Between the Lines: Freedom and finance (1988)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Freedom and finance

The Financial Times (4 May) carried an article by its TV critic, all full of fury and libertarian sentiments. The FT's man imagines that he has spotted an anomaly. On the one hand, he observes, the Government is going mad trying to sell off as much of the media as can be flogged, all in the name of increased "economic freedom", while at the same time the same Government is, through its sickening attempts to out-Stalin Stalin, acting as a dangerous threat to whatever remnants of political freedom TV producers still have left. If the Government really believes in freedom, asks the FT innocent, why do they not extend this to political freedom? The FTs TV critic would be well advised to go away and play with his toys. Surely it does not require very much intelligence to see the intimate connection between so-called market freedom and actual political tyranny. After all, if the Government is really serious in its efforts to make TV a suitable area for capitalist investment, then it is only proper that it must ensure that TV will serve the class interest of those who are being invited to invest. The campaign of arrogant persecution has ranged from the appointment of Her Thatcherness's own poodle. Marmaduke Hussey, to run the BBC, to the raid by the police upon BBC Scotland when they planned to show a documentary which the Government considered to contain information unfit for the eyes of the witless proles, to the most recent threat by the Prime Minister to punish the Independent (sic) Broadcasting Authority for having the audacity to show a This Week documentary (ITV. 28 April. 8.30pm) exposing the shoot-to-kill tactics being employed by the louts of the SAS.

Journalists working within both BBC and ITN newsrooms will testify to the extreme political pressure which they are currently experiencing. This should come as no surprise to the FT. the relationship between freedom and finance has never a happy one. In the USA. where "economic freedom" has been dragged further down into the gutter of "free enterprise" than it has yet to be over here, TV studio discussions are shown in which it only becomes clear after you have been watching them for a while that they are paid adverts for particular commodities. You switch on your TV to watch an apparently free studio discussion on skin care, when all of a sudden the presenter pulls out from his pocket a tube of chemical garbage and, with the sort of smile that you thought went out of style with Japanese torture camps, says. "Well, I for one never come into the studio without my packet of Ripoff's Miracle Wart Remover". This opens up a whole range of possibilities for British TV. Perhaps we could have Rupert Murdoch sponsoring a new Sun-style News At Ten, the directors of Guinness sponsoring Crimewatch, and the SDP sponsoring One Man And His Dog. (The latter is assuming that The Two Davids could be reconciled for a suitable fee.)

Realspeak

Most political discussion on TV is as phoney as hell. It consists of people who know nothing making statements which mean nothing about subjects which amount to nothing. More often than not such emissions of unadulterated wind are presided over by that Know-Nothing-In-Chief, Sir Robin Day. On a recent Question Time programme a member of The Socialist Party who was in the audience managed to mention the party's name and indulge in 30 seconds of TV free speech. Sir Robin looked bemused, an expression which matches perfectly his level of political intelligence. Thirty seconds of permitted questioning from the audience is not enough for revolutionary socialists and if the BBC thinks that is. then we will have to convince them that they have made a mistake. Amidst the flow of incessant hot air and tripe which is presented in the name of TV debate, After Dark (C4. 11.30pm-4am on Saturday/Sundays) is a breath of fresh air. At last here is a studio discussion format which actually allows real talk to occur. There have been some very stimulating programmes in the recent series. The memorable debate on homelessness when "Spider", the homeless punk, told the Tory backbencher that he was talking out of his backside and that whoever is elected. Labour or Tory, they would all carry on running capitalism; the discussion on the Grand National — of all things — in which the obnoxious racing commentator for Channel Four declared that all the unemployed in Liverpool are indolent scroungers and all socialists are the scum of the earth and a local worker from Aintree tore the bigot's prejudices to pieces and exposed the capitalist constraints involved in modern sport; the discussion about fashion in which the designer, Bruce Oldfield, who apparently makes dresses for Di, the Royal Clothes Horse, was confronted most eloquently by an Asian trade unionist from the West Midlands who spoke about the sweatshops where the fancy clothes of the rich are produced; there was that beautiful moment when the General who was discussing terrorism explained that there was no war going on in Ireland, but British troops had a right to shoot Irish workers without asking questions first because there was a war on.

These are good discussions because they are unconstrained by time limits and interfering presenters. They are good — but only as far as they go. What has been desperately lacking from so many of the After Dark debates has been any hint of a solution. How necessary it was. when the subject of homelessness was discussed for over four hours! Just one studio guest could have explained how easy it would be to provide decent homes for all if only the barrier of production for rent, interest and profit was destroyed. When they discussed terrorism it was fundamentally important that at least one person should point out the need to examine the root cause of killing in the modern world, regardless of whether such barbarism is practised by thugs paid by the state or thugs who want to set up a new state. The programme on the war in Ireland on 7/8 May was an excellent example of the crying need for socialist comment on After Dark. Before the programme we had written in to the programme's producers telling them about a socialist from Belfast who is well qualified to offer a unique, non-sectarian, revolutionary analysis of the Irish situation. It seems that the producers at C4 did not want to let such comments infect the minds of the viewers. Our comrade was not invited to appear. Instead, the so-called socialist analysis was presented by Eamonn McCann of the Leninist SWP. Rarely has the socialist label been so miserably betrayed. McCann is an IRA fellow traveller, and a very eloquent one too. But he was asked several times during the discussion. "Okay, Eamonn, you are a socialist, you claim to have a solution to the Irish question, what is it?" McCann did not even offer half a solution. All that he did was repeat the worn out cliches of radical republicanism which will never take the workers of Ireland anywhere. After Dark is, without exaggeration, one of the most important developments in the format of TV discussion in the history of the medium. Thanks for the great format; now let's fill it with a bit of hard socialist talk.

Loadsamoney

Friday Night Live (C4. Fridays. 10.30pm. series now finished) is a show which I watched with a mixture of irritation and amusement. It was a showcase for so-called alternative comedy, and after a decade or so of The Benny Hill Show and Terry and June, even death by hanging would be a pleasant alternative. But . . . Ben Elton, the show's presenter, seems to think that he can make a career out of simply not being Jimmy Tarbuck or Jim Davidson. Most of us are not as unfunny as Tarby or as filthily racist as Davidson, but we do not expect to get paid for it. Alas, it is not enough to simply not be a bloody awful comedian to be a good comedian. The trouble with Elton is that, despite all of his pious and strained efforts to be different. he is just another comedian who wants us to laugh every fifteen seconds at his preconceived gags. Ben Elton is a Labour Party supporter who in the Labour election rally in Islington last year was seen waving his manifesto about and joining with the other reformists in the undignified effort to publicly crawl up Kinnock in the way that Tarby and Monkhouse and the other creeps crawled up Thatcher. If Elton thinks that he is radically funny because he can squeeze a few giggles out of a trendy left audience at the expense of Norman Tebbit or Edwina Currie, then he is wrong. He is not poking fun at the system — and humour is a great weapon for doing that but, like the prefects at the public school revue, making a few near-the-knuckle gags against the present exploiters. Maggie will not be shaking in her boots.

The character who has come out of the series as a quite brilliant comic talent — comparable, I would argue, with the Hancocks, the Alf Garnetts and the Cleeses who seem somehow to transcend comic conventions and make people laugh about things which we had not laughed at before — is Harry Enfield. His Stavros is a fine illustration of great comic observation. But, much more importantly from the perspective of those of us who seek the establishment of a moneyless world society, his "Loadsamoney'' character summed up so much of what capitalism is deforming many workers into becoming. A man who cares for no one and no principle, who is obsessed by the wad of thick banknotes which he waves in the air to affirm his identity, and whose humanity has been absorbed into a single phrase which expresses his fragile security. Also funny is Enfield's other creation. ''Buggerallmoney". the macho northern worker who is as hard as nails and as thick as a brick. The humourless SWP, which likes the image of hard-as-nails northern, macho workers, has attacked Enfield for depicting a character which is supposed to insult the Newcastle unemployed. In an interview in Melody Maker (30 April) Enfield rightly accuses the SWP of not knowing their Marxism. He goes on to make the important point about the capitalist system's failure to provide for "the human factor": "That doesn't just mean people on the dole; there are also the people in jobs who are being dehumanised by it all". Quite right. We look forward to Harry Enfield's next character. "Letsabolishmoney". Mind you, if we started doing that, what would Ben Elton's agent have to say, and what would the dummies at the FT have to write about?

Steve Coleman

Blogger's Note:

With regards to Harry Enfield, from an obituary for John Crump:

  " . . . John [Crump] retired early and returned to live in York, where he had spent most of his academic life teaching politics and Japanese studies at the university there. Anecdotally, one of his students was the comedian Harry Enfield who, under his direction, wrote a dissertation on the SPGB."