Running Commentary: Labour tries again (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour tries again

Loud and nostalgic fanfares sounded along the Walworth Road when the Labour Party recently revealed its super new programme called The New Hope for Britain. Loud because Labour needs to be optimistic and it is promising nothing less than the secure prosperity of British capitalism, unemployment down to one million, everyone leading a much happier life and so on — and in any case because they are hoping that if they can compose an attractive programme enough workers will be deceived by it to put them back into power. Nostalgic because this sort of event has happened so many times before — the unveiling of a clutch of new fashioned slogans, new pledges, new futilities, often by the same old hands.

On nuclear disarmament, which both Labour and Tories seem to want to make a prominent issue in the next election, the programme offers a very sticky piece of fudge:

  We must use unilateralist steps . . . to secure multilateral solutions on the international level. Unilateralism and multilateralism must go hand in hand . . . we are against moves that would disrupt our existing alliances, but are resolved on measures to enable Britain to pursue a non-nuclear defence policy.

This craftily worded passage means everything or nothing, according to taste; read in one way it would satisfy Denis Healey, in another it would reassure a member of CND. A future Labour government which kept British nuclear arms, remained in NATO, supported an American war such as in Vietnam (as happened with past Labour governments) could claim that it had followed the programme to the letter.

A similar duplicity, not to say audacity, is evident when the programme comes to industrial relations and wages. A Labour government, it says, ".  . . will not . . . return to the old policies of government- imposed wage restraint” — without acknowledging that those "old policies” were imposed by Labour governments, usually after they had promised not to impose them.

Labour is again setting its hopes on being able to control wages, as the British capitalist class requires of any government, through the voluntary co-operation of the unions and the employers in yet another gimmicky-titled proposal — the New Economic Assessment. There is no reason to believe that this would be any more successful than previous gimmicks. Its failure is assured by the fact that, like its predecessors, it rests on the assumption that there is a unity of interests between capitalists and workers. If only both sides can be brought to a rational acceptance of this unity (by a Labour government, of course) then it can be cemented into economic order and prosperity for everyone.

There is only one problem in this; there is no such unity. Capitalism is a society of class conflict. New Hope for Britain? No hope for Labour.


Arms for sale

Since the world was plunged from war to peace in 1945, millions of people have died in armed conflicts. Of all parts of the earth nowhere has been more plagued by tension and war than the Middle East. But the victims can take consolation that they did not die and suffer in vain. For war is always good news for those capitalists who have investments in the arms trade.

The Ministry of Defence recently chartered a cross-channel ferry, converted it into a floating exhibition hall, had it loaded up with tanks, guns, armoured cars, shells, uniforms and the like and sent it on a sales-promotion tour to the Middle East. The ship visited Kuwait. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf States. As is usually the case, a war is in process there at present but this did not deter the sales effort; the very instability of the region makes it a fertile market for weapons and the states where the ship called have a combined arms budget of some £15 billion.

Any twinges of doubt about the venture (weapons sales people are human, like the rest of us and therefore also liable to such lapses) were put to rest by a representative of the trade organisation, the Defence Manufacturers’ Association:

  It went to that part of the world because there is still money out there and they need to get their armed forces in shape . . . I can say categorically that our members were extremely satisfied with the number of contacts they made.

Arms manufacturers have often been accused of causing war but in fact the roots of this scourge are in the basis of capitalist society. The makers and sellers of weapons merely (merely!) take their chances to exploit a market, to realise a profit, to accumulate more capital — just like the makers and sellers of any other type of commodity. People may die in extra abundance through this activity, but of what consequence is that when the overriding priority is to ensure the books balance on the side of profit?


Doctor, Doctor

The tentacles of this recession reach out to grasp many people who not so long ago might have consoled themselves that they were unreachable by its effects. There are plenty of ex-managers, ex-“white collar” workers, on the dole now and they are looking like being ex-whatever-it-was for a very long time.

As a case in point. Department of Health and Social Security figures published in March showed that over 2000 doctors are now out of work and the figure is rising; a year ago there were 1000 and in 1981 between 500 and 700. In their enforced leisure, the unemployed doctors might reflect on what this tells them about their class position in capitalist society. Their prospective patients might also ponder some important facts.

Doctors are not out of work because there is no demand for them, through the fact that everyone is getting rapid and effective medical treatment whenever it is needed. In cities like London there can often be severe problems in finding a doctor who can fit you into an already crowded caseload. Unless it is an emergency, few people who need to see their doctor can do so immediately. Young, newly-qualified doctors have to shoulder a fearsome burden of overwork and long hours — which can’t be to the benefit of the patients.

So what about the standards of health care? In March the Lancet published a league table of the various Health Authority Areas, based on the numbers of deaths from diseases which with proper treatment would not have resulted in death. From this evidence, anyone who is ill would do well to keep away from Walsall, Bolton, Sandwell and Wolverhampton in that order. The deficiencies in health care which the survey shows up could be eased by an injection of doctors but health authorities, like everything else under capitalism, have to work to a budget.

What it amounts to is that people suffer illness unnecessarily, and when they are ill their discomfort is prolonged, or they die, unnecessarily, because it is uneconomic to provide adequate care and treatment. The fact that this exists alongside thousands of doctors who have been trained and are humanly useful is comment enough on the grisly, inhuman priorities of capitalism.

War, glorious war

All war is glorious, with exciting battles and charges and explosions and when the warriors come home there are bands and celebrations with pretty uniforms and shiny medals for them for being so brave. And Thatcher and her henchmen keep telling us that the Falklands was an especially glowing example of this, of courage and professional militarism.

Of course there is also the little matter of people getting killed but when that happens their remains can be laid out in green cemeteries with neat, parade ground rows of crosses which make war seem bloodless and controlled and really rather tranquil. The sort of place their families can visit and observe and, through the very peace and order of the place, feel that perhaps it is not so bad after all.

When the families of servicemen who were killed in the Falklands went to visit their graves last month, the government took good care to remove an object which gave ample evidence that war is horrifying, agonising and obscene. The burnt shell of the Sir Tristram, the troopship which caught fire from Argentine bombs and where 51 men died and many others suffered fearsome burns and injuries, had lain at Port Stanley. It served as the rat-infested home of a couple of hundred soldiers and it was one of the first sights to greet anyone coming into the harbour there.

If the bereaved families had seen that ship, they would have had it brought home to them that war is not glorious. They might even have asked themselves what it is all about, why it happened, whether there were reasons for it other than Thatcher’s crude jingoism. They might have wondered whether those men died for the interests of one side in a wider strategic and political struggle and to protect the interests of the few who really own the Falklands.

Such doubts strike at the very basis of workers’ support for the wars of capitalism. Leaving nothing to chance, the authorities had the Sir Tristram towed out of Stanley to a hidden destination, where the families could not see it. This was no act of humanity. The excesses of capitalism are such that they can be defended only by a continuing deception.

Getting it wrong

George Schwartz, who was Economics Editor of the Sunday Times for 27 years, probably felt at home in Thatcher's Britain since it claims to operate on principles which Schwartz propounded as near sacred. For Schwartz was a simple believer in capitalism and thought, tenaciously, that the profit motive was one of the great rationalities of the human race. Left to itself, without the state barging in with subsidies, quotas, taxes and the rest, it would work to provide prosperity everywhere, if rather more of it in some places than others.

To mark his death in April, the Sunday Times (a very different newspaper now from the one which Schwartz worked on) republished one of his pieces, which first appeared in November 1949:

  To quarrel with accounting is to quarrel with economic calculation, and that is to quarrel with Providence itself for not having supplied everything in such abundance that it can be had for the asking. In a world conditioned by scarcity, accounting is the tool of rational choice and action.

These cosy beliefs were once put to the rigorous test of a debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain — at about the time Schwartz wrote that article. It took place at the old Kensington Town Hall, which has now been partly demolished, to the anguish of preservationists but strictly in accordance with the principles of cost-effectiveness of which Schwartz was such a firm defender. A large audience heard Schwartz attempt to defend capitalism by attacking the Labour Party and its nationalisation schemes. At the time the Attlee government were deeply in trouble, wrestling with the problems of reviving British capitalism after the war.

Now at almost every SPGB meeting, in those days, speakers had to spend a lot of time disabusing the minds of people who thought the party either was, or had some connection with, the Labour Party. The economics guru of the Sunday Times had no more original an opposition to offer than socialists could get at any street corner, any night of the week. When the socialist speaker firmly removed this sole prop of Schwartz’s argument, the famous man adopted the tactic of trying to put it back in place, refusing to accept the weight of evidence against him. It was a pathetic performance and Schwartz left the hall with his ignorance and prejudices obviously intact.

He may have felt at home in Thatcher’s Britain but, if he ever bothered to check, he must have been disturbed to realise that the socialist case is as relevant and forceful today as when he avoided facing it over thirty years ago.