Running Commentary: Evening All (1979)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Evening All

Old ladies who have been helped across the road by them, lost children who have been restored to their parents by them, black youngsters who have been harassed by them, criminals who have been beaten and stitched up by them, will all be impressed to learn that this month the Metropolitan Police is 150 years old.

The Met, as we are liable to be told by their Commissioner (who is the man to be found sitting uneasily at the apex of this pyramid which contains so much thuggery and corruption) is the finest body of men in the world.

So it is natural that the Post Office, eager to join in the celebrations, should mark the occasion by issuing a set of special stamps. Now special issues can become collectors’ pieces, so they are usually of attractive design, like flowers or nursery tale characters or Christmas scenes.

In line with this gentle tradition, the police stamps will show bobbies talking smilingly to kids, bravely directing traffic at an accident, grandly sitting on a horse, and splashing down the river in a police launch.

Clearly, there is scope here for someone to produce a set of alternative stamps. One showing a red-faced policeman caught out perjuring himself in the witness box; another of the Special Patrol Group wielding their home-made coshes against demonstrators; another of detectives slipping the cooked-up evidence into their suspect’s pocket; another of the boys in blue standing guard over private property during a strike.

The true function of the police is not to be nice to people (in fact, they are actually paid to be suspicious of us all). They exist to protect private property rights — which means to protect the privileged position of the ruling class of capitalism. Which means, further, to perpetuate the inferior, unprivileged position of the working-class.

The fact that policemen are themselves workers makes no difference to this. The capitalist class have to get workers to do their dirty work for them. — workers are not only exploited in the interests of their parasitic masters but are also persuaded to tighten their bonds ever tighter about themselves.

The 150th anniversary of the Metropolitan Police is not an occasion for rejoicing or congratulation. Rather it is symbolic of a century and a half of a particular type of capitalism's coercion — and the event should shame workers into abolishing it all.

Cut Price Hospitals

Something remarkable is going on in darkest South London, where the Area Health Authority for Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham refused to implement the £5.5 million cuts ordered by a body described as the Department of Health and Social Security.

The Authority based its defiance on the grounds that cuts in medical services would mean the deaths of people who would otherwise live. DHSS Secretary Patrick Jenkin was unimpressed; the Authority, he said, was already overspending (and what could be more despicable than that?), so their money would run out anyway, which would mean patients dying — not, be it noted, from a lack of treatment, but from a shortage of cash.

Jenkin wanted to sack the Authority but he could not do this legally. So he declared that an emergency existed in the area and appointed commissioners to run the show as he tells them. This circumventing of the law has been carried out by a government which, it must be remembered, won power partly by standing for a respect for the law.

The sick people of Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham — places which are not famous for their salubrious surroundings, with health blooming from every paving stone may be grateful that the Minister is concerned enough for their welfare to declare that their treatment is a matter of emergency.

They would be deluding themselves. Working-class medical services have always suffered from a lack of money. They have never been freely available. They have always been restricted by the capitalist priority of producing and working within a budget. And people have died in consequence — died, for example, because they could not afford a kidney machine.

This is something which afflicts only the working class; their masters always have access to the best in medical treatment, as in everything. They can go to the most comfortable clinics (like the Wellington, in St. John's Wood, where it can cost about £900 a week), call on an endless supply of the best qualified doctors.

The Authority members sacked by Jenkin are in grave danger of becoming left wing heroes, garlanded in mythology. Said one NUPE official: “Our union will give the Authority full support, because they are demonstrating that they have the interests of patients at heart.’’ In fact, their rebellion began over a year ago, against cuts imposed by the Labour government.

Anyone who wants to reduce their chances of catching or dying from a number of diseases had better get out of the working-class. But this is virtually impossible; a simpler way is to abolish class society altogether.

Indian Summer

Much energy was expended in the struggle to bring what was called independence to many states in Africa and eastwards, once part of the British Empire. As all school children were told at the time, this was the greatest and most beneficial event in the history of the human race.

Left wingers, unimpressed by this propaganda, took the cause of independence to their hearts, and many a bearded thinker ruminated, in the Movement for Colonial Freedom and the like, on the benefits the people of all these states would receive once the perfidious British rule was banished.

It was a simple argument. The British Empire, said the left, was repressive, exploitative, had a blood-soaked history. This was true. Therefore, argued the left, remove British rule and all would be well. This was not true, and there is a mass of evidence to say that the freedom fighters were deceiving themselves along with a few million other people.

Of all the states which have gained their ‘freedom’, few have had a more turbulent history than one of the greatest of them, and one of the first to become independent. Since British rule was ended in 1947, India has had little peace and her people have lived, as before, under the cruellest destitution.

At present the Indian government is devoting a lot of energy to a ruthless drive to suppress the living standards of its workers. Official figures give some idea of the effect of this, with wages under severe pressure from an increasingly inflated currency.

The Indian workers are fighting back. In 1978, 22 million working days were lost in strikes. But an ominous feature of this unrest is the eruption of violence. In their desperation, Indian workers, even killing, industrial managers and owners — people they regard as responsible for their worsening plight.

This is an unwelcome development. Workers will not improve their lot by committing violence on others, no matter who they are. To kill a manager or an owner may remove a personality, but they will be replaced by another, imposing the same repressions. Capitalism is a  society of privilege and its hierarchies express this fact.

But if it is too much to expect Indian workers at present to look beyond the violence to the permanent solution to their problems to a new society — perhaps they will at least draw one lesson from the crisis. Independence did not — could not - benefit them. It only replaced one set of bosses with another, leaving the society of riches and poverty untouched.