The Greasy Pole
Down in Westminster there has been a certain amount of scrambling and scratching a little way up what was once memorably described by a Tory ex-minister as the Greasy Pole.
Those who were saddened by the abrupt decline in the fortunes of John Moore, who now attempts to run the degradation factory called the Department of Social Security, probably had mixed feelings about his recent effort to resuscitate his political career in a speech which set out to challenge the poverty lobby at what is perhaps their strongest point—the statistics of indictment. Just after the last election Moore was widely publicised as the Man Most Likely To Succeed Thatcher. There was no evidence that Moore realised how dangerous it was to be written up in that way—how likely it was to encourage a coalition of rivals keen to put the skids under him. It was whispered that his outrageous obsequiences to Thatcher had left him practically without friends and when he found himself in trouble he did not possess the cunning or the resources needed to fend it off. By the simple, instant method of chopping his job in two and giving him the smaller bit he was demoted and since then has been waiting his chance to stage a comeback.
That is why he recently announced that the idea of deep, widespread poverty is an absurdity. Moore relied on the fact that people on low incomes have been known to drink booze and smoke fags, to watch TV and keep what little food they can afford in a fridge. Harking back to the Tory obsession with Victorian England, he compared how the poor lived then with how we get by today and invited us to agree that poverty had therefore ceased to exist in any meaningful way. Well he would, wouldn't he? According to the Daily Mirror Moore lives in a detached house with a swimming pool, in a posh London suburb which could be sold now for about £850.000. Meanwhile thousands of people in London sit and watch TV in homeless accommodation, or in slums or on bleak estates. Thousands more exist in wall-to-wall stress in mortgaged homes, worrying about redundancy and the bills and what they will have to pay the building society for "their" home, asking themselves whether they can afford to go on holiday when they should get the roof fixed.
It was apparent that Moore's object was to appeal to the more callous and cynical elements in the Tory party and to make himself the centre of a popular debate about living standards. So it is as well to get one or two things clear now. Possession of things like a fridge and a TV is no gauge of poverty: the rich in Victorian England did not have such things but that fact did not make them poor. Poverty existed then and it exists now; the elements of how it expresses itself may change with time, in the same way as how riches express themselves also changes, but poverty endures because it is a necessary product of capitalism. This society is one of class division. beginning with the ownership and control by a minority of the means of life which leaves the rest—the majority—in poverty. That does not necessarily mean destitution, which is a condition lying at one extreme of poverty while the kind of wealth which Moore has access to lies on the way towards the other extreme.
If Moore wins the debate (which would not mean that he has the strongest argument) he may succeed in talking out concern for a desperate social problem which causes an enormous amount of despair, sickness and sheer misery. He may well have safeguarded his place in the Tory hierarchy and perhaps have inched a little way up the Greasy Pole. On such cynical calculations political careers are so often founded. The fact least worthy of attention is that real human beings—their conditions. their welfare their lives—are also at stake.
Labour Pains
After their disastrous election in 1983 the Labour Party decided that one of their priorities must be to change their image Out went the shuffling, bookish image of Michael Foot, who in spite of everything still managed sometimes to look as if he could be discomforted by reminders about political principles. In came the ambitious, unstudious image of Neil Kinnock, who spoke of principles as inconvenient obstacles to the achievement of power.
Well, Kinnock was by no means an instant success: in fact his liking for long, rambling, multi-syllabic interventions in the Commons quickly won him the title of the Welsh Windbag. Of himself he seemed quite incapable of exploiting that part of working class ignorance which insists that leaders are needed to organise society, to plan our lives for us,tto take decisions and to tell us what to do.
At that time the Labour Party might have ditched Kinnock and gone back to looking for the kind of leader who would bring in the votes just as Wilson did in the 1960s. Instead they chose to publicise him as the ideal of leadership, in cunningly crafted TV material, in carefully protected exposure and in rallies of the party faithful which were staged managed in a manner not unlike those of the pre-war fascists. The idea was that, whatever kind of person he is, however great or small his abilities, Kinnock was to be presented to us as the all-wise, all-caring, all-knowing father of the nation who only had to be allowed into Number Ten in order to look after us all for all time.
There must, however, be more to it than coming across as an unrelenting Mr Nice Guy. Labour's publicity team know that it is also essential, if the votes are to be won. to be Mr Finger-on-the-Button-and-Willing-To-Push-lt-lf-The-Situation-Demands. This is, they tell us, because we need to be protected from rampaging hordes of foreign invaders who are so envious of the British Way Of Life that they want to move in and take it over complete. In fact the reason is a lot less romantic: the button will be pushed, by Kinnock if he is prime minister at the time, if the interests of the British ruling class demand it.
So Kinnock is now presented to us as a leader with a core of steel. The significant thing about all this—about all the policy changes which are clearly coming in the Labour Party and the accompanying publicity blitz—is that Kinnock's personal reputation is welded onto that of the policies. Labour's present tactics demand that the workers cannot have one without the other. But what if the voters—the working class of this country—take the attitude that if there is no obvious difference between the Tories and Labour there is no reason to change from one to the other and therefore elect Thatcher for yet another period in power? In that event Labour's new policies will disappear, along with their leader, into the chaos of recrimination and desperate searchings for other policies, other leaders.
While all this goes on. the capitalist social system continues its grisly life. That means that the class division, with a minority of parasites living sumptuous lives off the backs of the useful majority, will continue. It means that millions will die quite unnecessarily, in wars, of avoidable diseases or of hunger. It means that millions will suffer the unrelenting stress of the poverty which we have to call ordinary life. It means millions existing in slums. The list of the crimes which capitalism commits against the human race is very, very long and the indictment of the system is unanswerable. From that viewpoint—from the viewpoint of human interests—what is happening in the Labour Party is glaringly exposed for the cynical futility that it is.
Ivan
1844 not 1884
For some inexplicable reason each time we have wanted to say 1844 in the last two issues this has come out as 1884. The title of Engels book (April issue, p.60) was The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and the Tory Act authorising the nationalisation of the railways (May issue. p.77) was passed in 1844.
Editors.
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