Progressing backwards
The Labour government’s housing drive is progressing steadily backwards.
At the beginning of May, several big building firms announced that they were cutting back their production of houses.
Wates Ltd. (whose advertisements tell us that they care) said they were reducing by about fifteen per cent. McManus started a cut in its labour force of around twenty per cent. Richard Costain stopped work on two hundred or so part-finished houses — a quarter of their yearly production.
These reductions do not mean, of course, that everyone is now so comfortably housed that there isn't any need to build any more homes for the moment, thank you.
On all sides, the tragic evidence of the housing shortage abounds. The Milner Holland Report, which touched only one aspect of the problem, said that over seventy thousand London dwellings have no proper bath and that more than one million share a bath, a sink and other basic amenities. There are still thousands of homeless people in London alone.
Why, then, are there cuts in building?
As part of their great programme of bringing prosperity to the working class, the Labour government has imposed a credit squeeze which, among other things, has made it more difficult to raise loans to buy houses.
These loans—a mortgage from a building society, a housing endowment policy—are the only method open to a worker who wants to buy a house he will never have the ready cash.
These, then, are the people who are affected by this aspect of the squeeze. In Glasgow, reported The Observer, tenement flats are being left unsold because young couples cannot raise the loans to buy them. For the same reason, cheaper houses in Leeds and Bradford are not selling. Bigger, costlier houses are not in the same difficulties; in Leeds and Bradford, those in the £8,000 to £15,000 range can be sold easily. People who can afford that sort of house can also raise the necessary loan—if indeed they need to borrow the money at all.
This particular crisis will probably continue. and develop. “We will only start up again," said Costain’s managing director, “When the purchaser shows he can raise the money.” In other words, they will only start building again when they think they can sell the houses.
Housing, like all human needs under capitalism, is a commodity — something which is made to be sold. If for any reason the market contracts, as it is contracting now under the credit squeeze, the houses will not be built.
Simple, but bad luck on anyone who has not got anywhere to live. Perhaps the government's intelligence on the matter was represented by Mr. Robert Mellish, who is the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing. “Personally,” he said, “I feel that building societies are a machine by which people buy homes . . .”
This brilliant flash of insight, leaving unilluminated as it does the fact that building societies are also machines by which a few people make a lot of money, does not reveal anything new to those workers, who, unable to afford a house any other way, have chained themselves to a lifetime's debt to a building society.
Any year now. as Mr. Mellish settles into his new job, he may catch up with one or two other facts which are common knowledge. He may even go further, and realise that there is a perpetual housing problem for the working class, and that no government can solve it because the problem is an inseparable part of the capitalist social system which they administer.
Pakistan-lndia
One thing is dear about the Rann of Kutch, and that is that the fighting there was not over who should have the right to enjoy the beauties of its scenery.
This is one of the world’s inhospitable spots—a ten-mile square patch of lifeless mud and salt flats, broken by small mounds and peopled only by the Jeroba rat. The 24th. Parallel runs through the middle of it.
But inhospitable or not, the Rann had all the makings of a typical international dispute. To begin with, there may be oil out there somewhere. The Sun Oil Company of the U.S.A. plans to start drilling offshore fairly soon.
This is not to say that the fighting was about oil only. Its origins, as far as they can be discerned, were rather more complex.
India forcibly established its troops in the Rann, north of the 24th. Parallel, in 1956—soon after oil had been struck in the Gulf of Cambay, about two hundred miles away to the south.
At that lime, Pakistan was on the Western side in the Cold War, and was signatory to several American dominated pacts. India, on the other hand, except where its own interests were concerned, was the Great Uncommitted, infuriating Washington by its insistence on playing off the Western bloc against the Russian and acting as honest broker whenever it could.
Whatever else this did, it gained for India a certain diplomatic leadership in South East Asia. Since then, the situation has changed.
Pakistan has recently taken the initiative right out of India's hands. President Ayub has been feted in both Peking and Moscow. The Chinese government has stated its support for Pakistan in the Rann dispute. The Russians have implied that they uphold Pakistan’s case over Kashmir.
India, with no sympathy in Washington to fall back upon, was thus isolated—something which was emphasised by President Johnson’s brusque cancellation of Mr. Shastri’s proposed visit to him.
In this situation of double-cross all round, the Indian government had to do something to try to regain the lost ground and to divert its people’s attention away from India’s defeats.
On these facts, it seems likely that it was India who provoked the fighting in the Rann. Delhi’s propaganda machine was soon at work to make the most of it.
The so-called Socialist Party demanded assurances that the fighting (in which, of course, none of its leaders were actually engaged) should not cease until the Pakistani forces had withdrawn. Mr. Shastri himself said:
I know that each of our 450 million people of India is today prepared to make any sacrifice in defence of the motherland. . .
The Rann of Kutch, then, had all the requirements of a classical war situation—rival economic interests, diplomatic ploys, political manoeuvres, betrayal and hysteria.
The final irony is that India and Pakistan have always posed as leaders of the “Uncommitted” nations, as the peace- loving neutrals of the Cold War.
The Rann of Kutch repeated the lessons of Kashmir and Goa. The newer nations of capitalism are no better than the old. The peacekeepers of yesterday are the warmakers of today.
Old, old story
In yet another flare-up in the endless round of minor conflicts, the focus of world attention swung last month to the Western Hemisphere.
Once again the United States Marines landed in that trouble spot of the centuries; the island of Hispaniola. This time it was the Eastern half of the Dominican Republic; not very long ago the marines were hovering off the coast of Haiti.
President Johnson's statement that
All we are in the Dominican Republic for is to preserve freedom and to save those people from conquest.
was rich, even from such a poker-faced operator as the President. As any brief glance at the blood-stained history of Dominica will show, the people there have never had any freedom to lose.
In fact, for most of the time they have been ruled by corrupt and vicious dictatorships with occasional periods of civil war. And if the occupation of a State by the armed forces of a foreign power is not conquest, then the word has changed its meaning.
However, almost in the same breath the Americans came out with the real reason — fear of another Cuba. Dominica was in fact Viet-Nam in reverse. The United States has always been extremely touchy about Non-American states having a foot in the American Continent.
The Monroe doctrine of 1823 was proclaimed to prevent this, and the conditions of the modern world, with its nuclear weapons and its long range missiles, makes the idea of a possible Russian base so near home particularly unattractive.
Whether or not there were actually any so called Communists in Dominica, is unimportant the possibility was enough. Russia and China made all the expected noises, and the usual moves in the United Nations, but obviously did not intend to risk a major war over a possible minor gain.
There was however a further complication for the U.S.A. — namely the Latin American States, with their fears and suspicions of their gigantic neighbour. In the 19th Century the United States could afford to treat South and Central America with contempt, but today they prefer to have amicable relations with them.
They have, over the last 30 years, devoted much energy to their “good neighbour” policies and to the Organisation of American States (O.A.S.)
If the situation really demands it, and American Capitalism is threatened, Washington is quite prepared to go ahead and damn the consequences. Dominica, luckily, was not that serious, which saved all that good neighbourliness from going up in nuclear dust.
Dead duck
The nationalisation of the steel industry may well be the last quack and flutter of a dying, if not already dead, duck.
Nationalisation is not the political issue that it once was. The Labour Party have quietly forgotten their intention, avowed only a few years ago, to take over cement and sugar. They have also forgotten, although less quietly, the fact that Clause Four commits them to nationalise all industry.
The Conservatives are similarly placed. They have left the vast majority of Labour's post war nationalisation untouched. They have even added some of their own state influence—and in the steel industry at that. They set up the Iron and Steel Board, with instructions to “exercise a general supervision over the iron and steel industry. . .”
Steel is probably the last opportunity, for a long time to come, for the sham battles over state control. For both parties, it is something of a political albatross which neither of them can cut away.
One argument has been notably absent from the debate over steel. When the Labour Party wanted to nationalise the mines they always pleaded that this would benefit the miners. They drew pictures of the suffering of the mining areas under private control. “Pithead baths” was a promise on the lips of every Labour candidate.
This had a certain force, especially in the mining communities which nursed dreadful memories of their past. But the same argument could not be applied to the other concerns which the Attlee government nationalised. No Labour propagandist, be he ever so eloquent, could pretend that the clerks in the Bank of England had gone home hungry and filthy before the war. Neither could the argument apply to the airlines, to gas and electricity — and now it cannot be used about the steel industry.
The case for taking over steel rests on other grounds. The White Paper made them clear:
The iron and steel industry occupies a focal and dominating position in the British economy. ... A single new large integrated works may cost £150 million.. . . There are difficulties in raising private funds for projeots of this sort.
In other words, steel is vital to the economy of British capitalism and only a state controlled, integrated industry can hold out any hope of providing the capital to allow it to live up to its importance.
On this issue the Labour Party’s mind is made up, at least until they change it. Some of their Members revolted over the scale of compensation, but they were rather late in the day here, because the Labour Party have never concealed their intention of arranging “full and fair” compensation to the steel shareholders. The time for revolts on this issue was last October, when these very same rebels were campaigning to get into Parliament on Labour’s programme, compensation and all.
It is true that the terms are what can be called “fair", if by that we mean that the stockholders are not going to lose out on the deal. Government stock to the value of £550 million will be exchanged for securities valued on the market, on the day the White Paper came out, at only £430 million. Any disagreement between the Minister and the stockholders over compensation will be referred to arbitration. What could be “fuller’’ and “fairer” than that?
If the Tories denounced the compensation as a fiddle, this was only a haggle, an attempt to bump up the price of steel shares. The Stock Exchange provided a more reliable reaction: “The voice of protest,” said The Guardian, “ was muted. . .”
A couple of days later, the point was rubbed in when millions were added to the values of steel shares. Whatever the reason for this, one thing it does not suggest, and that is that the capitalist class are trembling behind their Walls of Jericho at the sound of Fred Lee’s steel band (state controlled, of course).
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