Being prepared
Ignoring the persistent evidence from the by-elections, the Labour Party is doggedly drawing up its plans to be the next government of British capitalism.
They are well aware that every government faces the difficulty of holding back pay rises. Past Labour administrations have tried to do this through exhortation, threats, legal controls and financial sanctions. Their policies have often brought them into spectacular conflict with the workers and sometimes with the unions as well.
Each time they are in opposition they claim to have learned from these experiences. Never again, they swear, will they attempt a frontal assault on workers' living standards; in future they will organise prosperity for everyone through wage restraint with the unions’ agreement, a peaceable surrender without a shot being fired or an angry word spoken at the Despatch Box.
Harold Wilson called one example of this tactic the Social Contract and the implied promise to bring order into wage negotiations where once there had been fractious chaos helped him back to power. Of course things didn’t work out as Wilson had promised and his successor Callaghan had to muddle through the winter of discontent.
But despite these grim memories, Labour is undaunted. They have a liaison committee with the TUC which has recently negotiated an agreement on wage control with the principal unions. It is all there in a working paper and the policy is called, not the Social Contract any more, but the National Economic Assessment.
This latest piece of trickery promises to give the unions new “rights" while emphasising their “responsibilities” to take account in their claims of economic priorities as identified by the National Economic Assessment.
In simpler terms, this means the unions would agree to hold back their claims if they conflicted with the priorities of a future Labour government. And no one can now be in any doubt about what those priorities are — a more profitable British industry, more competitive British exports, a more intense exploitation of British workers.
Out of office, and looking very unlikely to be in power again for a very long time, the Labour Party is still laying its plans to run British capitalism. Their problem, as ever, is that although this can be done in only one way — in the interests of the British capitalist class — it must be made to look as if it will benefit everyone
Jolly Swagman
If Barry Humphries got it right, Australia is a place populated by excessively bone-headed, obsessively macho sports. And if that is true the well-publicised reputation of their new Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, as a one-time bibulous, roistering womaniser may have helped him win the recent general election. Votes have been cast, and elections won, on flimsier grounds.
But more to the point was probably Hawke's promise to attend to the problems of the Australian economy with policies which would unify the people there. Australia is no longer a golden land of opportunity, beckoning to British workers exhausted by the exploitation and the weather and mistakenly believing that all their troubles would vaporise under the Australian sun. Unemployment there now stands at ten per cent and prices are rising sharply. For the Australian worker, life gets harder and harder.
Hawke’s predecessor, Malcolm Fraser, was a Prime Minister in the Thatcher mould. He did himself no good by imposing a wages pause without consulting the trade unions or trying to win their co-operation.
As we all know from experience, Labour governments aim to do it differently. While it is their object also to keep wages in check they at first negotiate on this with the unions. If they get an agreement, it is usually given some deceptive name like Harold Wilson’s Social Contract, which is supposed to convince us that frozen wages under a Labour government are less icy than the same thing under the Tories.
Bob Hawke, who came up through the trade union movement in Australia, will quickly use his experience and standing to get the unions' compliance in wage restraint. The Australian workers will be told that this is in their interests because, of course, a Labour government would not have it any other way.
Another example of the style in which Hawke will "unify” the country was his statement that the Prince and Princess of Wales will be given a dignified welcome when their imminent visit to Australia takes place. These two parasites personify the dominant class in a grievously divided society; they stand for privilege above the majority’s poverty. To welcome them is to condone a disunited society.
Like all Labour leaders. Hawke came in on a wave of optimism and on the prayer that things will be better hereafter. He has made an unusually rapid start in exposing these hopes for the futilities that they are.
Best forgotten
In the city of dreaming spires, a raging controversy disturbs statuesque scholars at their books. Was Michael Heseltine, when he was a student at Oxford in 1954, a supporter of the campaign to ban the hydrogen bomb? If he was it could be highly embarrassing to the man who now has the job of putting the government case against CND.
According to the Guardian, everybody who was anybody at Oxford at the time was in the campaign. Historian Raphael Samuel, who was then secretary of the university Communist club, says that Heseltine was more than just a member of the committee against the H bomb — he drafted the petition opposing the bomb and was scorned as a stooge of Moscow as a result.
Jeremy Isaacs, who so benefited from his time at Oxford that he now masterminds the production of drivel on Channel 4, says Heseltine attended a meeting but refused any further involvement. Tory MP Julian Critchley does not remember the future Defence Secretary being involved.
And Heseltine himself? "I really don't recall . . .” he said. “If the petition called for multilateral disarmament, well we are all in favour of that."
This problem with the Defence Secretary's memory is unsettling. He is, after all, the politician responsible for the nuclear warheads and delivery systems which have gone on growing worse and worse in spite of all those protests from angry undergraduates. We don't want him ordering them to be fired off in a spasm of absent-mindedness.
But Heseltine's forgetfulness is also understandable. It is common for people who are interested in reforming capitalism rather than abolishing it to become zealous about all manner of causes and campaigns. There is no lack to choose from: nuclear weapons, war, famine, poverty, dictatorships. massacres, demands to free some people and to lock others up . . .
No self-respecting reformist refuses an invitation to sign up in support of such causes, unheedful of the fact that this is a waste of time which could be contributed to the struggle to abolish the root cause of all the problems.
And of course much of this zeal is expended at universities, where there is youthful energy associated with adolescent delusions about possessing élite intellectual qualities. It is quite understandable, that among all that excitement they should fail to remember every campaign they put their name to, and how and when and why.
If Heseltine was against the bomb in 1954, it need not disturb him now when he wants to keep it. Both attitudes are indefensible and both are best forgotten in favour of the idea of a basic change in society.
Double Act
The Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act is a misnomer because it does not prevent terrorism and. since it has lasted for nearly ten years, begins to look anything but temporary. So unsuccessful is the Act in stopping terrorism (which means guerilla acts committed by the other side) that, according to Home Secretary Whitelaw, 1982 was a very bad year for bomb incidents in England. So untemporary are its provisions that Whitelaw intends to introduce another Bill to replace the present Act — and presumably to give it permanence.
In the recent debate on renewing the Act for another year the Labour Party were quite clear that it is an assault on civil liberty. Whitelaw’s shadow Roy Hattersley protested about the harassment of Irish people which the Act encourages — “. . . part of a movement towards a more authoritarian society. That move is wrong in principle, and as far as combatting terrorism is concerned, wrong in practice".
Labour MP Reg Freeson weighed in with his description of the Act: “. . . the very kind that political terrorists in this country or any other wish to see a democratic state give way to”.
There is of course some validity to these arguments; for example the Act allows the police to arrest and to hold suspects for long periods without charging them or bringing them into a public court. According to Hattersley, some 85 per cent of those arrested and held under the Act are released without being charged.
But the points were just as valid in 1974, when the Act was rushed through parliament in the hysterical aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings. It was no less a threat to personal liberty, no less a political weapon for the IRA, then than it is now.
The only thing to have changed is the party which is in power. It was a Labour government, with a “liberal", "civilised” Home Secretary in Roy Jenkins, which passed the Act and which had it renewed each year until they lost power in 1979. In those days Hattersley felt able to vote for the Act.
In the case of Freeson there may well be another motivation. His constituency has a large number of Irish voters and he is under some pressure in reselection. And of course when they are out of power the Labour Party has always felt free to criticise many of the measures which they took when they were the government.
This latest squalid manoeuvre may win Labour a few votes from workers who are ignorant about where their interests lie. For the likes of Hattersley and Freeson, that is justification enough.
1 comment:
Reg Leeson was deselected before the 1987 General Election, and was replaced by Ken Livingstone.
Btw, that's the April 1983 Socialist Standard now kicked into touch.
Post a Comment