A matter of timing (1987)

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

A long holiday on a remote island is recommended to anyone who is not obsessively interested in speculation about the date of the next general election. Until the Prime Minister ends the agony by naming the day we shall be harassed by political correspondents picking over the latest opinion poll, by the pollsters asking their irrelevant questions and by politicians whose speeches have taken on the urgency and concentration which was once supposed to influence the thoughts of prisoners on the eve of their execution.

No member of the Cabinet can relax for a moment because everything they say. everything they do. everywhere they go, will be minutely scrutinised for clues. The hysteria has already extended beyond the political field. Take, for example, the recent marriage of failed trainee accountant and rally driver Mark Thatcher to a millionairess from Texas. This union of two heavily-moneyed parasites. a boring and unremarkable event, could not avoid being an element in the speculation about the election. Had the rich and happy pair, it was asked, been rushed to the altar by Tory Party planners to soften Margaret Thatcher's image as the Iron Lady by making her a prospective grandmother?

Of course this might be all just clean fun, to keep the media hacks busy between the end of the Wapping dispute and the announcement of the next royal pregnancy, were it not for the reasons why the timing of an election is considered so important. Indeed, in some cases the outcome of an election is said to have been decided by the day chosen for it. In 1970, for example. Wilson's government was widely assumed to be on course for a third term of office. The original slim majority of 1964 had been enlarged in 1966, in an election fought on the slogan You Know Labour Government Works — which should have been enough to frighten away millions of voters. The local elections of May 1970 were encouraging for Labour and the polls predicted a victory for them at a general election. Apart from that, Ted Heath was some way behind Wilson in the grubby contest to appear as the sort of leader workers admire, to tell them what to do. to blame them for the politicians' impotence to deal with capitalism's problems and generally to exploit their political naiveté. Wilson's ambition to purge the Labour Party of its professed objective of social revolution and instead establish it as the alternative government of British capitalism, seemed close to achievement.

George Meddemmen

There had, of course, been one or two problems — like economic and financial crises — but these are faced by all governments. There had been battles with the workers — notably the seamen — over wages and conditions of work. Living standards had been persistently threatened through rising prices; but these had been prominent features of British capitalism since Labour first won power in 1945. The Wilson government had carried on with providing the British armed forces with the nuclear power of super-annihilation; they had supported the American government's ugly struggle in Vietnam and, aware that the British capitalist class had large investments in Nigeria, and got ten per cent of their oil from there, they backed the Nigerian government's genocidal war against Biafra. It was, as they say, not a pretty picture but neither was it untypical of the necessary actions of the governments of capitalism. The British working class, it was predicted, were satisfied enough with Labour s record to give them another spell in power.

But Wilson, who was supposed to be a master of timing, got it wrong, which led to three years of Tory rule under the despised and derided Ted Heath. At the time the surprise result was attributed partly to the publication, just before polling day, of some statistics which showed that British capitalism was not doing as well in competition with its foreign rivals as the Labour government had hoped. Few things are so likely to undermine the workers' confidence in a government as the suspicion that they are not looking after the interests of the ruling class as competently as they might. There were other factors, not the least of them the bewildered disillusionment which six years of governing capitalism had stimulated in the Labour Party. At times the Party seemed on the verge of disintegration, with the spectacular defections among leaders such as George Brown and Ray Gunter and with the Party at large rent apart over Biafra, Vietnam, nuclear weapons, the unions and so on. Under this pressure Wilson, who had once been lauded as Labour 's man of magic, became exposed as a trickster.

It was apparently even more difficult for the next Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, to fix the date for his one and only attempt to hold on to power. Callaghan's government had been in continual trouble, trying to hold down wages in a series of battles with striking workers — notably the firemen in the winter of 1977. In mid-1978 the unions gave notice that enough was enough, that the pressure from lower paid workers could not be contained much longer. The sewage workers, lorry drivers, local authority manual workers and hospital employees came out in a series of much-publicised strikes which ruined Labour's strategy of wage restraint through the co-operation of the unions. Some of the strikes were supported by workers not directly involved in a dispute but who joined a picket line anyway. How badly the government were shaken was evident when Callaghan — who had risen to power through the unions and who was once, briefly, regarded as a left-winger — said in the Commons:

 I assert very clearly that everyone has the right to work and everyone has the right to cross a picket line. It is not a sacred object and I hope they will do so. (Guardian, 24 January 1979). 

In the same speech he stated, no doubt to an appreciative audience of Thatcherite Tories, that the expenditure limits fixed by the government could not be exceeded and that for private industry the "ultimate discipline" was that workers could lose their jobs — which must have been confusing to anyone who took seriously his mouthings about the "right to work".

In October 1978, in a speech in which he was expected to announce the date of the election, Callaghan committed himself to hanging on into 1979. He must have been hoping that things could not possibly get worse. That was the time when the present economic recession was gathering momentum; under that Labour government unemployment went up — doubled — between 1974 and 1979, from about 600,000 to about 1,200,000 and their response was the established one of cutting back on investment. Labour's Chancellor, Denis Healey, thus gained the reputation as the originator of Thatcherite monetarism. Class society and poverty, after five years of Labour government, was as evident as ever. There were still, as Callaghan himself admitted:

   . . . men and women struggling with low pay, mothers stretching the household budget to make ends meet, youngsters in search of a job . . . patients queuing for a hospital bed or families without a decent home . (Foreword to Labour s 1979 election programme, The Labour Way Is The Better Way).

As it happened the choice of date was taken out of Callaghan’s hands when a defeat in the Commons forced him to call an election; for some time they had clung to power through sordid compromise deals, at first with the Liberals and then with the Nationalists. At least, he might have reflected, he could not be accused of turning victory into defeat through bad timing and the leader of so unpopular a government, which was duly cast aside by the voters, needed whatever consolation he could get.

It was simpler for the Tories in 1983, if we are to believe Cecil Parkinson, who masterminded their campaign. In an article in the Guardian (24 November 1986) Parkinson wrote that Thatcher chose the 1983 polling day after the Tory leaders had spent a day discussing the last local election results and studying two opinion polls they had taken in key marginal seats. It was, he said, a matter of common sense — and nothing is more beloved of politicians, for common sense justifies every human excess of capitalism, from nuclear annihilation to mass starvation. And of course Tory common sense paid off — in spite of millions unemployed and all that meant in terms of even more desperate poverty, in spite of the fact that the numbers living at or below the official poverty line had increased by millions between 1979 and 1983, in spite of the tightening of the screw on those still in work, in spite of the slaughter of the Falklands. . . .

George Meddemmen

It is, to put it mildly, depressing that millions of workers should vote for political parties who indulge in such blatant, cynical manipulation, whether Labour’s attempts at subtlety or Tory common sense. In 1979 Callaghan delayed polling day in the uncertain hope that workers were so foolish and irresponsible that only a few months were needed for them to blot out the miserable memory of his government and then, perhaps, be ready to fall for some vote-catching gimmick. Thatcher in 1983 should have been surprised that deeper poverty and the jingoistic hysteria of the Falklands had not destroyed her chances. But she saw that workers actually seemed hungry for more of her style of capitalism and she took the opportunity to exploit this.

If the analysts have got it right — if it is true that a few months' difference in polling day can affect how workers vote — the whole exercise is exposed for its futility and irrelevance. A working class who value their vote — their power to change society — so lightly will continue to vote for capitalism, switching from Labour to Tory and back again or even perhaps, to the Alliance. They are not about to make any fundamental change in society, to eliminate the disfigurements which capitalism brings. Such swings are brought about through the most trivial changes in capitalism, such as a set of trading figures; basically the system does not change. The problems we face now, which are the raw material of election promises, are those which have been faced by generations of workers and they will be eradicated only through social revolution.

Because capitalism does not change fundamentally. neither does the case for its abolition. We know why socialism must be established, and how, and who will do it. The one remaining question is: when.

Ivan