Sting in the Tail: Accident? What accident? (1996)

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

Accident? What accident?

When the oil tanker Sea Empress ran aground and spewed about half its 150,000 tonnes of crude oil, we didn’t view it as an “accident”. This sort of thing is inevitable inside capitalism.

For 10 days tugs toiled in vain as a 100-mile oil slick polluted the Welsh coast. The Government has promised an enquiry as environmentalists talk about the loss of wildlife, the marine food-chain, despoiled beaches and fishing ruined for years to come.

  “They are cynical about the Government's forthcoming report on the catastrophe, conscious that some key recommendations of the independent Donaldson report—commissioned after the Braer disaster—have been deliberately ignored. Crucial among the omissions was a Government decision not to station a giant salvage tug on the Western Approaches ” (Observer, 25 February).

Funny old game

It is a sad, wet afternoon in Coketown. In the bar they are showing a re-run of yesterday’s game. The City are playing United. Two groups of workers are sitting at opposite sides of the bar. They are throwing insults, slogans and empty-headed songs at each other.

A well-dressed gent enters the bar with a notebook in his hand. He says “Two days’ work for two joiners, a glazier and a spark. Who is available?”

Football is forgotten. Sunday afternoon pretence is dropped as they crawl to the man in the nice suit. He signs up two City and two United fans. The others retreat into their corners. In subdued voice, they vainly try to regain their former show of arrogance. The man with the notebook goes into the lounge for his double brandy.

Football may be a funny old game but capitalism is a tragic, ball-breaking society.


The hypocrisy game

Politicians, priests and pundits are all concerned at present about selling arms to dictators. What hypocrisy!

Capitalism is based on exploitation, selling commodities and realising as big a profit as possible. There is no other way of running the system.

“The Business”, the financial section of the Observer (18 February), got it right when it stated “The recommendation that parliament scrutinise arms exporters is a pious hope for a murky industry.”

The Observer added:

  “Digby Walker, defence economist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, estimates world military expenditure totalled S800 billion (£500 billion) or 2.6 percent of economic output in 1994."

We are talking big bucks here and no British government is going to restrict British arms exporters (now reckoned to be the second or third biggest in the world) from getting on the gravy train.

The dead, maimed and blinded workers can expect no mercy from that quarter.


Flights of fancy

Colin Welland is a lad of many parts. Actor and screen writer, he also writes a weekly column in the Observer on Rugby League football. On 18 February he waxed so lyrical on the Salford defeat of Wigan that he even became a social anthropologist!

  “If theatre is the mirror of life, sport is its metaphor. In team combat sports in particular we play out of our system all that tribal aggression which, like it or not, is our birthright, testing our resolution, valour, our fleetness of foot and our flights of fantasy. ”

There is no such thing as inborn tribal aggression. Indeed all the evidence seems to point to the history of early humanity being based on co-operation rather than aggression. Colin Welland would be better restricting his “flights of fantasy” to reporting rugby.


The good old days

The present leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, is tipped to be a front-runner in the Russian presidential election.

In a two-day conference in Davos for foreign businessmen he harked back to the good old days of the USSR and promised future investors a safe haven for their investments:

  “I have known times when all debts were paid on time and no foreign investors wondered whether they were going to be paid. We intend to create conditions in which confidence can flourish." (Guardian, 5 February).

Whether Yeltsin, Zyuganov, or some other job-hunting politician wins the day the Russian working class can be assured it will be business as usual.


The human zoo

The Tory Government, claiming to be the party of law and order, and keen to appear to be doing something about crime, have had a new prison for women built near Bristol. To save money the 80 cells measure six foot square and are to accommodate prisoners for 14 hours a day.

Women’s crime is seen as a growing threat to society by the Government, although according to the Observer (25 February):

  “The 2,150 female prison population has risen by 40 percent in two years, but a third of the women are in jail for defaulting on fines or non-payment of television licences."

These licence-dodging desperadoes are to be put in cells that are unsuitable for animals in a zoo, according to Jeremy Mallinson, director of Jersey Zoo:

  “There is no way I would countenance shutting up a gorilla, a chimp or an orang-utan in conditions such as these. It would not be allowed in any professional zoo."