Ted’s all at sea but does it matter ? (1971)

From the October 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard 

If we accept their own evaluation of themselves, there can be no doubt that our politicians do a wonderful job. Toiling night and day, they control the economy to a hair’s breadth accuracy — stimulating here, damping there, so that we all enjoy the most marvellous prosperity ever known to man. And if anything goes wrong with their control, if they stimulate when they should dampen, or vice versa, they are ready with a number of amazingly generous schemes of social security which ensure that even when we are out of work we are almost as prosperous as before.

Then there is the matter of defence. We all know that we live in an extremely dangerous world where everything we hold dear, like our motor car and our back garden and the Royal Family, is under the threat from Russia and China and Egypt and many other uncivilised countries. To ward off this threat the politicians have arranged a fantastic armoury of weapons which are enough to frighten away the most insensitive Oriental ever born. Of course at the same time as they claim the credit for the production of these weapons the politicians also tell us that they have attended numerous conferences and signed numerous treaties with the professed object of ensuring that the weapons are never used, But that apparent contradiction should prove to everyone except the most cynical what wonderful men our leaders are.

With all these tremendously good, and time consuming, works being done for us the wonder is that the politicians ever have any time spare for anything else. Yet many of them are active in all sorts of other fields. Churchill, for example, used to spend a great deal of time eating and drinking; Attlee was clever enough to be able to doodle silently while the great affairs of state were being fought out all around him; Macmillan and Douglas-Home were both fond of the grouse moors. But now we have a Prime Minister who is better than all of them because he is an international sportsman.

It is possible that some sport fans will he misled by that description into thinking that Ted Heath has been recruited into Alf Ramsay’s squad and will shortly be taking on George Best for the glory and honour of Old England. But before any of them have a heart attack at this idea, it should be made clear that Heath’s international sporting is confined to yachting, in which he has represented Great Britain.

Perhaps Heath’s public relations men think that his hobby — if that is what it can be called — fits in well with his image of the small seaside town grammar school boy who made the top. This, you see, is the age of the Daily Mirror dinghy, when almost any worker who is not actually out of work can probably afford to buy or build his own sailing ship for a fairly modest outlay. Unfortunately Heath’s rather elephantine publicists seem to have overlooked the vital fact that his boat is larger and more expensive — something like £20,000 more expensive — than all those little do-it-yourself boats.

In addition the Prime Minister is providing the Labour opposition with some handy ammunition, because as he has been absorbedly sailing backwards and forwards there has been an escalation of the current problems of British capitalism which he as the top politician should be able to solve. In Ulster the violence flares even higher, with more and more deaths. The world is in the throes of yet another currency crisis. At home, among the usual poverty problems like housing, unemployment has become an issue and is likely to reach the dreaded million mark this winter.

The Labour Party have always been adept at picturing leisured Tory ministers callously at their sports while the workers are suffering. On the face of it, it seems reasonable to expect, politicians to be energetic and committed to their work. But it needs only a little probing beneath the surface to put this assumption in a very different light.

Of the men who have held the job of Prime Minister since the First World War, one who provoked a lot of criticism by his apparent inertia and lack of concern was Stanley Baldwin. He was a man who was always ready to make a sentimental speech about the beauty of the English countryside but who preferred to spend his holidays in Southern France. He exploited the image of the comfortable, fatherly, pipe-smoking leader talking to the people like a family doctor — which he rather spoiled by being photographed looking affectionately at a pig. Chamberlain referred sarcastically to his ‘‘poetic temperament” and whatever truth there was in this sneer, Baldwin was capable of coining some memorable phrases — like his slogan of ‘‘Safety First” for the election of 1929, when there were a couple of million unemployed in this country who might have been expected to want anything but a policy of caution. Nevertheless the workers were so fascinated by Baldwin’s promise of tranquility that they gave him almost enough votes to get back into power.

Just after he got back to the Premiership in 1932 he

. . . declared himself by no means overwhelmed by his responsibilities ... He was going to the theatre tonight!

(Neville Chamberlain’s diaries; 23.5.1932).

And while Baldwin was so gay and carefree Sir John Orr was telling the world, which included the politicians, that the cost of an adequate diet — nine or ten shillings a week — was beyond the purchasing power of one third of the people. A little before this Baldwin had announced to the Junior Imperial League that “This is a glorious age in which we live . . . the whole world is sick” but he did not mean the same thing.

After a time his lethargy and stone-walling became a liability. In addition he once made the statement that “You cannot palter with the truth for the sake of votes”, which must have seriously unnerved his fellow' politicians and, more than anything else, convinced them that he had to go.

Baldwin was succeeded by the scrawny Neville Chamberlain, who may have been the most unpopular Prime Minister of recent times. So old fashioned was he that he regarded the fountain pen as a new fangled instrument of torture. Chamberlain belied his appearance because, apart from recurrent gout, he was a robust and physically tireless man. He took the chair of every Cabinet committee dealing with major domestic policies; he was the one minister in his government who could always be relied on to read and digest every paper before the Cabinet; when he was seventy and would tire out his police bodyguard by dragging him on long, hard hikes over the Chiltern Hills. And of course there were those famous flights to meet Hitler — in those days quite an adventure for a man of 69.

Although Chamberlain championed many of the methods of running British capitalism which might have been put forward by the Labour Party — for example state welfare schemes and what he called a “managed economy” — he was the image of the stiff, grim faced Tory. Yet none of his opponents could accuse him of lethargy; indeed, when he later became damned with the memory of Munich the Tories must have wished miserably that he had not been so energetic. Perhaps a bit more of Baldwin’s casualness would have saved something from the wreck which emerged as Labour’s victory of 1945.

But in the nature of capitalism’s politics the Tories recovered and after Attlee’s men, many of whom were so energetic in their efforts to defend the interests of the British capitalist class that they worked themselves into an early grave, came the Age of the Grouse Moor. As it happened Macmillan was a one-time admirer of Baldwin’s and shared many of his characteristics as a slick performer on the political tightrope. He too made slushy speeches, once persuading a deputation of railwaymen to call off a strike by tearful reminiscences of the 1917 battle of Passchendaele.

Macmillan was a man who presented strongly contrasting images. He liked to affect the “effortless superiority” of one who had gone to a posh Oxford college yet he could also sponsor policies like the Premium Bonds which some Tories thought were vulgar. One of the many surprises he sprung was to become energised by taking on the job of Prime Minister. Before that he was thought to be worn out by his time as Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. But as Premier he blossomed; crisis suited his acting talent and he quickly dominated his party, stifling any gestures of opposition with elaborate yawns and deliberately boring speeches.

Nevertheless, behind the facade of the dandy in a fashionable play Macmillan was doing a tricky political job. He played a large part in recognising the necessity of, and organising, the retreat of British capitalism from the old Empire so dear to Tory hearts. He signalled this policy in a speech which passed a new catch phrase — the Wind of Change — into common usage and which infuriated those Tories whom Macmillan had allowed to believe that he would carry on with Eden’s policies in areas like the Middle East. Years later, in an interview with Nigel Lawson (Listener 8/9/66), he described the process of this trickery:

Lawson: Would you say it is easier for a Prime Minister in this country to do one thing if he says he is doing something else?

Macmillan: It is a very common method, yes.

As in the case of Baldwin, Macmillan’s popularity waned and his grip on his party weakened, with the growing impression that he pursued too casual a style while crisis mounted all around him. In the end he panicked, he came to admit in the Profumo debate that he was out of touch with the times and, after one last effort, he retired from the Premiership. Even his influence on the choice of his successor Douglas- Home provoked such a split in the Tories that they never used that method again.

After Douglas-Home, Wilson came roaring into office with a reputation for crushingly hard work. He was another grammar school boy made good — in fact the original, authentic article with his simple life style and comfortable family. Wilson was said never to relax, giving up even his Sundays to reading and to preparing his speeches. He said he thrived on work; only boredom made him tired and the most responsibility he had the more relaxed he became.

For a time this was effective; we all remember how pleased the voters were with their new, bustling Prime Minister after those thirteen years of Tory snobbishness and lethargy. It was only as reality forced its way into the picture (yet again, for the umpteenth time) that Wilson was discredited. He himself probably helped in this process, by persisting with the image long after it had been exposed as a sham and the man of action written down as a slick purveyor of empty clap-trap and blatant trickery. It will need a massive confidence trick now to reestablish him as a creditable politician worth any of the millions of votes which will be cast for capitalism at the next election.

It would be possible to go on like this for some time, but every example would lead us back to the same conclusion. The personalities of our politicians — whether they are stupid or clever, energetic or lazy — have absolutely no effect upon the world they are supposed to control and improve. The tragedy is that, as political leaders are necessary to capitalism, the working class assume that they will always be necessary in any society. In fact, a successful politician needs many of the talents and qualities of a good actor, which means that he cannot represent reality. It is not uncommon, when a play is no good, for the customers to enforce its shut-down by the simple method of not supporting it. In the same way the working class could bring down the curtain on the destructive farce of capitalism.

Ivan