Diary of a Capitalist (1979)

The Diary of a Capitalist column from the July 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday

I am staying the weekend with my old friends, the Tavistocks, at Woburn Abbey. The Duke and Duchess of Bedford live in France now, so their eldest son and heir, the Marquis of Tavistock, runs the Abbey. Went for a little spin in an Aston Martin Lagonda that the Marchioness bought the Marquis last year as a seventeenth wedding anniversary present, for £32,000. Nice to see couples who remember these occasions with little gifts. It’s the thought that counts. (Daily Telegraph, 29.5.79)

Monday

A man at Sotheby’s was telling me they sold a case of Romance Conti ’71 recently — a fine wine, but not yet very rare — for £850, and another auction house, Bonham’s, got £580 a case for some ’53 Cheval Blanc (The Observer, 11.2.79). The highest price Sotheby’s ever got was last year, when a Washington wine merchant gave them £8,300 for a single bottle of Lafite. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up with a wealthy friend of mine in California: last time I visited him, he showed me round his bomb-proof cellar shelter, lined with bins of rare burgundies and clarets. After all, if you can afford to buy protection against high explosive in a future attack while the less privileged are dying up above, you might as well enjoy yourself while you wait for the All-Clear.

Tuesday

Lunched with a friend at his club. A chap at the next table was sounding off about how ‘those of us in the upper class’ should stick together. Now I know for a fact that he owns virtually nothing — nothing, that is, that brings him in any income; his pay is twelve or fifteen thousand a year, no more, as a manager in someone else’s factory.

“He’s just a worker’’, I said to my friend, “merely a glorified foreman. If the business closes down, he gets the sack like the rest of them.”

But my friend — who is one of us; he owns companies, like I do — pointed out that this chap’s ideas were all to the good. And of course, on reflection I had to agree. Lots of these white-collar workers, office-wallahs, ‘professional men’, almost anyone who doesn’t actually stand at a factory bench all day, are convinced they are a cut above all the others — all the artisans and worse who dirty their hands, and clock on, and get paid on a Friday. And being convinced they’re different, they feel hostile to the other lot, refusing to co-operate voluntarily in any way, and probably vote Conservative, while most of the people with overalls and dirty hands vote Labour. As my friend says, it’s just what we want! If they all realised they were workers (with different sized wages and salaries and different stresses and strains, but all workers) they would get together and overthrow capitalism, and build a system which benefitted themselves, not us. It’s the old story — divide and rule.

Wednesday

Day out at Epsom, for the Derby. Not a cheap day, what with the admission to the stand, the grub and the champers, and my contributions to the bookies. I had a pony on every race, and didn’t pick a winner. It cost me £216 just to get there, a return flight by helicopter from Central London. Still, as a man on my flight said (Daily Telegraph, 7.6.79), it was worth it just to see all the struggling humanity below, stuck in the traffic jams.

Thursday

Bought a grouse moor in Northumberland — shooting rights over 5,491 acres, and a hill farm of 491 acres. Well over a thousand brace have been shot in the average year; last year’s bag was 1,320 brace. The paper (Daily Telegraph, 1.6.79) said it was bought “on behalf of a British buyer” — that was me. It’s probably an economy in the long run; it’s getting very expensive even for a couple of weeks’ shooting in the autumn. We’re all entitled to relax some time.

Friday

The newspapers that 1 and my friends own naturally keep up our campaign about how all-powerful the unions are getting, in order to make absolutely sure they never get any real power, and also to provide a handy scapegoat for any worker who is unhappy with his necessarily property-less position in society. Hitler, if I remember rightly, ran a similar campaign about how powerful the Jews were getting, for the same reasons. But I sometimes come across fellow-capitalists who have actually begun to half-believe their own propaganda. It’s important for the prosperity of capitalism that we distinguish between what we tell the admass, and what we know are the facts.

Take several news items in the last day or two. The bakers’ union annual conference decided to hold a ballot before calling another strike, an acknowledgement of the failure of last winter’s strike, which the employers won hands down. The Tower Hamlets social workers decided to end their ten-month strike; if they have obtained any improvement on the offer they got in February, it isn’t visible to the naked eye. (Sixty of them left their jobs during the strike; they will not be replaced.) The kitchen staff at Wellington School, after a three-week strike, gave up their claim and returned to work — or tried to; they found their jobs had gone. The outside catering company which actually employs the women had cancelled its contract, and the school was able to say triumphantly that it was making other arrangements. Again, one of the Nottingham Evening Post’s journalists sacked last December for joining the NUJ provincial journalists’ strike (so they not only failed to win their claimed pay rise but lost their jobs too) was told by a Nottingham industrial tribunal that his dismissal was perfectly fair — “If all employees who take part in a strike or other form of industrial action are dismissed or not re-engaged, the dismissal is automatically fair.” (all these items. Daily Telegraph, 7.6.79 and 8.6.79).

A few days earlier, a despatch written by Sir Nicholas Henderson (the new British Ambassador to Washington) was ‘leaked’. Henderson was worried about Britain’s ‘decline’, as seen from his previous job as Ambassador in Paris. Compared with France and Germany, he said, “not only are real wages lower but hours of work are longer”; besides that, working conditions are worse. Sir Nicholas has read about the omnipotent British trades unions, and he called this strange result “the paradox of the British labour scene”. But there is no paradox; we must judge by results. Sir Nicholas should reflect and discover the real reason for what puzzles him: we capitalists are much the stronger in our battle against the trades unions, because as long as capitalism lasts, power resides — naturally enough — with the capitalists.

Saturday

Sad to see that Jackson’s, the Royal grocers in Piccadilly, are closing down. They can’t afford the rent for a new lease of the premises. Many’s the feed of truffles, caviar and pate I have had from Jackson’s. However, as Buckingham Palace said, there’s always Harrods and Fortnums. But while I thought of it, I went round for several jars of their Beluga caviar; I am very partial to it, and it’s only £144 a pound.

On the way back I cheered myself up by buying a new watch; a Rolex Oystcrquartz with rather a nice case of white gold, for £4,116 (The Observer, 25.3.79).

Alwyn Edgar