Two steps forward; two steps back
Well over twelve months later, and the Band Aid-Wagon keeps rolling on . . . US Aid for Africa, Live Aid, Fashion Aid and Classical Aid have all occupied a lot of publicity, not to mention time and energy. In the course of this they have raised a sum of money immense to the average reader of the Socialist Standard, but insignificant when placed alongside the priorities of capitalism. For example, the amount of money raised (over £100 million), is still a fraction of the one billion pounds spent in Europe every year to keep the food mountains frozen and stored. And what else could you spend the whole proceeds from the various charities on? How about one-and-a-half Buccaneer fighter planes, such is the logic of capitalism.
The lunacy of the buying and selling system is such that while Live Aid is trying to get more food to Africa, a similar fund-raising concert. "Farming Aid" is trying to reduce the amount of food being produced.
Bob Geldof recently warned that two-and-a-half million people will run out of food in the Western Sudan, and that the situation in Ethiopia is as bad as it was before Band Aid started. And just as the problem will not go away, neither it seems will the spectacularly futile attempts to deal with it. The latest event, which of course, must be sufficiently entertaining to satisfy the media's hunger for good pictures, is Sports Aid. which has had everyone running round in circles to raise money to send food to Africa while it is money and markets which stop the food from reaching the hungry in the first place.
In the course of such campaigns as Sports Aid — which try to deal with the problems of capitalism while leaving the cause intact — reformists always end up tying themselves in knots: the Save the Children Fund ended up at the end of last year asking that food should not be sent, as it would cause "economic chaos" in Sudan . . . it 's all very well peasants suffering but not the market, seems to be the suggestion. The Oxfam report on "Sudan: the roots of famine" gives the same shortsighted solutions with the ludicrous request to Western governments to prevent "the dumping of surpluses such as sugar on to world markets', when it is in fact the buying and selling system that can produce poverty amidst plenty. starvation alongside "surpluses”.
Now most people are aware of the contradictions between starving millions and the food mountains like the beef, cereals and skimmed milk in two hundred warehouses around Britain. But, so the argument goes, we must "do something now". The same was said for the famines in the Seventies in Biafra and elsewhere, and now, ten years on, the charities, the politicians and the bureaucrats are back where they started. Whether we shall be in the same position in another ten years' time — with a world of even greater productive capacity, and world hunger falling in the TV ratings depends on whether we start running society sanely, or just end up running on the spot.
Police accountability
The Labour Party has frequently offered "accountability" as a solution to the problem of abuses of power within the police force. Currently this is being down-played a bit as Labour tries to rival the Tories in its attempts to court the Police Federation (who are playing hard-to-get), woo the electorate (with promises of gifts of burglar alarms and window-locks) and convince us that they too are "a party of law and order ", in time for the next general election.
The limits of accountability as a strategy for curtailing the activities of the police were made plain recently when Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, announced that chief constables could over-ride the decision of their local police authorities and obtain stocks of plastic bullets, water cannon, and CS gas. At present police forces are, in theory, local in that they are answerable to a police authority which oversees spending. Police authorities have in some areas (especially Greater Manchester, West and South Yorkshire) been reluctant to allow the police to increase their para military hardware through the acquisition of these items. Chief Constables are now going to be able to side-step the authorities to which they are supposed to be accountable in order to get the equipment that they want and which the Home Secretary clearly wants them to have. So much for police accountability!
Whose house?
More and more workers have been persuaded to buy their own homes because of offers they can't refuse: no more council house building and existing council houses being sold to tenants at knock-down prices; building societies offering 100 per cent mortgages to just about anyone who wants one; and the lack of privately rented housing forcing people to "buy" whether they really want to or whether they can really afford it.
Owning your own home has long been sold to workers as a mark of status, a sign that they've made it to the ranks of the "middle classes". But those workers who bought that line when they "bought" their home are in for a nasty shock. The government is about to give them a reminder that they are workers after all with the same interests and problems as all workers under capitalism.
This blow to "middle class" pretensions comes from a proposal announced by Norman Fowler, Social Services secretary, that unemployed home-owners will lose their right to claim Supplementary Benefit to cover half their mortgage interest payments. These changes are likely to affect 90,000 claimants at any one time, forcing them to renegotiate mortgage repayments with their banks or building societies. This comes at a time when the numbers of people in arrears with their mortgages has increased rapidly (as have repossessions of houses by building societies because of non-payment of mortgages) as a result both of unemployment and the policy to force people through lack of choice to take out mortgages they can't really afford.
This change, if it is accepted, can only lead to more workers being evicted from the homes they thought they owned — a sharp reminder of how little workers really own under capitalism.
Postal code
An item in the Mail on Sunday on 1 June 1986 reveals that the Post Office is recruiting two stress counsellors to combat illness amongst harassed staff. Professor Cary Cooper of Manchester University Science and Technology Institute, who is helping to select the counsellors, believes improving the general well-being of the work force will help boost productivity and overall performance at work. He adds "When you overload people it has an adverse effect on production and leads to bad decisions and absence through sickness". What you might call putting capitalism's stamp on your health.
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