On the day the Tories won the 1979 general election a group of trade unionists in the telecommunication industry gathered in their local and assured each other that within six months they would bring the Thatcher government down through a campaign of industrial sabotage. The rest, as they say, is history: but those boozy, disgruntled Labour supporters are not alone in a desire to forget the promise of fifteen years ago.
The Tory election manifesto then had recommended itself as based on "reason, on common sense, above all on the liberty of the people under the law". That was how things were going to be run — on reason, common sense, liberty — and Thatcher had emerged from Number Ten to tell us how her government would bring harmony and prosperity as well. It is all very different now as the government staggers from one crisis — economic, diplomatic, political, personal — to another. The Tories, who have always won votes from a popular prejudice that they are in control of events, are being seen as dramatically out of control and they have paid for this in their electoral losses. However brave the face they put on it the fact is that the Conservative Party is in a country-wide panic about what has gone wrong for them and how they might put it right.
Back to basics
So far they have not been very successful. Each diversionary ruse they have tried has failed - sometimes worse than failed. Back to Basics, for example, had hardly been launched before it suffocated beneath a blanket of sleaze, as Tory MPs seemed to be queueing up to expose its hypocrisy by revelation of their business activities and what they chose to call their private lives.
So until something better comes along the Tories will probably continue in their efforts to excuse their government’s failure in the simplest possible way: they will blame it onto someone else. This is not a new idea, nor one exclusive to Conservatives; Labour governments were always ready to explain their impotence and confusion onto currency speculators or Tory saboteurs in the civil service or greedy and irresponsible workers who wanted more wages than they "rightfully" earned.
Politicians who have to face up to their inability to produce profitable markets out of nothing, to control prices when economic forces are pushing them inexorably up or down, often ascribe it all to a lack of confidence, to industry "talking itself into a slump". They ignore the fact that if it is possible to create a slump by talking about it, it should be equally possible to create a boom by talking about that: in reality the economic problems which undermine confidence in that way are very real.
For example in September 1990 Thatcher was upbraiding a meeting of Welsh business leaders about the "voices of gloom . . . newspaper talk of recession . . . self-doubts assailing the business community — or perhaps more accurately the press". But it is simply not good enough to say it has all been got up by the press. Thatcher’s outburst was partly in reply to a CBI survey which reported some 10,000 jobs were being lost monthly as orders for goods, and consequently output, fell. At the same time NatWest Bank had been forced to write off £230 million in bad debts — which they would hardly have had to do in a boom — and reported 235 companies going into receivership during the first six months of 1990 — about twice as many as the previous year. The CBI had described British capitalism as "on the brink of recession" — they were not being pessimistic; they were facing facts.
Beggars and homeless
It is not only industrialists and bankers who have been talking themselves unnecessarily into difficulties. One of the most distressing symptoms of the so-called prosperity of Tory governments has been the re-emergence of beggars on the city streets. In the West End at night nameless bundles of misery huddle under whatever they can find to cover them. On the tubes frail youngsters listlessly display placards appealing for lose change. Some of these are mentally sick people who before the benefits of "community care" descended on us would probably have been in hospital. The minister responsible for housing, Sir George Young, an Old Etonian toff, once described such destitutes as the people you have to step around as you leave the opera. It was a chilling illustration of what one of the soggier Tory wets thinks about the homeless, whose number have doubled since 1979.
In rather different circumstances — Young never has to avoid them on the pavement after a night out — are those people who have become homeless because they could not afford to keep up their mortgage payments. In recent years numbers of such people increased to such an extent that even the banks and building societies — not to mention estate agents — became worried. By a typically grisly misnomer, this process is known as "repossession", as if the evicted people had ever owned the house in the first place. "Repossessions" climbed to a peak in 1991, when from October to December nearly 40,000 took place. This year they have fallen, presumably because the real possessors of property — the banks, building societies and so on — have worked their way through the defaulters. The people who have been turned out of their home may reflect bitterly on the Tory 1979 manifesto which informed us that "to most people ownership means first and foremost a home of their own".
As Lady Porter demonstrated in Westminster, there is an assumption that anyone who takes out a mortgage on a home is, for some reason, a Conservative voter. So those who have suffered "repossession" come in for a certain amount of cold sympathy from ministers. But the destitute are not believed to be Tories so they don’t get such sympathy; their hapless condition is all their own fault. As John Major said:
"They are not on the streets because they have to be on the streets. There are empty accommodation units across London and in other areas where people could go if they wished. But they choose not to stay there and that is a cultural point. It is a strange way of life that some of them choose to live."
And so it goes on. The government can have no responsibility for any of the problems they promised to solve because the fault really lies with the people who suffer the problems. Millions of people are unemployed because of some peculiar determination to endure the deeper poverty of being out of work, which has suddenly affected them all like a virus.
All our fault
The figures for recorded crime go up and up because indolent parents and mischievously trendy teachers have failed to instil into children the proper values and ability to discern right from wrong — which really means compliance with the demands of class society and with their degraded place in it. It is almost as if the Tories have not been in power for the past 15 years, as if they have not had time to deal with all these problems.
So whose fault is it? Well it doesn’t make sense to blame the politicians because they only make up the lies and excuses, they only urge us to forget their failures and to trust them again and again when all reason and experience tells us not to do this. So the responsibility lies with the people who allow themselves to be cheated out of their historical role, their power to make a basic change in society and prefer instead to hope for a few piddling adjustments which have no effect on capitalism’s continued existence and on its power to wreck our lives. To go back to those trade unionists — the task is not to bring down a government but to abolish the entire social system.
Ivan
1 comment:
That front cover is just wild.
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