard evidence that "peace loving" Russia was in fact a world-ranking military power, that "freedom loving" Russia in fact ruthlessly controlled every possible aspect of its people lives, that "socialist" Russia imprisoned, tortured and murdered tens of millions of people in order to sustain Stalin in power, there was always one final pathetic justification for all the horrors. There was. squirmed the apologists, no unemployment in Russia; surely that proved the system there was basically different to, and better than, what existed in the West.

So there must have been many a die-hard from the old Communist Party, grown old and weary under the stress of defending the indefensible, in despair at the news that even that puny argument is no longer available. In July a new employment law came into effect in Russia which legalises — in other words admits the existence of — unemployment and lays down a system of unemployment benefit, or dole to you and me.

As Russian industry moves into a long and painful period of reform it is being encouraged to "release" its "surplus" workers, just like British firms when they try to stay profitable by sacking people. Some estimates have it that as many as 20 million Russian workers may be out of work — or thrown on to the industrial scrapheap, to use a favourite Communist phrase — to rely on state benefit for their subsistence.

But being on the dole in "socialist" Russia, where poverty was supposed to have been wiped out over 50 years ago, will not be easy. Seven conditions will have to be satisfied, like signing as available for work and being means tested. To dole claimants in this country it will be gloomily familiar; they will be able to depress their Russian counterparts with an endless fund of stories about waiting for hours to plead for their pittance, about how to grovel to the best effect and finally how to get by on starvation money with no new clothes or outings or entertainment.

Like any country threatened with large scale unemployment, Russia expects a steep increase in the harshness and more destructive poverty among its workers. The Communist die-hards will probably blame it all onto Gorbachev and his betrayal of the true, Stalinist faith. In fact all Gorbachev is doing is to rearrange a social system which was basically never different from avowedly capitalist states like Britain and America. After nearly a century of appalling suffering, with the prospect now of yet more, the people of Russia have nothing to thank their "Communist" rulers for — nor those in other countries whose obsession made them blind and deaf to the suffering.

Citizen's Arrest 

There has recently been an addition to the list of words — like "freedom", "peace" and "truth" — without which the life of a speech-making politician would be exceedingly difficult. It is "citizen". The fact that the Tories have recently begun to talk about their concern for the "citizen" and the government to produce something called a Citizen's Charter should rally us to the defence of the word, to prevent it being mauled like so many others.

The word "citizen" has a lot of implied meanings for it suggests people of equal standing, who participate in society on terms of equality and who willingly share in social obligations. It is the kind of word we might use to describe the people of the future society in which work and pleasure are inseparable and human beings regard each other as natural friends. It will be tragic if by "citizen" we mean some unquestioning sycophant of property society, if the word becomes twisted and debased in the battle between the Labour and Conservative parties over who should be the next government of British capitalism.

In any case what "rights" do we "citizens" have under this social system? Capitalism is founded on the monopoly of the means of life by a minority of parasites and its laws and morals — including the "rights" of people — are fashioned by that fact. Governments win power through the votes of "citizens" who have been seduced by promises to protect their interests but when a party are in power those promises are at best compromised, at worst ignored. This happens behind a smokescreen of lies, evasions and euphemisms, some of these the product of devilishly creative minds, which no "citizen" is permitted to penetrate.

In fact any government which really acknowledged the "rights" of its "citizens" is unlikely to survive very long. Capitalism depends on the restriction of freedom and of "rights" and part of its trick is to persuade the very people who are denied these things that it is in their interests for things to be like that. To overturn this set-up we might begin by thinking about how words are distorted in order to sustain it.

Ivan

Caught In The Act: Check out (1990)

The Caught In The Act Column from the August 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Check out

How much would you pay for a bottle of wine? If you can only run to plonk from Tesco or Sainsbury you are unlikely to have been an enthusiastic participant in the recent auction of the contents of West Green House, the Hampshire home of Lord McAlpine, when bottles of something called Chateau de la Tour were going for around £500

You see Lord McAlpine, who is the kind of jolly, informal fellow who likes to be known to one and all as 'Alastair', is a bon viveur and. as any shopper knows, that means he would look on supermarket plonk as only a little less intolerable than strychnine. Selling up his home does not mean that the noble lord is on the slippery slope which ends in Cardboard City; it's just that he had a fancy to move to another sumptuous place with another collection of antiques, art treasures and all the little bits and pieces which make life bearable for a bon viveur.

He was also, until recently, the treasurer of the Conservative Party, a job which did not entail his growing pigeon-chested over fusty ledgers since it mainly consisted of extracting generous donations to party funds from other exceedingly rich people. His background (Stowe public school, where he managed three ’O' levels) and his present circumstances (inheritor of massive wealth and a powerful position in the McAlpine building firm founded by his great grandfather) made him ideally suited for the job. It is said that in the 1987 election he screwed some £23 million out of his fellow tycoons.

Election realities

As part of his fund-raising during that election McAlpine sent a copy of the Labour Party manifesto to 200 selected top business people. The implication was clear; a Labour government would cost them a lot of money. The fact that this is nonsense — as only a cursory knowledge of recent history reveals - shows how little capitalism is understood even by the capitalists whose privileges are nurtured by the system. But to return to those Labour manifestos: when the parties of capitalism go into an election they do so on the assurance that they stand for the interests of all the people. Vote for us. runs their argument, allow us to implement our programme, and everyone will benefit. McAlpine's ruse, highly successful as it was, reveals the truth that elections are fought over which section of the minority ruling class should be that much richer and more secure, over which investments should receive more protection, over which proposals for working class exploitation promise to be more intense and profitable

McAlpine once informed the House of Lords that he was " . . . the builder of the National Theatre". This kind of assertion is often made by capitalists, we hear of them designing buildings, laying out gardens, building houses and so on when in fact they are not to be seen doing any such thing. McAlpine may have dropped in on tho site of the National Theatre — it was a prestigious enough project to warrant his interest in its progress — but he didn't actually sketch it out on a drawing board, or mix the cement or slap down tho bricks or hang the doors This work was carried out by members of the class who need to work for their living and who got a wage which does not allow them to drink Chateau de la Tour. They build places like the National Theatre and West Green House and they live in mortgaged semis or flats or rented bedsits. And at elections they are so impressed by the specious arguments of people like McAlpine that they surge out to vote to keep his class in power and privilege and their own class in exploitation and poverty. Our class has to eat supermarket food, wear supermarket clothes, live in supermarket houses. But this does not mean we have to have supermarket ideas.

Political packaging

The question is — is there some connection between supermarkets and tired, discredited political non-theories? We only ask because there is. apparently, no truth in the rumour that David Sainsbury is about to apply to join the Labour Party This member of a famous, exceedingly rich family whose fortune is channelled through those clattering check-outs where tho operators have little time or motivation to make any human contact with the patiently-shuffling customers and their laden trolleys, was a valued contributor to the late, unlamented Social Democratic Party. Did he, we wonder, receive one of those manifestos from Lord McAlpine? With the collapse of tho SDP there was a hopeful casting of bait among the partyless members by Liberal and Labour and Sainsbury would be a very juicy catch for them. But he has stated that ho remains loyal to the mould breakers even though they hardly exist any more

As a supermarket chief Sainsbury is probably well versed in the theories about the sales appeal of attractive packaging. So was the SDP, whose favourable attention from the media went some way to disguise the fact that they had little more to offer than bits and pieces of the failed policies of the other parties which they were so ambitious to replace. The same can be said about their leaders, who were supposed to have discovered the cleansing relevance of something called moderation. Jenkins. Owen. Williams and Rodgers had all held office in a Labour government and it took a lot of opaque packaging to obscure their association with the impotence of that government to make capitalism work as they had promised

Well this is all history and some history it was: the risible Alliance and then the chaos of the attempted merger with the Liberals and Owen's refusal to accept a vote which went against his wishes. Now he is no longer leading a party, which leaves just Rosie Barnes and John Cartwright, neither of them sure about who is leading whom. And all of this disreputable manoeuvring has been within the party who said it would not play the old game of party politics. So the mould remains unbroken. The SDP deserves, and will probably get. no more than a footnote in British political history

Will Sainsbury stay with them? Whatever he decides, it need not concern the check-out operators nor the queues in his shops Whichever government has held power Sainsbury has continued to prosper; capitalism has gone on its way undisturbed. The company's slogan is that in their shops Good Food Costs Less. What price consistent, viable political principles?

Political pollution

When supermarkets came on the scene thy were recommended to us as part of something called the Retailing Revolution. What that meant was the abolition of the system where customers stood at shop counters while assistants weighed up sugar, biscuits, butter and the like — and knew something about the stuff. This was replaced by the system in which the customer took the stuff off the shelves, which meant that it had to be pre-packed and that brought in another thing called the Packaging Revolution. People who tear their nails trying to get at a packet of biscuits or cheese or whatever may be consoled to know that they are participating in a revolution. Except that the whole episode was a grievous misuse of the word

We mention this because, as the Eastern European dictatorships crumble away, the abuse of political terminology is reaching the scale of a feverish epidemic. In the Weekend Guardian of 16 June, for example, an article on the devastation wrought on the environment by industry in countries like Poland and East Germany was described as "Marxist-Leninist pollution". Leaving aside the fallacious linking of Marx's name with Lenin's — all too common — it is a fact that Marx did not condone the ghastly effects of capitalist industrial development, indeed he devoted a lot of effort to exposing it and to pointing out how it could and must be permanently eradicated.

In its frantic scramble to industrialise, to concentrate human labour power and to expand, developing capitalism has not been concerned about human interests. That is the story behind the slums and their diseased misery, the wrecking of the environment and the pollution of the air, earth and sea. It is the story behind the rush to industrialise in the Eastern bloc countries and the devastation it has brought. Politicians in the West pretend that it is socialism which is responsible for this and which has failed in Eastern Europe. To be charitable, we may assume they say this because they don't understand capitalism and even less socialism. Being rich doesn't save Lord McAlpine and David Sainsbury from being deluded, the working class doesn't have the same excuse, though

Ivan

Caught In The Act: No, No, Nigel. (1989)

The Caught In The Act Column from the August 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

No, No, Nigel.

Nigel Lawson did not get where he is today through being bashful or at all reticent about his own talents so he does not take kindly to any criticism about the way he handles the financial affairs of British capitalism. That is why, some time ago, he dismissed the analysis of a large group of economists with the inadequate—and untrue—sneer that they were a bunch of teenage scribblers. That is why he is locked in an apparently unbreakable conflict with Thatcher and her toadies and why, as it is rumoured, he may take his talents and his touchiness off to some well-paid job in the City, where they are prepared to pay a lot to know all about the impotence of Chancellors of the Exchequer straight from the horse's mouth.

For Nigel is no longer a success. Against a rising tide of criticism and in face of all the evidence he can only insist that he is in complete control of the situation, working to an effective plan which is moving smoothly into operation. Of course there are some doubters, as financial observers consider what is happening to prices and the balance of payments but Lawson's response to these is that his remedies are taking rather longer to be effective than he at first thought. We only have to wait a little longer, be patient and trustful of the Law- son talents and all will come out well.

What worries Lawson's enemies—and many of his admirers—is how long this argument of postponement can hold good. As the Chancellor has to revise, again and again, his forecast of how much prices will rise by and how high interest rates will go in the near future, he begins to look like anything but a man in control. Perhaps he is hanging on in the hope that there is still time for the cyclical nature of capitalist trade to come to his aid so that he will be able to publish some statistics which make it seem as if his measures are indeed working. If that happens it will probably add quite a bit to the wage he can expect from his job in the City; he will retire from office in all the glory of a prophet fulfilled; what he assured us was only a "blip” was indeed that.

The success of that will be greater as more people forget how often, and how spectacularly, the forecasts of Lawson and his experts have been discredited in the past. The Tories came to power ten years ago on the promise that their priority would be to eradicate inflation, by which they meant that they would stabilise prices. For a while, as the rise in prices began to flatten out, they were able to claim that their policies were successful (in fact the two are not connected). But as the trend in prices has changed Lawson has been forced to revise again and again his forecasts about the rate at which prices will go up. Almost as soon as it was out of his mouth, each of his forecasts was outstripped by what actually happened. How long will this go on? How long can Lawson keep it up? How long before the voters begin to wonder whether the economy is under anyone’s control?

Teaching us a lesson.

The background to these events is that it is not so long ago that Lawson was making the claim to have conjured up an "economic miracle" for British capitalism; only just over a year that Thatcher was describing his budget as "brilliant". Some of this euphoria was based on the lowering of income tax rates, which so many workers mistakenly believe to be a sort of barometric scale of their prosperity. And some of it was based on the steady lowering of interest rates which, as more and more workers are forced to commit themselves to a lifetime of mortgage repayments, have assumed the same kind of false reputation as income tax rates. Part of the Lawson coda was that low interest rates not only bring us all prosperity but also contribute to its growth, so that the rates would move in a downward spiral while our living standards spiralled upwards. Now all that has changed and those working class dreams have, in many cases, turned into nightmares. The present orthodoxy is that low interest rates are not a form of prosperity but a symptom of a malignant economic disease. They must be forced upwards, to teach us all the evils of living beyond our means.

The popular explanation for all this confusion is that Lawson and his experts are having a little temporary difficulty in sorting out some passing, unpredictable problems. Anyone who believes that will believe anything. It does not require any great feat of memory to recall that every Chancellor has had to face similar problems and that they have all responded in the same way (if not with the same lack of modesty) as Lawson—with the promise that they are only postponing success for a while. Clearly, there must be an explanation more in tune with the facts.

However consummate their expertise, however seductive their promises, the people who claim to be able to control the economy of capitalism are really floundering about in impotence. Lawson's changes of policy and his ever-lengthening string of broken promises are not the result of his notoriously arrogant and pompous conceits. It would be no different if he were the most modest and retiring of men for his job is one of trying to do the impossible.

Not in front of the voters.

Perhaps it was people like Lawson Honourable Members had in mind, when they were so uneasy about allowing the TV cameras into the House of Commons. It is one thing to be seen by millions reading a carefully constructed harangue of the working class for not working hard enough, expecting too high wages or for wanting too much of life's little (very little, in their case) luxuries. It is quite another to be shown up by the camera's merciless eye as a spluttering buffoon. For many Labour Members it is one thing to allow themselves to be filmed addressing ecstatic crowds about building the new Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. It is quite another to be exposed, in a classier kind of soap opera, as the Percy Sugden or the Jack Duckworth of the Commons.

Some of the arguments used against letting in the cameras, such as that it would provoke even more irritating behaviour from the louder MPs and stimulate the rise of media favourites (like Percy and Jack) were deployed a long time ago in the rearguard action against allowing reporters to record parliamentary debates for the press. The question must be asked, now as then, whether Honourable Members are ashamed of their behaviour, whether they feel they have something to hide from the viewing voters.

If they were aware of what actually goes on in the world—and much of what they say and do leaves that open to doubt— MPs would realise that the exposure they have to fear most is of the uniformity of their impotence to affect the problems of capitalism. This is not only a matter of being shown up as ineffective but also of the viewers having it rammed home to them that the clashes in the Commons are sham affairs, at most over trivialities and not worth serious attention or of influencing how people vote at elections.

Television has already allowed us to sit at home while we watch our leaders, represented as all-knowing, all-caring, all-powerful (there is no point in having leaders unless they come up to these exacting standards) are shown up as blundering helplessly from one crisis to another sustained only by their own self-esteem. This is an encouragement to workers to develop their own consciousness, take their own decisions, run society in their own common interests. What is more likely to happen, if TV is allowed freely into the House, is that Members will mend their ways. No more dropping off during debates; no more yobbish heckling and jostling; only established eccentrics licensed to sport strange clothes and wild hair styles. It is important, to our legislators, that they keep up the pretence of representing our interests. And even more important to us that we see through the pretence.

Ivan