They have been warned
It seems always to escape the attention of most of the people who vote for it, but every period of Labour rule in this country has been notable for a bitter fight with the working class over wages.
To add insult to injury, Labour ministers have the impudence to tell us that they are fighting us for our own good. The late Richard Crossman went so far as to describe a Labour incomes policy (which in plainer language means wage cuts) as “socialism”, on the argument that everyone (every worker, that is) was supposed to suffer equally under it.
Workers who resisted wage restraint have always been dubbed by Labour governments as saboteurs of their plans for abundance and security. Thus Attlee’s lot castigated “communist agitators” in the mines and the docks: Wilson huffed and puffed about “a small minority of politically motivated” seamen fomenting a strike in the merchant navy; Callaghan had his “winter of discontent”.
Well, they are still at it, even though they are out of power. Last month’s TUC spent some time discussing how they thought the issue of wages would be handled under a Labour government. Their clear decision against wage restraint was no comfort to Peter Shore, the man lined up to be Labour’s next Chancellor of the Exchequer and who, like all his predecessors, is hoping the unions will do a deal with him and so save all that unpleasantness about striking.
Shore’s disappointed response to the vote was to offer a euphemism fit to take its place among the countless others uttered by Labour leaders about pay. He talked about a “new economic consensus” in which pay would be an element. These menacing words promise battles to come, if the workers are foolish enough to think that another Labour government would handle the crises of capitalism any better than the Tories.
And that is something which the unions still, in spite of all that experience can teach them, seem determined to fight for. For example Postal Workers’ leader Tom Jackson advised the assembly to “pray for the return of a Labour government”.
Well, they have been warned.
Nothing new
The Social Democrats, as is clear to anyone who can swallow an outworn cliche, are a party with a new outlook; a fresh departure from the weary, discredited old gang who have made such a mess of running Britain. Well anyway that’s what they say.
It is, of course, impertinent for people like Roy Jenkins and David Owen to claim that they stand for anything new — and especially so when they are simply rehashing the elements of the mess they themselves managed when they were in office.
Of a type with this is the squabble which went on over the election of a SDP leader. In the course of this, the bonhomie which bonded the Four into a Gang, in those carefree days of the Limehouse Declaration, was seen to be melting fast in the heat of the battle for the top job in the party.
It is instructive to note the line up in the preliminary clash in this battle, over the method of electing the SDP chairman and their leader in Parliament. Jenkins and William Rodgers forgot all about this desire to get away from the old style and plumped for election of the leader by MPs only (and so did the majority of SDP MPs) which was the very method used by the Labour Party before they changed it at their Wembley Conference last year.
On the other hand Owen and Shirley Williams went for election by the entire membership and this is also interesting because it was when Labour changed their rules for electing their leader to something like this that the Gang of Four decided that they had had enough. Well at least none of them can be blamed for being hidebound by principle.
So even before they have an agreed constitution, or the necessary programme of promises with which to deceive the electors, the SDP is in the sort of mess we have grown accustomed to seeing from the Old Gang parties of capitalism. A mess of cynicism, backtracking and double dealing. And in that there is nothing new.
Long knives
It was not exactly a Night of the Long Knives, more like a month of them because, if the copious leaks to the press were any guide, Thatcher took some weeks in deciding on the reshaping of her government. It is said, for example, that Ian Gilmour wrote his resignation statement a month before he got the chop.
Significant beyond all the chit-chat about how many wives, children, neckties, pieces of toast for breakfast, the new ministers had, is the fact that so drastic a reshuffle indicates a serious crumbling of support among Thatcher’s higher ranks.
Now it would need a very naive person to believe that this is due to any concern for working class suffering. If Thatcher had been lucky enough to be in office during a boom, with belching chimneys blackening the sky and all the Job Centres empty of customers, there is little doubt that people like Gilmour and Prior would not have found much to quarrel with in her policies.
When Gilmour warned that the government is steering “full speed ahead for the rocks” he probably meant the rocks of electoral defeat. It is by that standard that the administrations of capitalism are judged. None of them can master the system; they blunder a while in the dark and how they are remembered by the working class is something largely out of their control.
Perhaps the Tories are beginning to think they are having bad luck with their leader, who can’t be helping their prospects with her pose of stubborn belief in her own rectitude and by her liking for giving the other side some wonderful propaganda chances.
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