Bigger Crumbs
Sir Andrew Gilchrist, chairman of the Highlands and Islands Development Board, has recently been pouring cold water on the idea that Scottish workers were all about to share in the much publicized “Oil Bonanza”. Writing in his Board’s journal (North 7) on 5th March he announced:
There were large areas (in Scotland) which would not secure a direct share of the massive investment needed to get oil out of the seabed and which would have no part in the well paid employment prospects.(The Times, 6th March ’75)
“Areas” of course are not employed, it is workers who are employed; nor can any of them hope to “secure a direct share of the massive investment”, they are paid wages. Bearing in mind that Sir Andrew’s chief function is to act as a form of capitalist missionary in the north, even those workers who will be concerned in oil and affiliated industries would do well to remember that “well paid employment prospects” simply means that bigger crumbs will fall from the capitalist’s table.
For the others, Sir Andrew has been busily at work seeking out ways to make them useful:
We must look beyond oil and its present benefits. These are reasons enough for continuing and sharpening our effort to strengthen existing industry and to encourage new types of enterprise. If we are to have any hope of a balanced growth these things are essential . . . In the past nine years nearly 3,000 prospects of different kinds and different sizes have been brought to locations in the Highlands and islands. With them they have brought nearly 10,000 jobs. That is what Highlands development is about.
The interests of the "we” and the “our” refer to the capitalist class. That is what Highlands development is about.
War on Want
In a letter to The Times on 10th March, Mr. Peter Burns, General Secretary of “War on Want”, put forward the following view on the “world food crisis”:
The problem is essentially one of insufficient demand not insufficient supply. There is food available that the poor do not have the means to buy. Only poor people starve.
Considering its source, this is a most peculiar form of argument. If people are starving is there not a demand? The simple answer is that there is, but the capitalist answer — which Mr. Burns has clearly accepted — is that if men and women cannot afford to buy food there is no demand. He goes on to argue that supplies of food in the form of foreign aid merely “stifles incentive to invest in rural development” and the answer must be on a local basis to
increase food production and its availability to those in need within the Third World, there must be land reform, guaranteed food markets and prices for the Third World, and aid and development programmes directed toward the landless and the poor peasant farmer. These are the policies to tackle poverty, which is the real enemy that tightening one’s own belts will do nothing to combat.
Look again, Mr. Burns, at the world around you. Why imagine that such projects as your “guaranteed food markets and prices” will prove any more satisfactory than those already existing? The basis will remain unaltered, those who can make a profit from selling food will produce it. Those who cannot afford it will starve.
To make “War on Want” you will have to "make war” on the system of society which gives rise to such lunacy as starvation while food is both available, and is even deliberately destroyed for the "benefit” of its "markets.”
On the Bandwagon
The Church of England is always scouting around for some current events on which they can make meaningless remarks in an attempt to bring us all back into the fold. In this respect they have regarded the economic phenomenon of inflation with what could be described as a jealous reverence for some time. Now however a report has been published (6th March) “on behalf of the industrial committee of the board for social responsibility” which feeds out the C. of E. line to its followers. Among other things we note they recommend:
A more rational and institutional way of determining levels of income was needed to re-inforce the social contract, for unless wages and salaries were held to reasonable limits a situation would arise in which a statutory incomes policy would become a moral incentive.(The Times 7th March ’75)
That word “reasonable” has been slipped in again, and when the Church talks of “reasonable limits” they mean just what the capitalist means — as low as possible. However the report does not apply the same criterion to the rate of inflation. It produces instead a dynamic new theory which will surely have even the confused capitalist economists rocking in the aisles:
Inflation, the report argues, is a sign of a society that has lost its way. 'In some ways it can be seen as the climactic by-product of a relaxed society’.
We fail to observe much that is “relaxed” about capitalist society, except perhaps the benign ignorance of the Church of England, but we would be interested to learn if successive governments since the war have realized that by increasing the supply of inconvertible paper money they failed to recognize “the sign of a society that has lost its way” and can now see this contemporary burning bush as clearly as the C. of E. does.
An Out-of-Date Creature
As various strange bedfellows begin to join together for or against Britain’s continued membership of the European Economic Community, Mr. Len Murray, General Secretary of the TUC, has given notice that his organization is opposed to membership. His reasons appear to be that the EEC as at present constituted is in some way harmful to “the social welfare” of the “British People.”
Unions in every EEC country were less than satisfied with the operation of the Community: many thought that it had started off with too much competitive purpose and too little community purpose: too much of economics and too little of social welfare: too much about fair business practices and too little about fair social practices. ‘I am afraid that your Market is rather out of date, a creature of its times, and its times were some time ago.’(The Times, 8th March ’75)
Not that Mr. Murray has any basic objection to capitalism or the exploitation of the working class here or abroad,
We shall need to be satisfied that decisions are taken in ways which give due and balanced weight to common interests and to what the member countries themselves see as their essential and proper national interests.
We can reassure Mr. Murray that the capitalist class will most certainly take steps to realise their “essential” interests: in or out of the EEC. And they will continue to do so while men like Mr. Murray misleads his members into believing that “fair social practices” can have any relevance or application to capitalist society.
The Other Side of the Same Coin
To balance the issue, the Times report of Mr. Murray’s Utopian mouthings was adjoined by a report of Mrs. Margaret Thatcher’s “opening salvo” for her Keep-Britain-in-the-EEC campaign. That Mrs. Thatcher is capable of making any kind of “salvo” is open to conjecture; she did however make a realistic comment on the Government attempts to revise the terms of membership. Having wished Mr. Wilson success in this field, she said:
No doubt, she said, Mr. Wilson would return claiming that his renegotiated terms were vastly better than anything the last Conservative Government had been able to achieve. ‘In fact of course, they will be but the latest stage in a continuing process of adjustment between the members of what is essentially an evolving partnership.'
The evolving partnership she refers to is that between the various capitalists, and she is quite right in assuming that they will be constantly competing against one another for more favourable terms. The honour among these thieves will no doubt be sorely tested after Mr. Wilson announces the new rules of capitalist competition in Europe.
During the course of her remarks, Mrs. Thatcher expressed her willingness to “fight alongside all men and women of good will, from all parties and from none, who wanted to put the future of Britain above partisan quarrels.”
While noting this almost libertarian gusto, we can’t help remembering that Len Murray also wanted to put the future of Britain first; only he suggested doing so by leaving the EEC. How on earth then are we, “all men and women of good will”, to decide upon this momentous issue? It is all very puzzling and a report (“The Grudging Europeans”) published by Social and Community Planning Research on 5th March confirms this bewilderment. There is throughout Britain
a grudging acceptance of our need to rely on Europe, an almost petulant acknowledgement of the benefits to be derived from partnership, there is precious little enthusiasm either for the idea or the reality.(The Times, 6th March ’75)
The answer is that with Britain in or out of the EEC, the international working class will remain shackled to a system of private property ownership. To believe that this relationship can be altered by leaving (or remaining in) the EEC is time-wasting nonsense and only further delays the job which all workers should be undertaking to establish Socialism.
Alan D'Arcy
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