It was not so long ago when no Labour Party rally was complete without a nostalgic reference to the likes of Keir Hardie and George Lansbury, those dead leaders whose spectres could be called up to prove that Labour was true to its faith. Whatever the Party—or sometimes a Labour government—might do, there was always the memory of people like Hardie and Lansbury to reassure the doubters that their party’s heart was in the right place, and that one day they would bring us all to the Promised Land. This usually provoked a few tears and lots of applause. It sounded good, stifled any awareness of reality with a blind faith.
There were some other Labour leaders who were never mentioned in those circumstances. Among these were Ramsey MacDonald and Philip Snowden, Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government of 1929-31. The reason these men were kept in the background was that, although holding the two most powerful jobs in that government, they had not made any progress towards the Promised Land; they did not inspire any confidence in the staunchness of Labour’s principles. After a short spell of confused impotence in the face of an economic crisis MacDonald had sacked all his ministers and taken back only those who promised to behave themselves in future—which meant join in a government with the Liberals and Tories, who until recently were supposed to be Labour’s sworn enemies.
That crisis sprang from the effects of an international slump on British capitalism, causing unemployment to climb steadily, up towards the three million mark. Due response was to set up Committee on National Expenditure, presided over by George May who (like Peter Davis, who now heads the Blair government’s drive to force welfare claimants into work) was a big noise in the Prudential. When the May Report came out, towards the end of August 1931, it recommended, among other measures, that unemployment benefit should be cut by 20 percent.
Laziness
This attack on the fragile conditions of the poorest workers was not in itself a new idea. Nor was it accompanying justification, that people who are poor and unemployed are like that because they want to be, through laziness or ignorance. It is exactly the kind of propaganda we are being subjected to now, as the Blair government push through their policies of depressing the living standards of the lowest and most vulnerable people. Those who accept these arguments, often on the flimsiest anecdotal “evidence”, have to explain why so many people, all at once, all over the world, become suddenly afflicted by this idleness and stupidity and why this always coincides with economic recessions—and why so many become energetic and sensible as the recession eases.
But for the moment the significant thing is how some elements in the Labour Party reacted to the suggestion that British capitalism’s fortunes should be protected by assaults on the unemployed.The two Labour members on the May Committee issued a dissenting report—which disappeared almost without trace. When the Cabinet met to decide finally to cut unemployment benefit and by how much (ten percent) they were almost equally divided, with ten of them opposing the cut and 11 supporting it. So it was that MacDonald became Prime Minister in a “National” government, supported by Conservatives and Liberals.
It is worth remembering that sorry example of Labour’s futility and cynicism in order to compare it to the conduct of the lot who now occupy the seats of power in the name of introducing a new, more humane and equal society. As the Blair government, through the hapless Harriet Harman, bulldoze through their plans to cut the benefits of single parents and the disabled (with much more to come) there is nothing worth the name of opposition in the Cabinet.
Cigarettes
There was, of course, one brief and feeble coded protest from David Blunkett but that soon died away and in any case, Blunkett was always careful enough to avoid making it a resignation issue. It was almost the same story among Labour MPs, with only the usual veterans of dissent like Livingstone, Skinner and Benn and a few others sticking their heads over the parapet. Among the new MPs, ecstatic at finding themselves in this new important powerful job, there was overwhelming obedience to the whips and the spin doctors.
Typical of this was the passionate advocacy of the cut in single parent benefit from one MP who just after May confessed himself astonished to be in Parliament, let alone with such a large majority and a dizzying swing. When the Parliamentary Labour Party met to discuss the proposed cut this MP distinguished himself—and perhaps booked himself a very minor government job—by ranting that the cut amounted to only the price of a packet of fags a day.
This contribution to the debate—if we can call it that—fulfilled a necessary condition for such arguments; to blame the poor for being that way. It used to be that the poor would not leave a bath unfilled with coal; now it is that single parents make themselves a present of struggling to bring up children on their own and simply can’t be trusted not to smoke their benefit away.
Friends
The odious creep who talked about the price of cigarettes had obviously learned his lesson because he was once a prominent and ardent member of a local council which in the 1980s supplied a lot of copy to the gutter press about their policies as so-called loony lefties. One effect of this was that the local Tory MP bounced back to Westminster with a hugely increased majority—and stayed there until he was defeated last May. Obviously, the point went home; to win votes it is necessary to be willing to say anything, at any time and to be flexible in what you say so that you always pander to every popular prejudice. It is a lesson which the Labour Party at large has absorbed, since those days of MacDonald and Snowden, and in Blair they have found a relentless teacher.
Blair’s support is not confined to the Labour Party. In a letter to the Sunday Times of 28 December last Madsen Pirie who is president of the Adam Smith Institute—which is a longstanding proponent of Thatcherite policies—said:
"Your leader last week supporting welfare reform was most timely . . . Tony Blair has shown commendable resolve by his insistence that the system must be changed . . . so far the signs are encouraging.”
With friends like that does Blair need enemies—especially among those whose lives are an endless grind on the lowest level of poverty—of hunger, sickness, despair?
Ivan
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