Base metal
Margaret Thatcher, not to mention her advisers. have worked hard at promoting her image as the Iron Lady of Europe. This means depicting her, not just as determined and strong but also as fair and consistent. For a woman of her mettle, there is a Right side of a question and a Wrong side and the twain shall never be allowed to meet.
[The] obstruction of the Queens proposed visit to Russia? Leaving aside the possibility that her objection was inspired by fear of being upstaged, even by the head of the royal family — so base a motive must be beneath the dignity of an Iron Lady — we are left with the argument that no British monarch should be allowed to visit a totalitarian country like Russia. It was also rumoured that Thatcher thought it improper for a British sovereign to so recognise a regime whose forerunners had done in the Romanovs.
There might be a shred of justification for this stance were it consistent. But no government — including this one — has ever refused contact with a foreign power because of an abhorrent record on human treatment. Anyone who has doubts about this need only look at the recent example of Turkey. This member state of the supposedly democracy-defending alliance of NATO is governed by a brutal dictatorship which is notorious for imprisoning and torturing people whose only offence is to voice opposition to it. Yet Thatcher's voice was not raised against the recent visit here of the Turkish President Evren and she is an avowed admirer of the Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Ozai: the term she has used to describe herself is an Ozalite.
The issue of whether the queen goes to Moscow — which in any case has now been wiped off the agenda by the Armenian earthquake — is not concerned with human interests. Capitalism has a history of international conflict but no states have ever gone to war because one was a democracy and the other a dictatorship. All states deal with each other over economic, political and strategic advantage, which leads to all manner of disputes and alliances. the common feature of which is a ruthless cynicism. Human welfare does not enter into it, unless it can be used to make propaganda points against the other side.
So let not the Iron Lady deceive us. with her audacious claim to be concerned with fundamental human rights and freedoms. Nor with her claim to be any different from, or better than, the other politicians for their common role is to dabble in the brutal mess of capitalism.
Beyond Ken
Strange events in Brent East, where discontent rumbles about local MP Ken Livingstone, who was better known in his hey day as Red Ken of County Hall. During that time, when he was leader of the GLC. Livingstone showed himself to be a tough and clever political operator and to have some flair as a self-publicist. At any rate he rode out some pretty scurrilous attentions from the gutter press and ended his time at County Hall as something of a local hero, the champion of local democracy against the depredations of the Tory government.
But he has not found life so agreeable in Parliament. It has been reported that he is an outcast there; he himself has said that anyone who enjoys being in Parliament probably needs psychiatric care — which could not have endeared himself to those who are addicted to their status as Hon. Members.
None of this need have gone against Livingstone in his constituency but recently he has put some scathing views on record about the local council, which is about the most famous in the country for the chaos created by its wild-left administration. Brent councillors have worked on the principle that the capitalist system they stand for, and which they persuaded the voters to vote for, does not exist when it suits their purpose. The result has been historic in its embarrassment and confusion. A veteran of local government, Livingstone has not approved; he has compared the Brent Labour Party to Kampuchea under Pol Pot. along with a few other unkind remarks.
So now there is talk in the constituency about de-selecting Red Ken. There is a delicious irony in this, for the left wing in the Labour Party pushed through the constitutional reform of de-selection on the assumption that it would only ever be used to unseat right wingers. That was what happened in Brent East, where Livingstone was appointed candidate after a long and bitter struggle to turf out the old-established sitting MP, Reg Freeson.
De-selection was hailed as a great step forward to a more democratic, more ' socialist'' Labour Party. In reality it was often used as a steam roller to ensure the unquestioning acceptance of one point of view. Livingstone's offence has been to go against this, to act as if he had some independent thoughts. If he pays for this by the loss of his seat, perhaps he will learn something about the futility of single-issue, fragmentary reformism as well as about the cynicism of his party.
Percentage game
"£14 million for Sainsbury chief" said the Observer headline on 6 November. The item told us that 23 UK company directors received in excess of £1 million each last year in salary and dividends. Against David Sainsbury's £14.846,816. Tiny Rowlands only managed £8,095,754 and the last five only managed £1 million, excluding dividends. 1,451 directors had to make do with salaries of just over £100,000.
Three years ago no-one was paid over £1 million and only 338 received in excess of £100,000. How well invested therefore was the cool £4.5 million contributed by major companies to Tory election funds (Observer, 4 December). After all, of those directors in the above list, the £102,000 contributed by Hanson is less than one tenth of Lord Hanson's salary last year of £1,263,000!
Much was made at the time of Thatcher's decision not to take the last increase MPs awarded themselves. However it is less well-known that, while the cost of running her private office has risen from £4.4 million in 1986 to £5.4 million (an increase of ten per cent per annum), the part-time cook who has worked there for seven years is paid the princely sum of £69 a week — that is, £3,588 a year or just about enough to cover the cost of one of the new sets of drapes Thatcher has just had made for her windows. Expressed in the percentages of which Mr. Lawson is so fond, the cook is earning 0.15 per cent of what her employer spends spends on running her office.
Under the headline "Pay; alarm bells ring — wage explosion fear as inflation rises" (Daily Express. 19 November), we are told of Government fears following another rise in the rate of inflation. Last year average wages rose 9.25 per cent, as firms gave their employees a small slice of the increased profits obtained through their efforts. We should all be used to the Chancellor's attempts to "cook" figures (the latest suggestion is to remove mortgage repayments from the Cost of Living Index) but now the Treasury has gone one further. “If the wage rises awarded to workers were taken out of the equation, instead of a rise to 6.25 per cent in inflation in October, the figure would have fallen from 5.2 per cent in September to 5.1 per cent", we are told in that same article. Obviously. therefore, if we take all figures out of the equation a healthy zero would be achieved!
In more serious vein, socialists do not expect anything other than "double speak" from the owners and controllers of wealth production, who threaten us with dire consequences if we ask for even a small part of increased profits, while justifying the ever larger remuneration they allocate themselves as "essential incentives".
Merthyr Vale
One of the latest collieries in South Wales under the threat of British Coal's axe is Merthyr Vale. If it is closed over 500 miners will lose their jobs, adding to those who have been made redundant at the 19 pits which have been shut down since the 1984 strike to save them. Only nine pits now remain of what was once a vital and dominant industry.
If Merthyr Vale closes it will be especially poignant. It was once known as Aberfan-Merthyr: the first part of the name was lopped off after the disaster in the autumn of 1966, when a spoil tip on a mountainside above Aberfan was loosened by torrential rain and came sliding down onto the village, to kill over a hundred people, many of them children in the village school.
It was clear then — as the subsequent official enquiry confirmed — that this was no accident in the sense of it being unpredictable or out of anyone's control. The spoil from the colliery had been dumped up above the village because — as it was the case in many other mines in the area — that was the cheapest way of getting rid of it. (In County Durham it was emptied into the sea, turning the water and the beach black.) The overriding concern for cheap production fostered a complacency which contributed towards the events that morning, for the great mass of dust and slag had not been properly checked for stability. When the rains came there was some alarm about the heap's condition but still nothing was done and as a result the people of Aberfan experienced indescribably terrible deaths.
At the time there was a natural outcry against those whose complacency was seen to have been a factor in the disaster. Among those outraged voices, it was not unknown for miners to put a different point of view. A colliery, they argued, meant jobs; without it the village would decline into the direst poverty. If the price of the jobs — the price of keeping the pit open — was that lives had to be imperilled, which in the case of Aberfan meant building an unstable hill of slag on top of a mountain, then so be it. After all, the coal industry was no stranger to massive tragedies. Better a paid wage slave than one out of work; better the gentler poverty of employment than the destitution of the dole queue.
Well the employers — the Coal Board — have shown what they think of that stoically self-sacrificing attitude. Merthyr Vale will close if it is adjudged to be unprofitable to keep it open, just as it was once thought to be unprofitable to dispose of the pit’s spoil in some way other than dumping it high above the people of the village.
The profit motive which spawns and drives production in this society exploits millions of people, which means that while it impoverishes them it makes them grateful for their poverty. In many cases it murders them, while persuading them that there is no other way to live, or to relate to each other and in the end to die.
Balance sheets exist to show whether a profit or a loss is being made and how big it is. They are not there to settle debts of suffering. The Coal Board, like any other employer who knows their business of exploiting people for profit, works on the same calculating basis as those tragically compliant miners who would accept death as an unavoidable part of their wage slavery.
The fate of Merthyr Vale illustrates what little account are human lives and welfare in this profit-orientated system. Is it too much to hope, that the workers there will remember Aberfan for what it has to teach them about capitalism, to help them better understand its tragedies and the full humiliation of the part they condemn themselves to play in them?
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