Political Notes: Bad language (1982)

The Political Notes Column from the September 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bad language

Of course, Willie Whitelaw has been under a strain lately, what with a representative of the common people sitting harmlessly on the Queen’s bed and the discovery that the royal person has been guarded devotedly by a sacrificed homosexual. But there is no excuse for him saying: “I should have thought than many people in the House and in the country would have believed that . . .", when what he really means is “Yes".

Whitelaw watchers will recognise his words as a typical piece of parliamentary language, in the coils of which MPs have an apparent need to entangle almost everything they say. But behind this oblique urbanity is a steely core. The job of Members of Parliament is to legalise and oversee the exploitation, repression and killing of tens of millions of useful people in the world. To describe this process clearly and directly would result in a charge of using unparliamentary language.

There is no greater offence an MP can commit. No Member is allowed to call a person who supports capitalism's exploitation of the majority a thief; it would be out of order to describe an MP who supported war a murderer. No matter what deceit they may practise, they are always honourable members; none of them may be denounced as a liar. Yet the social system which every MP stands for rests on legalised robbery; it is sustained by acts of socially organised killing and justified by a persistent deception.

When socialist delegates arrive at the scats of power they will not obscure their actions and principles in misleading verbiage. They will be too indignant at the degradations of capitalism and too impatient to abolish the system to have time for urbanity.

Life after death?

People who narrowly escape death have been known to say that the crucial moments were enlivened for them by the rapid flashbaek of their past life, which is supposed to work wonders by way of remorse for their misdeeds. Well, Lord George Brown is not dead (although he has joined the Social Democrats) but recently he must have wondered if the end had come because it seemed just like a flashback for him.

It was all the fault of Michael Foot (Labour Party) and Len Murray (TUC) who presented, for the scrutiny of critical media hacks, the latest thoughts of the Labour Party on how to end the slump and get back to the days of full exploitation, sorry full employment. These thoughts were in a report grandly entitled Economic Planning and Industrial Democracy—the Framework for Full Employment. As might be inferred from this, the report's dominant theme is planning. If there ever is another Labour government they will set up a national planning council; a national planning college; they will plan investment, prices, wages. They will erect, from the bureaucratic reserves of Whitehall, a new ministry for economic and industrial planning.

Now what might well have troubled George was the memory of the time when all this was tried before, with himself as king planner. As the man in charge at the Department of Economic Affairs (no relation) he excitedly produced his National Plan (no relation either) for the rebirth of British industry and the birth of a new prosperity for everyone. But the DEA disappeared over the storm-wracked horizon when British capitalism was, in Prime Minister Wilson's words, ‘blown off course'. It perished in the reality that the Labour Party could not control the economic weather—although that was exactly what George Brown and his plans were supposed to be able to do.

As capitalism spirals into slump, the best the Labour Party can offer is this tawdry attempt to raise the dead. They offer us a corpse of a policy, which has already been exposed as a lifeless futility. This is an apt comment on their impotence and cynicism; they learn nothing and, even worse, forget everything except the technique of uttering worthless verbiage.

George Brown is himself now little more than a ghost. It would be more humane if his old comrades were to leave him in peace, untroubled by memories of those days of despair.

The media and the mob (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent riots, triggered but not caused by the Southport stabbings, have reopened the debate concerning who should have the right to disseminate information (news). The ‘establishment’ mainstream media have resumed their unceasing war against the ‘misinformation’ of social media.

At the heart of this debate lies the terror of our rulers and their media that they will lose control of the political narrative that they have monopolised for so long. They conveniently forget that their newspapers’ continual demonisation of immigrants has normalised racism for many and that in their desperation to evade EU banking rules through lying about the benefits of ‘Brexit’ it has been the mainstream media who have created the noxious racist atmosphere that fed the violence.

Loathsome internet ‘influencers’ like Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate and Katie Hopkins would have no cultural platform were it not for the unceasing propaganda of the mainstream media. The media have created a Frankenstein monster and now that it has served its purpose they need to control and tame it. The elite of both left and right politics condemn the ‘mob’ violence without taking any responsibility for creating the toxic cultural atmosphere that made it inevitable.

‘Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism’ (Oscar Wilde).

This was true until very recently when those outside of the media establishment (fourth estate) discovered the internet and found their voice. The powerful have always known that the control of information and, more importantly, its interpretation, is vital to their interests. Sometimes we are told that we have a ‘free press’ but the claim that it is not ‘state owned’ in no way guarantees that it is ‘free’. Owning the mass media has always been a preoccupation with the parasite class and the classic Murdoch versus Maxwell struggle was an example of this pissing contest for status within their class.

Their basic narrative is that capitalism is the only possible, and indeed the highest, creation of civilised economic organisation. This fact turns most of their ‘news’ content into mere political propaganda. Presumably they are aware that they are lying but it is not always as starkly simple as that; take the proposition that high taxes are bad for the economy since they deter investment and thus employment – and from a capitalist perspective this is true. But, from a working-class perspective, low taxation for the rich means an enfeebled infrastructure (schools, hospitals, etc) which impacts exclusively on their class and so renders the cuts bad for their economic and social needs – also equally true. No amount of ‘fact checking’ can resolve the reality of this class struggle as within capitalism such internal contradictions are always present. Indeed, this is the primary ‘fact’ contained in any interpretation of information – the rest is pure rhetoric.

From the time of Ancient Rome the ‘people’ are considered to be a mindless mob when they indulge in any protest against conditions. The protagonists of the ‘Farage riots’ were universally condemned as mindless thugs without any reference to their representatives in Parliament (Reform Party) or the legitimisation of such actions by none other than the former president of the USA Donald Trump who lionised the rioters at the Washington Capitol building. The rioters of the infamous ‘Gordon riots’ were similarly condemned with no reference to the toxic anti-Catholic culture which, like the anti-Muslim environment of the UK today, was created by the establishment for their own political needs.

The alleged disappointment of Nigel Farage when he discovered that the murderer in Southport was not a Muslim is an example of the instincts of the monstrous demagogues that capitalism creates. The present political system effectively locks out the people from any democratic expression of their concerns for five years so it is no surprise that such imposed political impotence will erupt into violence occasionally. Only the time-honoured right to a ‘petition of Parliament’ still exists but this cannot change anything in the absence of real democracy.

Although the ‘outrages’ of racist violence are universally condemned by agencies of the state they do provide a useful distraction from the real causes of the symptoms of capitalism. Immigration, racism, culture wars, two-tier policing and myriad other social problems conveniently divert the working class from prosecuting the class struggle.

All of these problems affect the majority who live in the real world of capitalist exploitation but not those who benefit from it. They have no concern for, or knowledge of, those living in poverty; without access to proper health care; poor education; terrible industrial relations, low wage jobs etc, etc.

The former Home Secretary under Thatcher, Willie Whitelaw, said, as he gazed out on the extensive grounds of his mansion, that the race riots of the early eighties did not belong in the England that he recognised. Most of the racist thugs who joyfully attacked hotels containing immigrants have no knowledge or understanding of that other world of luxury and decadence. They only know the daily struggle to make a living that occasionally fails completely to provide for their own and their family’s needs. Someone must be to blame for the misery and the capitalist media always have ready-made scapegoats available to distract the politically naive from the culpability of the parasites whose cause they slavishly serve.

Wez.

So They Say: Imaginary Differences (1976)

The So They Say Column from the June 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imaginary Differences

Cartoons have been appearing in the press suggesting that the policies of the Conservative Party have become a mystery—that they offer no alternative to the Labour Party. In an attempt to dispel this view, cartoon characters in the shape of Conservative MPs and their attendants have been hurriedly pounding tables proclaiming that there is a clear distinction between “Conservative philosophy with Socialist [Labour Party] dogma” (letter to the Daily Telegraph, 12th May 1976).

What the Conservatives had to do was point out to the country that the Labour Party was under the control of the left wing and the Michael Foots of the world and then point out that the Tories were a party who took a different view and line for the future.

Daily Telegraph, 28th April 76

If that was not a tall enough order to begin with, the Labour Party is not making things any easier for them. Maurice MacMillan (Conservative MP), attempting to “make clear our own constructive alternatives”, pointed to the basic problem as he saw it:

Conservatives must be bold enough to say that businesses and investors must be given a real incentive by allowing them additional profits from their investments.

Times, 10th May 76

While MacMillan and his fellow drones have been plucking up their courage to say such a thing, they appear to have missed Callaghan who found his nerve some days earlier:

The first thing to concentrate on is to ensure that there is sufficient incentive to provide a proper level of investment in these firms so that productive jobs can be created. That is what I would like to focus on. But I don’t believe you can force a large private sector to invest. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, and you have to apply the incentives necessary which compel it to drink.

Guardian, 5th May 76

Conservative philosophy or Labour Party dogma— after the froth, they bow to the profit motive.

An Acceptable Face

We have heard of the blind leading the blind. Now we have William Whitelaw, deputy leader of the Conservative Party, lecturing his cohorts on public relations. At a meeting held in a pub on 27th April he informed members of the Reform Group that at the next election Conservatives would “break from the party political tradition of making manifesto promises.” Other things were to change too—“we have to be scrupulously honest.” Good grief! What are they going to put in it? Whitelaw had an answer for that as well; they would announce “decreased public spending.” But before his audience could choke on their beer and sandwiches, he quickly pointed out that appearances could be deceptive: The Tories must not

turn into a hard-faced party. We must not be seen as the party looking all the time on the money side and not being interested in the various social problems that are certain to come up, and certain to be increased as our country is short of money. We must act with an economic head but also be seen to have a heart at the same time.

Daily Telegraph, 28th April 76

There goes the “scrupulously honest” facade. If this body politic of fair face, economic head, bulging pockets and kindly heart requires soft brain-matter, Whitelaw will no doubt become a donor.

You'll Never Walk Alone

It was hard to imagine that the announcements had not been made to the accompaniment of tambourines, the Joystrings and the Hallelujah Chorus: “We’re next for the economic miracle, says Healey” read the headline in the Daily Telegraph of 11th May.

Providing we can make this incomes policy stick to the end of the next wage round, I believe we have got the inflation problem under control. Now we must concentrate on the problem of unemployment. We want to get back to full employment within three years from now.

But "full employment” has become a loosely interpreted phrase, and before the “believers” acclaim the “miracle worker” too hastily, we draw attention to the specific statements made by Healey in the previous week.

The best we can hope for is to reduce unemployment to 3 per cent. or about 700,000 in 1979 . . . The TUC have expressed the hope that unemployment can be reduced to 600,000 in 1978. But I have already explained to them that this is too ambitious.

Guardian, 5th May 76

So the “miracle” becomes a mirage, and not a particularly distinguished one at that. The working class can take cold comfort from what Healey described as:

The tributes [which] are pouring in to the patriotism, the far-sightedness, common sense and maturity of our trade union movement as the full magnitude of this achievement sinks in.

The “achievement” of course, being the incomes policy agreement, not the aforementioned “miracle" which is only “hoped for.” Surely the TUC, who could by no stretch of the imagination be described either as far-sighted, or of mature judgement, must have noted the incongruity when Healey gushed forth:

Even the central bankers of the United States and Germany have added their tribute to the British trade union movement in the last few days — and believe me that is something.

Praise indeed, when the capitalists give tribute to the workers. Such praise is normally reserved for those occasions when members of the working class are encouraged to kill and maim one another on the battlefields.

What a Lovely Miracle

The chancellor expanded elsewhere on what he described as “the full magnitude of this achievement” —there were to be many sides to the miracle. Not only would there be the (hoped-for) 700,000 unemployed, but “The deal guaranteed that from August, wage rises in Britain would be the lowest in the world.” But how low an increase does he mean? Again we find some rather loose interpretation. An increase can usually be taken to mean an addition, but not apparently to Healey:

In fact wages will be coming down while our competitors will be going up . . . That is the best possible news for exports and employment.

Times, 11th May 76

In the light of the foregoing, and as the Chancellor is calling for “an 8.5 per cent annual increase in manufacturing output” and claims that “If we could get as much output out of our existing equipment as most of our competitors, we could increase our national income even without new investment by anything up to 50 per cent”, members of the working class would do well to consider their rôle in the “miracle.” It will be what it has always been—that of the wealth-producing class which owns nothing but the chance to work (literally) for the benefit of the owners. When workers see this division, they will have recognized exactly those whom the Labour Party represents.

Buy Me and Stop One

The ruthless examination of all aspects of social requirement from the point of view Can money be made from meeting such requirements? is one of the hallmarks of capitalist society. Marx put the view that when Socialism is established man will look back on his previous forms of society, including present-day society, and will describe them as pre-historic. We take a clipping from the London Evening Standard of 13th May which serves to underline the extent of our “civilisation.”

A price war is raging among private abortion clinics, it was claimed today. Mrs. Helene Grahame, of the Pregnancy Advisory Service, a London based charity, said the days of the get-rich quick abortionist look to be fading fast . . . Advertised prices of £50 and £60 are now quite common, against £70 to £80 a year or so ago . . . Clinics are advertising much more widely and extravagantly, and a free pregnancy-testing is being used as a come-on. All the indications are that they arc getting pretty desperate for patients — which is why they are getting into this kind of price war.

The Daily Express of 14th May reported the phenomenon in an even more matter-of-fact manner. The first line of their piece told us: “Women can now shop around for an abortion at the right price.” Hats off to capitalism: If the thing runs true to form we can next expect the equivalent of supermarkets giving special offers and Green Shield stamps.

Alan D'Arcy

Greasy Pole: Who needs a willie? (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Margaret Thatcher did not make a name for herself through cracking memorable jokes so she probably did not know what she was saying, when she remarked that “Every Prime Minister needs a Willie”. Indeed, part of the joke was that she wasn’t aware of how her words were likely to be interpreted. Another part was the kind of person she was referring to—Willie Whitelaw who, among other jobs she piled onto his ever-willing shoulders was Deputy Prime Minister, Home Secretary, Northern Ireland Secretary. He died last month as Viscount Whitelaw of Penrith but will always be remembered as Willie.

His death unleashed floods of homage which we have come to expect whenever a prominent politician dies. The newspapers devoted pages to telling us how wonderful he was and how great was our loss. His fellow politicians were not slow to come forward with similar slush: “influence throughout his long career was immense…personified decency, compassion and tolerance . . . wise and honourable . . . generous and unselfish” There is no point in listing the authors of these remarks because they are all so similar, the kind of praise which is taken out and dusted down whenever the situation demands. But it is worth mentioning that one of Whitelaw’s successors as Home Secretary, Jack Straw, said he was “an outstanding parliamentarian”.

This is usually considered the highest praise among MPs. But what does it mean? Is a great parliamentarian someone who is good at speaking in debates in the House? Good at ranting about some current meaningless obsession? Good at emphasising some facts while doing their best to conceal others? Good at using what is known as parliamentary language, essential for anyone who wants to state an inconvenient truth about another Honourable Member without using plain words? Good at the back slapping mutual congratulations between the parties in parliament when they are not pretending to be bitterly divided?

Home Secretary

Perhaps Whitelaw was one of the great parliamentarians—whatever that means. Because he seemed to love everyone and everyone loved him. It must have helped him during his time as Chief Whip, when he was adept at twisting arms so skilfully that his victim thought he was just giving a friendly squeeze of the elbow. In spite of his closeness to Thatcher he kept her at arms length: “I wouldn’t have wanted to stay with her socially ” he said. On other levels, when he was visiting a prison as Home Secretary he asked a prisoner what he was in there for and when the man replied that it was murder Whitelaw responded “splendid, splendid” before wafting off to leave the man to get on with his sentence. When he was Northern Ireland Secretary, on a walkabout in Londonderry he was approached by a woman who obviously thought this was her chance to confront him with some home truths. “Now then, Mr. Whitelaw, “she said in a gritty accent, “Why don’t you come down to the Creggan to see how things really are?” Whitelaw inclined his massive head, fixed his rheumy eyes on her upturned face and patted her arm. “My dear woman,” he said as if he had just been invited to a week-end on the grouse moors, “I would love to come to see you in the Creggan”. Unlike most politicians, he flourished in this role he set for himself, never to seem cleverer than he was and if anything to seem slightly less so.

This was probably rooted in his privileged background. His father died in 1919, from wounds received in the First World War when Whitelaw was one year old. Thereafter his upbringing was the concern of his grandfather, who was Chairman of the London and North Eastern Railway and had been a Conservative MP. Whitelaw was brought up in a large house in Scotland and went to Winchester public school where his ability was described as “unspoilt by premature intellectualism”. At Cambridge he got a moderate degree but played a lot of golf. It was what would be expected of someone from a rich land-owning family, who need never be bothered by the need to work for a living. When the war started in 1939 Whitelaw was ready to be an Army officer; he had cast off the shyness and hesitancy of his childhood and developed into a man who expected to be obeyed.

During the war he commanded a tank squadron which in its first battle lost several tanks and many of the men he described as “a harmonious family”. Predictably, the obituaries of Whitelaw said that such experiences had given him a hatred of war as a way of settling international difficulties. In fact there was no trace of such an attitude during the Falklands war when he was a member of an Inner Cabinet concerned with running the British war machine. When a decision had to be taken on whether to sink the General Belgrano, Whitelaw gave no thought to the fact that there would be a huge loss of life on the Argentinean ship, where the sailors might well have been another “harmonious family”.

Loyalty

All Whitelaw’s obituarists agreed that he was loyal—which could mean that he was willing to subvert whatever opinions he might have in the cause of keeping his party in power. Thus he could be a close friend and confidant of Ted Heath and then serve Heath’s hated rival so assiduously that Thatcher could describe him as “quite simply, indispensable to me in Cabinet”. This loyalty—if that is what it was—was strong enough to stand a number of stresses, such as the Tory conference in 1981, when Whitelaw was Home Secretary and getting the rough ride the hangers and floggers of the party ritually reserve for the minister responsible for what they regard as law and order. As Whitelaw resisted the calls for the restoration of hanging he was not amused or encouraged to see the Prime Minister he was so loyal to openly undermining him by applauding the speeches against him. Stifling his anger—for a while—Whitelaw resorted to a well tried defence—when in difficulties, make the most boring speech possible.

That was typical of the manner in which he survived, until the cruel workload brought him down. His failing powers were shown up when he had to give up shooting after he accidently peppered one of the beaters. A stroke in 1987 led to his retirement to his sumptuous home in Scotland, except that he played a part in the overthrow of Thatcher in 1990, when he advised her to drop out of the leadership contest after her too narrow victory in the first ballot. When the assembled media hacks asked him then whether he was one of the men in grey suits who were said to be plotting to bring her down Whitelaw’s reply showed him acting at being stupid again: “I don’t know what you mean; in any case I haven’t got a grey suit”.

The people who work the confidence trick through which capitalism is kept in existence come in all shapes and sizes and manners. Some of them are strident—like Thatcher—and some—like Whitelaw—are subtle. Read his memoirs and you will see that he cultivated blandness to the point of being evasive. And it worked—he played a large part in keeping his party in power, in convincing the working class for a long time that capitalism under the Tories was the best of all possible worlds. Prime Ministers may need people like him but we can do without them.

Ivan

A little knowledge (1977)

From the April 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can you keep a secret? Sir Nigel Fisher, Conservative MP for Surbiton, has written a book on his Party’s leadership struggles and the Sunday Telegraph is serializing it. The extract in the 13th March edition described William Whitelaw as “an old and trusted friend” of Fisher’s. However, in describing the election of Mrs. Thatcher as Conservative-in-Chief, he remarks on Whitelaw’s candidature for the leadership in revealing terms:

Despite his many qualities of character, Whitelaw would have had weaknesses as a party leader. He knows nothing about economics. Some economists do not consider this a disadvantage, but it cannot be an asset in these days.

Which could suggest a slighting reference to previous Tory leaders and how much things have changed. But to be fair, they have all known enough. All of them could spot a profit from a loss, and similarly recognized to whom the profits belonged.

From Orange Law to Whitelaw (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

March 22nd. Mr. Brian Faulkner in London being talked to by his Tory overlord, Heath. Press says talks “crucial”. Ten hours talking . . . Brian walks out peeved. Brian comes back . . . talk . . . talk. 

March 23rd. Faulkner is back in Belfast giving the bad news to the rest of the gang at Stormont. Northern Ireland tense . . . waiting. Dark clouds over Stormont. Faulkner goes back to London. 

March 24th. The news is out! Stormont is “prorogued”, the semantics of anti-“backlash” strategy. Everybody knows that Westminster is not only the assassin but the undertaker! Orange law is dead; Wullie Whitelaw, Heath’s Ulster hatchetman, takes its place with near-absolute powers. Real change is alleged. 

Trauma . . . anger . . . suspicion . . . fear . . . bitterness . . . hope — all are elements in the emotional shock-wave that hits Northern Ireland. What does it all mean? Whitelaw or Orange law? We say there has been no change: capitalism still rules.

So often over the past few years in Northern Ireland have we seen the unexpected occur in a continual succession of nine-day wonders that have knocked many of the sacred cows from their sacrosanct pedestals . . . so many of the things which the cynics said “will not happen in our time” have happened.

The lessons are many but, primarily, they show two things: they show the speed with which political change can occur and the ability of the great majority of people to reconcile themselves to that change and they also show that whatever amount of apparent change occurs in the administrative organs of the system, they leave, wholly and totally, the real problems that affect the working class intact and undisturbed.

If, like the “Left” the Communists, Labourites, P.D., official I.R.A., etc — we were sufficiently ignorant of the real nature of capitalism, and the alternative to that system, Socialism, to take sides in the major dispute in Ireland concerning how capitalism should be organised or by whom, then we could take either side — almost with equal “justice” — and have an excellent case for rapping our opponents: But we are not “Leftists”, concerned with administering social aspirin to a society suffering the horrible economic cancer of capitalism. We are Socialists, holding to the demonstrable fact that only the surgery of social revolution, carried through with the weapons of democracy and Socialist knowledge, can bring about real change. As such we are not concerned with taking any “side” in the political struggle in Ireland (or elsewhere), a political struggle that has emerged from, and was caused by, the earlier internecine struggle within the country’s propertied class, and are, thus, absolved from the hypocrisy, the lies, the contradictions, the prejudices as well as the deliberate exploitation of working class blood and tears for the accomplishment of purposes that bear no relevance to working class interests.

We have seen anglophobic Irish nationalists demanding “British standards of justice”, sometimes even when the military stalwarts of that “justice” were engaged in the crassest brutality against them. We have seen “Loyalists” of the Unionist Party, and its fringe lunacies, denounce those same British standards while boasting their loyalty to Britain. We have seen the “Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people” take in a tame Catholic to its ranks in a lame attempt to convince the world that it was not a Protestant Parliament. And we have seen the British Tory Government sack the local Tory bigots, with all the implications of disgrace, and establish a dictatorial overlord to implement the aforementioned “British standards”!

And we could go on . . . and on . . . but, why? Nothing really has changed. Nothing, that is, that really affects the life of Paddy Murphy, Catholic, workingman or Jimmy Brown, Protestant, workingman. The regime of the alarm clock, the job, the dole, the poverty, the slums, even, the violence — real and intended — goes on and all the happy slogans of reform are turned on their head as their diametrical opposite draws the cheers of the leaders who first taught you the slogans of reform. “One man — One vote”? No! Now we have Whitelaw — and no votes! Abolition of the Special Powers Act? Now we have the infamous Act administered by the British Army with a repressive ruthlessness that sometimes makes even the RUC appear playful! Jobs? Homes? These are now the governmental preserve of the Heath administration and its wanton failure in both fields in Britain can hardly inspire confidence!

Because, so often, we saw the viciously-contorting face of Brian Faulkner vomit its blood-curdling hatred at those whom he opposed; because we lived with his lies and hypocrisy and his leadership of a group of self-seeking political gangsters prepared to stop at nothing to maintain their power and privilege, we may see in the ignominous dismissal of the foul Unionist coterie some victory. But there is no real victory for the working class, even in the satisfaction that some of them may see in the political demise of Faulkner and his cohorts. For these people, like Heath, Wilson and Lynch, or, if they achieved political power, the leaders of the IRA, the Ulster Vanguard or the professional “moderates” of the Alliance Party, are the mere political servants of capitalism.

It was to maintain capitalism in such a manner as would make most effective its exploitation of the working class that Unionism and Nationalism became political forces in Ireland. It was the immediate needs of capitalism in the nearly part of this century that exploited the divisive influences historically bound-up with class society in the country and brought forth the slogans of bigotry and patriotism, hatred and prejudice — the inane Orange battle-cries and the futile Nationalist shibboleths. The poison of sectarianism and nationalism was used by the contending factions within capitalism to rally the working class in the North behind the continuance of union with Britain, in order that the Northern capitalists could maintain their free access to the British markets, and the working class in the South behind the demand for “freedom” from British rule, so that the political servants of the developing capitalist class in the South could take legislative steps to protect a weak native capitalism from the competition of foreign, mainly British, capitalism.

With the changing of conditions affecting capitalism in both parts of the country the old friction of interest between the Northern and Southern capitalists largely declined. It was this decline and the closer economic integration of the UK-Irish economy, endorsed in the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement, that led to the closer co-operation of Northern and Southern politicians in the latter part of the Sixties and paved the way for the O’Neill-Lemass bun-worry at Stormont in 1965. Capitalism in Ireland no longer needed the unpleasant levels of bigotry and hatred that had been necessary to promote both parts of its divided interests nearly fifty years before. With as little scruple as had been employed when the weapons of hate and division had been first used, the political servants of capitalism attempted to throw them aside, and, in the process, to take credit for their integrity and political perspicacity! But, in Northern Ireland, the poison had been injected deep into the vein of working class life and the sheep baulked at following their leaders through the pens of hypocrisy to a tolerance based on the new needs of capitalism.

The rest is the history of the last four years: the story of murder, arson, brutality, torture and increased hatred and division when the working class paid with its lives, its freedom and endured privation and repression beyond the norm and the capitalist class saw its profits endangered and its lives discomfited. This was the background to Heath and his gang bestowing on Faulkner and his mob the old order of the boot!

Faulkner and his Tory hate-mongers were kicked out by their erstwhile friends of the British Tory party not because they were the Party that generated hatred and bitterness nor because they had set up an authoritarian statelet in which lies and deceit imposed the same miseries on propertyless Protestants as did hate policies and political coercion on propertyless Catholics. If these crimes had represented the indictment against Unionism, Unionist politicians would never have been allowed to relax their privileged backsides in the plushed splendor of Stormont. No, Teddy and his friends did not abandon Brian and his boys simply because the latter had been found out nor did the Leader of that other great act in capitalism’s political circus, the Labour Party, recommend dismissal on such grounds. Faulkner and his party had to go because they could no longer deliver the goods to the capitalist class in the form of a reasonably peaceful, docile, hard-grafting working class churning out goods for sale and profit without the expenditure of too much in the way of overheads for maintaining “law and order”.

A few points are worthy of note; the Party of acknowledged political gangsters whom Westminster have seen fit to dismiss are the same Party who were given power by Liberal Lloyd George’s Government of Ireland Act of 1920; the same Party that enjoyed the confidence and support of successive Tory governments up to the present Heath administration; the same Party whose political foulness was strengthened by the Labour government’s Amendments to the Governments of Ireland Act, in 1948 and whose corruption was beneath the cognizance of Harold Wilson until it became an expensive embarrassment in 1969.

And the alternatives for the future? Again it is worthy of note that Harold Wilson—who can doubt with the foreknowledge and connivance of Heath? — sat in counsel with “the gunmen and murderers” of the IRA in Dublin. It is worthy of note because capitalism will employ, and has employed, any trick, any hypocrisy, any instrument that guarantees its untroubled exploitation of the working class. And none of the contenders for power are any worse than those presiding over capitalism’s system of theft at present.

And the future for the working class? This we can predict with easy confidence. The continuation of poverty, insecurity, of going without . . . living in slums or letting the larder pay the rent or the mortgage . . . division . . . violence. In a word, no change! But, then, the working class knows its miseries and, ironically, while it seeks assuagement of political or religious problems it does not expect relief from its class miseries. Nor will it get it before it jettisons its inculcated nationalistic and religious prejudices and its notions that a society in which a minority class owns society’s means of living can provide the material basis of a peaceful, a full and a happy life for everybody.

Richard Montague

Caught In The Act: Out of touch (1990)

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

Out of touch

Willie Whitelaw went down to the mid-Staffordshire by-election to help the Tory candidate but probably lost him a bucketful of votes when he bought a box of chocolates and grandly said he wanted only the pound notes in the change. The shop girl had to remind him gently that we use only pound coins now—the notes went out years ago.

Being out of touch is one of the criticisms being levelled now at the Thatcher government—out of touch over Poll Tax. mortgages, interest rates, privatisation, the National Health Service . . . They are so out of touch that they lost a rock-solid seat like mid-Staffordshire— and that to a Labour candidate whose pre-packaged. master-minded campaign was openly contemptuous of the voters. Like football teams—or rather like their managers' excuses—when governments are out of touch they are also out of luck. Whitelaw's well-meant blunder was hungrily recorded by the news-hounds who accompanied him on his sweetshop safari, to be retold to an increasingly bewildered and irritated electorate. Thatcher's standing has crashed, as if she has fallen off a cliff, from that of a woman who single-handedly beat the Argentinians. Arthur Scargill and inflation and who then went on to persuade the people of eastern Europe of the benefits of McDonald's burgers and privatised water, into that of a reckless and stubborn dogmatist who would do everyone a favour by applying for her pension and her bus pass.

Squabbles

Of course there are still some hard-core Tories who pretend that all these difficulties are, to use one of Nigel Lawson's unhappier expressions, a “blip" and that all is in fact well within the government. But these loyalists ignore the evidence of their own eyes and ears and what they read in their favourite newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Sun. To begin with, there is the squabble over the leadership, before it is officially available to squabble over, between Heseltine, Tebbit and Howe. Not that any of them ever admit that the leadership is in question or that they would ever dream of opposing Thatcher. It is just that, in all modesty, if the party were ever to be in need of another prime minister who will give his all in the service of this Grand Old Country, well perhaps they have something to offer, perhaps they could be persuaded . . Since all these hopefuls also say that they wholeheartedly support Thatcher's policies and will do their utmost to ensure that we get another dose of Tory government under Thatcher at the next general election it is rather difficult to see why anyone should take them seriously.

Another symptom of the government's malaise has been the sudden eagerness of some of its prominent members to desert it. We refer to the moving examples of Peter Walker and Norman Fowler, both of them the slickest of political operators but who are now revealed as sentimental family men. Walkers survival through the years of opposition to Thatcher, while all around him other ministers were being picked off to crash into back-bench obscurity, must rank with the world's most thrilling escape yarns. Norman Fowler had some of the stickiest jobs in the Cabinet, some of its dirtiest work directly connected with class conflict and working class poverty but he adroitly rode most of his problems by setting up enquiries. By the time the enquiry reported Fowler was off to some other ministry, leaving an exceptionally unpleasant can to be carried by his successor— like the hapless John Moore at the Department of Social Security. Walker and Fowler have left the government, earnestly professing undying loyalty to it. on the excuse that they need to spend more time in their sumptuous homes with their lucky, secure families—a lot luckier than the families who desperately try to make the best of the cruel reforms which Fowler initiated at the DSS. Does anyone believe these reasons? Perhaps there should be an enquiry to find out.

Labour ecstatic

Naturally the Labour leaders are ecstatic about these developments as each day brings yet another crisis for the Tories. As they scent the government's impending doom they are presumably spending less and less time with their families. All that is needed, they happily burble, is one last electoral heave to dispense with the Tories and then we shall have a government of realism and humanity. People who worry about how they will pay the Poll Tax. or about whether the Building Society will be asking for their house back, or what will happen if their doctor's budget runs out just as they need some treatment. may find this an attractive vision. A reference to the history of Labour government should deflate their misplaced optimism.

In the middle of 1968 the Wilson government were facing a crisis which was remarkably similar to that of the Tories today. They had been returned to power, on a surge of expectation, with an increased majority in 1966. But two years later they were in an economic crisis with a persistent deficit in the balance of payments; they were in continual conflict with the unions over the statutory wage-freeze (the BOAC pilots were constrained to make a little history in this); they had lost a series of by-elections, the opinion polls said that only 27 per cent of people were satisfied with Wilson as prime minister and that if there were a general election then the Labour Party could expect to hang on to only 50 seats.

Plots

George Brown had finally managed to resign from the government because he objected to being left out when they were discussing economic crises (apparently he still wasn't bored by them) and Ray Gunter left the Cabinet grumbling about it being ‘overweight with intellectuals". It wasn't clear whether Gunther thought the government's crises could have been avoided with a bit of educational subnormality. In any case his departure was not deeply mourned. There were active plots to ease Wilson out of Number Ten, on the theory that he alone was responsible for capitalism's waywardness, encouraged by the Times, the Observer, the Economist and. under the deranged guidance of Cecil King, the Daily Mirror. Meanwhile, the Tories busily promoted their own candidate for prime minister as a "Man of Integrity". It was, of course, Ted Heath. Yes. it was rather a long time ago.

The Wilson government's response was to do just about the only thing they could do—plough on patching things up as best they could while pretending that the problems were only temporary provided everyone kept their nerve. Wilson soothingly assured the nation ". . . new and spectacular evidence from all over the country showing the robust strength of British industries" —rather like Tory ministers today who bleat about the "underlying strength of the British economy" or words to that effect. The Labour Party got out a mid-term manifesto which admitted some mistakes but insisted that basically the government was on the right lines—which is what the less obdurate Tories now try, when they harp on the violence among Poll Tax protests—to divert attention from their current problems by setting up a conflict, between the Commons and the Lords, a revival of the famous battle cry of Peers versus People.

Good and bad luck

What this shows is that governments do not basically differ. They all grapple with the problems of capitalism which are always beyond their powers to influence significantly. How the voters judge governments is based largely on what might loosely be called luck. Governments have their good times when, perhaps to their surprise, capitalism's affairs go well for them and the voters love them. And they have their bad times when the crises come one after another and the voters switch their support to another, equally ineffectual, style of reforming capitalism. These are the times when the cracks show, the squabbles become public, when some ministers suddenly want to go home to their wives and families and others can't remember things like what currency to use in a shop.

Ivan

H. M. Dustbins: Prisoners' Riots (1982)

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Every day a fresh humiliation." — one prisoner’s description of life in the long term wing at Wormwood Scrubs.

Whenever there is a Tory government, and the jobs are being dished out, one who is always willing to sacrifice himself in the more harrowing of ministries is Willie Whitelaw. Perhaps this is because he is such an amiable man. Or perhaps he is convinced that being a rich aristocrat is a burden he bears more in our interests than his own. Whatever the reason, his career has been studded with crises as regular as cairns on the route up a mountain. Recently, for example, there have been the city riots and — one of his persistent concerns — the turbulent state of British prisons.

According to Whitelaw, the essence of the problem in prisons is overcrowding the relentless stuffing of men (it only affects male prisoners at present) into large, gloomy, decaying Victorian buildings which were designed to contain several hundred less than are being forced into them. This is no recent problem; six years ago (The Times 4/8/75) Roy Jenkins, who was then Home Secretary, said that it would “approach the intolerable" if the prison population reached 42,000. It now hovers around 44,000 and, as the courts do not seem eager to heed Whitelaw's regular pleas to impose prison sentences more sparingly, is unlikely to fall in the near future.

There has been no lack of effort from the legislators, to reform the problem away. The Criminal Justice Act 1967 introduced suspended sentences and even made them mandatory in many cases when the defendant would otherwise have been locked up straight away. Another Act in 1972 set up the Community Service scheme, supposedly as an alternative to imprisonment. But the numbers behind bars has continued to rise; now Whitelaw is suggesting more reforms, heedless of the fact that so many have already failed.

Overcrowding means that life for thousands of prisoners is near to intolerable. Hundreds are confined three to a cell, measuring 13ft. by 7ft., designed to hold only one. There they may well stay behind the locked door, for up to 23 hours a day. They spend their time reading, listening to the radio, sleeping. Sometimes they discuss, with a garnish of fantasy, what they did to be sent to prison. There is, needless to say, no running water or lavatory in the cell. For these men the first task each morning is slopping out, when chamber pots used for the past twelve hours or so are emptied into a single disposal point which gurglingly accepts the intestinal waste products of about one hundred bodies. The smell, as prisoners like to inform, has to be experienced — it can’t be imagined. This appetite-sharpening start to the day is followed by breakfast; in very few prisons do the inmates concede that the food is edible, let alone appetising.

Not only the prisoners struggle with such exigencies. One wrote to the Guardian (11/12/81) from Wandsworth that in that grim pile the working conditions of the officers “would try the patience of a Buddhist monk’’. The governors of Strangeways and Wormwood Scrubs have recently publicised their anger in the press — a dangerously unusual act in a profession normally disciplined into reticence. Wormwood Scrubs, a place under unique tensions, was described by its governor as a “penal dustbin” made up of “overcrowded cattle pens”.

It is assumed from this that British prisons are likely to erupt into riot. There are dire warnings of ‘another Attica’ unless something is done to ease the overcrowding. But this sounds rather like the government dodging the issue in advance. Overcrowding is usually confined to local prisons where men are held on remand or are received straight from court after sentence, to be held before they are sent on to what is called — optimistically — a ‘training’ prison.

There have been riots in recent years but these have happened in those very ‘training’ prisons where there was no overcrowding — Parkhurst, Albany, Gartree, Hull. (The disturbance at Wormwood Scrubs in August 1979 was in the long term ‘D’ Wing, which was not overcrowded. In any case that was a riot by prison officers rather than by prisoners.) A modern prison like Albany has no slopping out; the prisoners can get out of their cell whenever they like and are not normally locked up for excessively long periods. In fact such prisons have physical conditions better than those awaiting a lot of the prisoners when they are let out.

So why is there fear of fresh trouble within those walls? The moment a convict walks through the prison gate, the pressures of the place on him are as palpable as the smell. A massive readjustment is needed, to survive within the rules and the customs on which the place is run. “Few sounds can be more heart stopping than the noise made by the closing of a cell door . . . . With the closing of the door, the prisoner knows that he has ceased to be a father, a brother, a husband or a son; from now on he is — a prisoner” recalled one man. (Ron Phillips, Race Today, June 1974).

Being a prisoner means that all sorts of decisions about you — whether you actually did what the screw says you did, what job you should do in the prison, should you be released early on parole — are taken without reference to you. “The interests of the individuals have to be sacrificed continually to the interests of the institution” was how the governor of Wormwood Scrubs despairingly expressed it. One result is that the customary standards of ‘justice’ do not apply in a place which is supposed to teach its inmates to respect those very standards.

Another factor is the growing militancy of prison officers, to the point when many prisoners are convinced that it is the officers, and not the governor or the Home Office, who decide how a prison is run. This militancy is a significant change for the prison service and has a lot to do with current economic conditions. At one time the prison service was something of a refuge for the ex-regular servicemen who found civilian life difficult, without the reassurance they gained from the military routine and structure. These officers with their guardsman’s peaked caps and their burnished boots, were a walking nostalgia. Now the service is often a refuge from redundancy and the inflow of recruits from industry has meant that a para-military discipline has been undermined by a trade union militancy. It is common now to see long hair underneath the warders’ caps, much to the disgust of the old time screws.

Militant prison officers may refuse — as they recently did at Strangeways - to receive any more prisoners; they can refuse to send them to court, or to work the hours needed for prisoners to go to evening classes or to week-end sport. These actions make life harder for the prisoners. Under the tensions of prison, it needs only one incident — a particular example of repression or brutality by the officers, an abrupt withdrawal of ‘privileges’, some specially bad food — to spark off a protest which can explode into a riot.

When that happens the official pretence that prisons are humane institutions which concentrate on caring for, and ‘reforming’, their inmates is torn away to reveal the truth that they are more akin to a battleground. On one side are the staff who like to think they represent ‘society’, which actually means the capitalist precept that one class holds the position to exploit the other, who must accept their degraded status. The prisoners are ‘offenders’ — they have breached that precept, even if they wouldn’t see it that way.

Many of them are obsessed with achieving the symbols of privilege — a gleaming fast car, glamorous women, a sumptuous home. If they had the income of a company chairman they wouldn’t offend but the real limit of their ambition is a typical working class wage, so they take refuge in fantasy. Perhaps their big difficulty is an inability to draw the sort of distinctions which capitalism demands of them — to appreciate, for example, that violence is permissible from a member of the SAS but not from a robber. The courts are part of the machinery to ensure that those distinctions are drawn and to punish anyone who fails to do so. In the end the most lenient of judges or magistrates will conclude that the only way of ‘disposing’ (a term often used in court) of someone is to send them to prison.

This is another example of the characteristic of capitalism, that it attempts to solve a problem by intensifying it. There is no evidence that prisons diminish crime; in many ways they are microcosms of society outside the walls — its jungle laws, its violence and cynicism. The highest aim of the entire penal system — including the reformers — is that members of the working class should emerge from a sentence prepared to accept a life of wage servitude. It is called rehabilitation and in the unreal world of prison it is in all ways the most savage fantasy of them all. 

Ivan

Between the Lines: The detestable Lord Wyatt (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the November 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who funds the Tories?

Here’s your starter for ten points. Fingers on buttons, now. Ready? Right: Which of the following give millions of pounds every year to the Conservative Party?

1. Elderly pensioners who want to be kind to others.
2. A secret group of freemasons based in Chingford.
3. Millionaires and multi-millionaires who stand to gain by policies which they think will make them richer and more able to exploit their wage slaves?

Do I hear a buzzer? Yes, you are right, it's number 3. Now for five more points - big scores here: on which TV programme was the above answer given? Was it

1. Neighbours - that everyday story of how millionaire capitalists are screwing the workers?
2. All Creatures Great and Small? (No, that was the Liberal Party conference you are thinking of. Take your hand off your buzzer and try again. And we'll have no crude jokes about Cyril Smith and David Steel either, thanks very much.)
3. Panorama - BBC1, 9.30pm, 1 October.

Yes it was 3 again. Now, for a bonus point, who can tell me which party has in it’s principles the statement that "all political parties are but the expression of class interests"? Is it

1. The Labour Party (Take your hand away from that buzzer - it should be obvious to everyone by now that they have no principles).
2. The Tory Party - (No, they claim, contrary to the clear evidence shown on Panorama that they are funded by big business, that they stand for everyone's interests.)
3. The Socialist Party. And once again - surprise, surprise - bring on Cilia Black to sing Imagine - the third answer was correct.

Millionaires devote money to a political party that they think will uphold their interests. The Tories will probably seek ways to punish the BBC for allowing such an obvious truth from being exposed. But who can blame the bosses for putting their money into the Thatcher mob.

The pity is that the workers do not follow their exploiters’ example and put their time and money into the only party which stands for their class interests: The Socialist Party.

The Detestable Lord Wyatt

Woodrow Wyatt is a detestable specimen of capitalist politics. He began life as a Labour faker. He is now a Tory Lord. He writes a weekly political column for the News of the World which is filled from end to end with crass, prejudiced, ill-informed, sickening bigotry.

Wyatt’s thoughts belong in the tabloid gutter where he is paid to pour out the kind of rubbish which leads workers to believe Thatcher's latest exercise in Orwellian speech: her promise at the Tory conference that the present government is committed to creating a "classless society".

Wyatt is a leading force behind a new law, currently going through parliament. The law professes to seek to eradicate bias in TV. In fact, it is the most powerful censorship law ever attempted by any government in relation to TV.

Even Lord Whitelaw has warned that the law would be a charter for the government to force documentary-makers to reflect its views. This new law, which will force the BBC and ITC to allow the government to reply to any adverse criticism of it (even from comedians or in factual news stories) will push TV further away from any claim to being an open and critical medium.

It will mean that while the likes of Wyatt can defame and attack bodies such as the trade unions in his weekly column with impunity, TV producers will be legally forbidden to attack the obnoxious ideas of the Wyatts of this world unless they are prepared to ask the government to have equal time to deny what has been said.

There is an irony - a bitter, tragic irony - in the fact that just as the Stalinism which gripped the media of one half of Europe is being de-clawed, here in Britain the neo-Stalinists of the Tory Party are sharpening their claws more than ever - all with more than a little help from their millionaire financial backers. 

Steve Coleman

Caught in the Act: Also rans (1990)

The Caught in the Act column from the February 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Also Rans

Just in case, in this eleventh year of Thatcher rule, there is any misunderstanding: there is only one Prime Minister. But there is no restriction on the number of those who regard themselves as admirably suited for the job and who plot their future accordingly. Indeed, when a new leader takes over it is often fascinating to learn how, from the humblest beginnings, they nurtured the hope to make it to the top of the greasy pole of politics, no matter how many necks they trod in the process. Nervous readers will have seen one implication of this: that lowly MPs like Harry Greenway and Terry Dicks cannot be counted out as future occupants of Number Ten, and they may hope that the best such publicity-crazed Members can hope for is to go down in history as what have been known, since a TV serial of the [same] name some years ago, as Nearly Men.

One of the most prominent of the Nearly Men of the Tory Party (whose ranks are thick with them) is Willie Whitelaw, whose removal from the running was so deliberately serpentine as to be notably less traumatic than that of most of his deposed colleagues. Whitelaw traded on his reputation for unflinching loyalty to his leader—although his recently published memoirs reveal an admiration for Thatcher which is, to say the least, qualified. He also depended for his survival on always trying to appear slightly less intelligent than he actually is, another way of saying that his image as the bluff, cheerful, kindly Teddy-bear of politics was a deception, a front behind which he carefully assessed his chances and plotted his moves.

But when his big chance came the Teddy-bear was shackled by that image; in the 1975 election for the Tory leadership Whitelaw did not stand in the first ballot because, it was said, it would have been disloyal to do so. In fact he was counting on Thatcher making a poor showing on the ballot and so promoting him as the front runner on the second ballot. But Thatcher's campaign had been too well organised and by the time Whitelaw entered the contest her bandwagon was unstoppable. So he didn't get to be Tory leader and all he had to console him was his loyalty to a new leader, his riches, his stately home, his estates and his cunning.

Whitelaw is a past master at the old trick of pretending that all his possessions are not really his but held in trust for the rest of us. This may cause him to give his servants and other employees a rather easier time than they might get from a less guileful employer; doubtless his retainers are well looked after in their old age—not thrown out into the Cumbrian snow when their working life is done, that sort of thing. But it is also a contribution to one of the most widespread and pernicious deceptions of capitalism: that private property does not exist, nor does class division, nor privilege, nor inequality. Whitelaw could practise that deception more successfully than most, perhaps because those he deceived really did believe that he was less intelligent than he really is.

Unsqueezed Pips

There is a Nearly Man in the Labour Party who is as cuddly as Whitelaw but who has a different reputation. Denis Healey ends his political career as a genial, wisecracking thug, an ex-member of the Communist Party (when it was the smart thing to be) turned into the scourge of Labour's leftwing (now that it is the even smarter thing to be). In his tireless defence of the interests of the British capitalist class—of their possession of the most destructive available military force, of their need on occasion to depress working class living standards—Healey was adept at getting himself in the news by encapsulating his ideas in punchy, gutter-press phrases. Defending his policies as Chancellor of the Exchequer against leftwingers who were, as usual, dismayed that capitalism cannot be run in a way contrary to its nature, Healey told his critics that they were "out of their tiny Chinese minds". He had clearly forgotten that, as newly-appointed Chancellor, he had himself stimulated those leftwingers with his promise to squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked.

However, when Labour lost the 1979 election it was apparent that, far from their pips being squeezed, the rich had actually increased their share of wealth; which meant that the poor's share had decreased. Towards the end of that government Healey laid down the policy that pay rises were to be no higher than 5 percent, which proved to be the last straw for the unions, and so conceived the Winter of Discontent. His programme of cuts in government expenditure made him the forerunner of Thatcher's Chancellors. At that time, Healey's famous sense of humour did not desert him; his Chief Secretary. Joel Barnett, later recalled how he would ask his underlings to think up "ripping wheezes" which were his name for disguised cuts in spending, measures designed to make it seem that the cuts were not happening. A year or so after Labour lost the election Healey, still in joking form, refused to cross a picket line, quipping that he did not believe in strike-breaking. It dod not seem to bother him that his government had used troops and Green Goddesses to break the fire service strike in 1977 and that his Prime Minister Callaghan had openly urged workers to cross picket lines whenever they felt like doing a bit of individual strike-breaking.

In spite of Healey's shabby record it is arguable that when Callaghan resigned the leadership after the 1979 election the Labour Party would have been well advised, by the gruesome standards of capitalist politics which say that the best leader is the one who, whatever the methods, wins the most elections, to have made Healey leader instead of Michael Foot. As it was, Healey was left as a Nearly Man, raking over his wretched memories, watching in probable irritation as Foot blundered into his party's worst defeat for fifty years.

A Future Nearly Man?

At this point Caught in the Act would like to indulge in a little forecasting about a possible future member of the Tory Nearly Men. Kenneth Clarke was put in charge of the Department of Health after what were acknowledged as some crude public relations blunders by his predecessors, notably the unlamented John Moore. Clarke, of the overweight, cigar-puffing nonchalance, had the reputation of a supremely accomplished communicator, just the man to convince us that it is not what the government does which damages us but the fact that the damage is made to sound attractive and restorative. At his great moment of opportunity Clarke's moon face beamed out from every newspaper as the man of the future, the next Prime Minister but one.

All that was changed by his handling of the dispute with the ambulance crews, which, as ambulance workers piled up an overwhelming public support, exposed Clarke as desperately inept at the crafty game of political deception. Memories were revived of Selwyn Lloyd's ill-advised battle with the nurses and what then happened to him in the Night of the Long Knives. Clarke's colleagues in the Cabinet—his rivals for the top job—were positively underwhelming in their support for him. Not for the first time, to be spoken of as a rising Tory was like being told that you have a terminal illness. We therefore nominate Kenneth Clarke, who has so grievously disappointed his admirers through his lack of guile, as the first Nearly man of the 1990s.

Nearly Men (so far there has been only one Nearly Woman—Barbara Castle when she was in charge of the Department of Employment and composed Labour's union-hobbling proposals in In Place of Strife) are nurtured on the assumption that things would have been different—better—if they had been the one to reach the top of the Greasy Pole. There is no evidence to sustain that for it is not personalties which count but the basis on which those personalities try to realise their ambitions. That is why all leaders fail to solve the problems characteristic of capitalism and why there are so many Nearly Men to trouble history with their piquant grumbles about What If and If Only.

Ivan

Brixton explodes (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

After the riots, the deluge. As the fires died in Brixton, the smouldering passions there were doused in words hosed out from all kinds of social and political analysts. Most of them claimed dolefully that they had been expecting just such a thing to happen for a long time; all of them were alert with theories about the causes, and thereby with suggestions to stop it happening again.

One who did not offer any analysis was the very man in the whole of Britain who might be expected to know more about civil disorder than anyone else—Home Secretary William Whitelaw. But apparently he had so little idea about what happened and why that he had to set up an enquiry to tell him. In charge of the enquiry is Lord Justice Scarman, who did similar jobs on the Red Lion Square confrontation in 1974 and Grunwick in 1977 and who, if he doesn't get a rest from it soon, may come to think that open air life in London is about as peaceful as the North Bank at Highbury when Spurs are playing there.

The analysis of the Brixton riots covered a pretty wide field. On the one hand there was the Labour leader of Lambeth Council, Ted Knight, whose role in the affairs of London becomes daily more obscure as people begin to wonder whether he is a councillor or a comedian. Knight declared (Guardian, 16/4/81):

We went to see the commander of the police tonight to demand that he withdraw his men. He won't do it.

And he then went on to advise:

... a future Labour government must dismantle the Metropolitan Police and replace it with a new force "responsible and answerable to the working class people".

Knight is one of those "practical socialists" who, while not actually being delirious, suffer from these dreams in which the police don't have to be a coercive, property protective force but can assert the minority privileges of capitalism in the interests of the unprivileged majority , This is a common sort of delusion among "practical socialists", who deceive themselves that capitalism doesn't have to be capitalism—and Knight's problem is that when he talks like this he is not joking.

On the other hand there was the reaction of Margaret Thatcher—and nobody is in any doubt by now about her role in capitalism's affairs. There was no surprise when Thatcher resisted the invitation to agree that pressures like racial discrimination and unemployment could have influenced the riots. And in between Knight and Thatcher there were the senseless trendies and liberals, like the teachers who tried to get the NUT Annual Conference to debate an emergency motion which called for the restoration of government grants for housing, education and social services.

One thing all these analyses hold in common is the notion that basically there is nothing wrong with capitalism. They all agree that the priority is not to abolish the system but to patch it up; any conflict between them is over how much patching up is needed, and where, and whether it can be afforded right now. The most visionary among them misconstrue Brixton as the result of malignant government policies and harsh police methods; the least visionary misinterpret the riots as .the malignant response to a benevolent, natural order of things.

From this it is clear that capitalism is OK; Whitelaw would hardly have chosen anyone who was likely to say differently. The Home Secretary is a tirelessly courteous man who resembles a friendly sea lion but that should deceive nobody. His plump, fatherly demeanour hides an iron determination to do as capitalism requires, at whatever cost to an undoubtedly kindly disposition.

How then should an enquiry into Brixton proceed? Well first there is the character of the place and the question of whether this is unique or even unusual. Brixton is not one of the world's beauty spots. Arterial roads suck in heavy traffic; there is the prison of grim infamy and, near the Town Hall, there is Rushcroft Road, where the fascists once jammed the streets with their malignant prejudices. The area was largely an Edwardian development and it has streets of substantial villas of that period, now run down and multi-occupied by the more depressed strata of workers. A study of the southern part of Lambeth in 1976 found 18 per cent of the housing in poor condition and 42 per cent of the people there in shared accommodation. These statistics represent workers whose deprivation is such that they must concentrate where the rents are lowest, even if that also means where the walls are damp, where the rats run and the floors are rotten. For these workers, survival takes a desperate toll; they are capitalism's social misfits or its unemployable—single parent families, weary pensioners and, inevitably, immigrants.

Like many parts of London, Brixton has immigration written into its history and by no means all the immigrants have come from what is evasively called the New Commonwealth. But it did receive the first imported workers from the West Indies in the early fifties, and they have stayed, raised families and are easily identified by other, similarly desperate workers venting their frustrations on the most accessible scapegoat. 

So, Brixton has become famous for tension as well as for its seedy buildings and its street crime. The Metropolitan Police say that Lambeth ranks second in their entire area for violent crime: in 1980 they recorded 2859 cases. In 1975 a police report stated that 80 percent of muggings—quick, violent, usually small scale street robberies—were committed by young blacks and that 85 per of the victims were whites. These figures were triumphantly used by racist organisations like the National Front, would not be anxious to emphasise inherently subjective element involved in any criminal statistics. Workers who were already in a panic at the decline in the fabric of the area might have concluded that they were surrounded by black thugs, that 80 per cent of the black youngsters were muggers. But the same report said that only 4 per cent of youngsters were involved in street crime, suggesting that the overwhelming majority of them keep to the law. 

Brixton's street crime gave it a deserved reputation for being about the most intensively policed part of London. It regularly returned the highest figures, outside the West End; for arrests for Sus, the offence which ropes people in not for actually committing a crime but for a couple of policemen think that they are contemplating one. Brixton has also had unusually frequent attention from the Special Patrol Group, which stopped thousands of people in the streets for spot checks and arrested hundreds of them. The police justified these tactics by a sharp fall in reported street but in the process, to some extent, they replaced the muggers' violence with their own. Contact with the SPG is not a tranquilising experience. Brixton bubbled like a volcano; the police tried even harder to hold the top down but in the end it had to blow up.

The riots were seen by many workers as authentication of the doom laden prophecies which have emanated from Enoch Powell, beginning with his infamous 1968 Birmingham speech in which he foresaw "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". Perhaps Powell feels that his reputation for rigourously logical thinking has been sustained. But there were others who also foretold the trouble which can be expected from crowding a specially depressed population into a decayed area and subjecting it to pressures such as racial discrimination, chronic poverty and state violence. Powell's contribution—if it can be described as such—is to blame the riots, and indeed much of the conditions in which the riots happened, onto the skin colour of the rioters. The famous logician Powell is here indulging in the fallacy of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which may be comfortable for him and which may appeal to the more ignorant and prejudiced among the working class but which is not logical or reasonable .

Even Scarman will probably be aware that Brixton is not unique, either now or in the past. In 19th century Britain, for example, the appetite for labour stimulated by the Industrial Revolution drew masses of Irish workers to this country. They came mainly to escape from the appalling famines in Ireland; with only their working abilities to sell for their living they came looking for employment, cramming into towns like Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. By 1851 they made up nearly 3 per cent of the population and, doing mainly unskilled work in textiles and building, they were in competition with equally desperate English workers for jobs and housing.

These were the roots of the discrimination which was practised against the immigrants, with "No Irish" signs up at .the windows and 'employers keeping English and Irish workers apart to avoid trouble at work. Even so there were riots and battles over many years, as one group of degraded workers fought with another over who should be exploited and repressed at one particular place and time. By the end of the century the Irish had become largely absorbed but they had been replaced as the butt of popular prejudice by the Jews, with an Enoch Powell—Tory MP Major Evans-Gordon—rousing mob ignorance for his own political advantage.

Then, as now, deluded workers were avoiding the reality that problems like slums, unemployment, poverty and competition for jobs cannot be laid at the door of an immigrant work force. Capitalism both creates the demand for that work force to be mobile and the urban concentrations in which it must try to survive. For capitalism works by the production of profit, which means by the exploitation of the majority of its people. For capitalism, profitable is beautiful: cheap is beautiful; so often slums are beautiful; conflict is beautiful; ugliness is beautiful. Brixton is beautiful.

And all of this, in 1981, can come into focus on the streets of some urban desert, when a black youngster is stopped by a policeman whose uniform gleams with the authority of one whose job is to protect the minority rights and privileges of the capitalist class which is responsible for the desert. If that same policeman also represents working class prejudices he may treat the youngster to some racist insults. If the focus becomes sharper, like the rays of the sun, there can be a conflagration in which those youngsters might feel that in some undefined way they are getting some of their own back as they riot and burn and loot.

And in that too there was an irony, in Brixton, because as a working class area, the shops specialise in the tawdry rubbish which is all that impoverished workers can afford. The looters were not getting their own back; in what they thought of as their freedom to take what they liked they were in fact affirming their own degradation. .

The conclusion of this enquiry then is that Brixton is not unique in either time or place. There have been many other, similar, riots in many parts of the world and there will be many more for as long as capitalism continues to exploit and repress the majority in the sordid interests of the minority. Here are the roots of Brixton's agony; they will not be approached by any official enquiry no matter how rigorous. The workers of Lambeth, of London and of the world are in a crisis which it is in their own power to end and they should need no judge to tell them what is wrong with society.

Ivan