Beveridge Deals with the Birth Rate (1943)

From the July 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

And We Deal with Beveridge

Sir William Beveridge, being the noise of the moment, has been taken up by the Sunday Observer, who have been paying him for a weekly article on the editorial page. As Sir William is a public figure, it is to be presumed that he receives no mean payment for these articles. In the issue of April 11th, he deals with “The Problem of the Birth Rate.” The title itself is interesting. Why is it a problem, and to whom? Let us now examine this problem.

In dealing with present-day society, certain basic features have to be borne in mind. These are the fact that society is divided into two classes—those who, by virtue of their non-possession of wealth, are compelled to sell their labour-power to some firm or organisation which is willing to buy it, and those who, by virtue of their ownership of the factories and the general means of production and distribution, are able to buy the energies of the first group for so many hours per week. In relation to the second group, the first group stand as slaves—wage-slaves. Perhaps they might even be termed “free slaves,” because in peace time they have the theoretical right to terminate their employment by a week or a month’s notice. But should they do this, they are not entitled to unemployment pay, and being without wealth, they are compelled immediately to seek another master. This is the extent of their “freedom.”

As is to be expected, Sir William ignores this feature, and for the moment we will ignore Sir William.

At this stage we might well ask whose birth-rate is it that Sir William is concerned with—is it the birth-rate of the wage-slaves or the birth-rate of the owning class? It must be fairly obvious that it is the birth-rate of the wage-slaves which is the problem, because numerically the owning class represent such a tiny fragment of the population that, even if they had sixteen per family, it would still not alter the birth rate. Evidently it is the birthrate of the wage-slaves which is the perplexing problem.

The next question is who is it that is concerned with the workers’ birth-rate, and why? If Mr. Jones told Mr. Brown that he was not satisfied with Mr. Brown’s birth-rate, we should imagine that Mr. Brown might feel a little bit annoyed, especially if Mr. Jones hadn’t done anything about it himself. Now it must here be pointed out that there is a distinct difference between the “birth-rate problem” and the desire to have children. If a worker wishes to have children, it is not out of a desire to increase the birth-rate; but simply and solely because that is a natural human desire. In reproducing himself, therefore, the worker does not make a prior study of the birth-rate statistics. As Sir William points out, most marriages result in one child; if second and third children are not born, it is because they are not wanted, and in most cases the reason they are not wanted is that the workers cannot afford to rear them decently—not because they do not want them. There is a further tendency which may be noted in passing. As wages tend to follow the cost of living, and as the cost of rearing a small family is less than that of rearing a large family, wages adapt themselves accordingly, so that before the war, owing to the low level of “real” wages, it was becoming increasingly the practice for both married partners to be working. Here the change from relative comfort to the poverty of one partner supporting three represented such a big change that there was less disposition than ever in such cases to have children.

Now the question of the birth-rate is this. If the birth-rate is increased, it means that there will be a large increase in the number of workers (and fighters)—for in wartime it is the workers, the wage-slaves, who do the fighting; even if the whole of the owning class did all the fighting, their numbers are so small that they would soon be overwhelmed. Now we are beginning to understand why it is that the problem of the birth-rate is so serious—for the owning class, and we can return to Sir William Beveridge at the point where he quotes Winston Churchill as saying : “If, therefore, this country is to keep its high place in the leadership of the world, and to survive as a Great Power that can hold its own against external pressure, our people must be encouraged by every means to have larger families.” Thus both Churchill and Beveridge desire that there should be a continual good supply of workers (and fighters). It is not possible to deal with this aspect of the question more fully at the moment, but it may be well to ask whether, if Britain lost the war, the British owning class would not lose a very large proportion of their wealth.

Beveridge twice makes the statement that “people will not have children for pay,” yet this is precisely the nature of that one of his suggestions which might, be described as practical. He says : “If children’s allowances are to be effective in remedying this inequality” (as between children in small and large families),” they must be adequate; they must be enough for subsistence in every case, and should be supplemented by special schemes for particular occupations.” He also recommends free comprehensive medical service for maternity, with provision for its special costs. His other idea, which might be described as the impractical or the imponderable one is a “change in public opinion”—i.e., that workers should be induced to have children as a result of pronouncements by members of the owning class that they should do so in order that “Britain’s role of leadership” should be maintained. One would hardly have thought it necessary to point out to an economist like Sir William Beveridge that workers are not going to have children for such imponderable reasons as this. If Bill Brown told Tom Jones that he had had a baby in order to help retain Britain’s role of leadership, would he not be greeted with ribald laughter?

Ramo.

Babies on the Assembly Line (1943)

From the July 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following is from the Daily Mirror, April 29th, 1943:

“New York, Wednesday.

“Babies on the assembly line—washed, given a clean nappie, dressed, doctored, and fed at speed as they pass in an ever-moving, never-ending procession through a £250,000 streamlined nursery—this is the newest plan of Henry J. Kaiser, record-breaking shipbuilder.

Kaiser and his lieutenants were to-day poring over blueprints of this gigantic “Kaiser Victory Nursery,” which is being built to care for the babies of the mothers employed in his shipyards at Portland, Oregon.

He expects that the nursery will be completed within fifty-nine days and ready for occupation by 1,500 babies.”

“In addition to being the biggest nursery in the world,” Kaiser said to-day, “it will be run as efficiently as my ship-assembly centres.”

Pass Along, Please !

“A mother will dump her baby in the reception hall on the way to work. Baby will then be wheeled past a line of experts, who will examine his mouth and eyes, wash, him, change his napkin and so on, without a moment’s interruption. Baby will then pass into the restaurant for feeding, on to a room for play, and then into a cot for his nap.”

Kaiser visualises babies passing through the departments in an endless stream day and night, for the nursery will care also for the children of many women night workers.”

At last ! after everything else has been successfully mechanised; only domestic industry remained in the same position it has been for a thousand years.

Now the children of the workers (not those of the capitalists), tiny tots, are placed on the conveyor belt for highspeed “attention.” This is the sort of “security” and “improvement” offered by those who hold that capitalism can be reformed into something better. Where are those Conservative speakers of yesteryear who brought tears to the eyes of their hearers by their mournful dirges on the break-up of family life under Socialism?

Horatio.

Editorial: Trade Unions in Wartime—and After (1943)

Editorial from the July 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

Judged by membership figures, war, with its busy factories, absence of unemployment, and rising prices, is a good time for trade unions. Total membership increased from 6 millions in 1938 to 7 millions at the end of 1941. The current total will he about 8 millions, of whom 1½ millions are women. Thus the British trade union movement touches again the peak membership reached in 1920, but lost in the depression years that followed. These are imposing figures, though it should be remembered that huge areas of industry are still little touched by organisation, as can be seen from a comparison with the much larger number of men and women insured under the Unemployment scheme. Insured workers totalled over 14 millions before the war, and the number of workers in employment has been increased since the war broke out, in spite of the millions withdrawn for the armed forces

Comparison with the position at the time of the last world war brings out a number of changes. One of these is the growing concentration of trade union membership in a small number of large unions—a development forced on by the concentration of capitalist industry. In 1913, when membership was 4 millions, the number of separate unions was 1,269. Now, with twice the membership, the number of unions has fallen to 983. These figures, however, do not bring out the full extent to which concentration has gone on, for over half the total membership is now to be found in just over a dozen unions, each of which has a membership of 100,000 or more. These include the Transport and General Workers’ Union with about 1,000,000, and several unions with upwards of 500,000. Over 6 million trade unionists are in the 50 unions which have a membership of 25,000 or more. This concentration, which was hastened by the last war, may go further still with such developments as the decision of the Amalgamated Engineering Union to recruit women and the tentative movements towards amalgamation of separate unions on the railways and in retail distributive and other industries. “Big unionism,” however, has not fulfilled all the high hopes of those who sponsored it, and the fear is often expressed that the, race for big membership has been accompanied by a slackening of zeal in the struggle against the employers. This fear has been increased by the close war-time association of the unions with the employers, and of the Trades Union Congress with the Government. The danger has been voiced that the trade unions may become permanently imbued with the idea of collaboration, so that they degenerate into little more than subsidiary organs of capitalist industry and of the Government. This reading of the situation fails to take account of evidence that, although the workers are more or less ready to accept collaboration now, they will strongly react against it when the war is over, if not before. It assumes that the workers can be permanently persuaded to ignore the stark reality of the class struggle based on the fact of capitalist ownership and control, and swallow the illusion of class unity. Sir Stafford Cripps may now address the workers on the Joint Production Committees as “comrades,” but this will soon be forgotten when the struggle resumes its normal intensity in the scramble for markers and profits after the war. In spite of all the official hopes of industrial peace, backed up by the powers of the Government under the various Orders imposing industrial conscription and banning strikes, the number of trade disputes increased from 875 in 1938 to 940 in 1939, 922 in 1940, 1,251 in 1941, and 1,281 in 1942. The number of disputes is actually larger than in the last war, though the number of workers involved, and the number of days lost, are smaller—due to the fact that “the great majority of the stoppages affected only individual establishments and were of short duration” (Ministry of Labour Gazette, January, 1943). In spite of the elaborate arrangements to secure the reference of disputes to arbitration, there is ample evidence that trade unionists have not accepted the defeatist view that they can afford to renounce what is in the last resort their main if not their sole weapon, the strike.

In a different direction, the decision of the Post Office Workers to ignore the 1927 Trade Union Act, which forbids their affiliation to Trades Councils and the Trades Union Congress, may be regarded as a sign of a widespread, if at present obscured, determination among trade unionists to retain their independence after the war.

Is Russia Socialist? (Concluded) (1943)

Book Review from the July 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

Another teaching of Socialism ignored by Hewlett Johnson and the Bolsheviks is closely bound up with the above; Socialism can be established only when the working class are ripe for it. The development of capitalism creates a world-wide working-class with identical interests, and presents it with problems the solution of which requires the abolition of capitalist society and the establishment of Socialism. Not for any other class is the task of accomplishing the Socialist revolution! But to achieve Socialism, it does need, not a handful of workers, but the majority of them, class-conscious and with an understanding of what Socialism is. Marx and Engels deal with this point in their “Communist Manifesto,” as Hewlett Johnson must know. They write: 

“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the conscious movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority.” 

This was penned in 1847. Nor the founders of Scientific Socialism change their minds on this point. On the contrary. After many more years of experience and study, Engels wrote about this question of “majority or minority,” His words make it plain that he was convinced that only a class-conscious majority of workers could achieve Socialism. “As conditions have changed for warfare,” he writes, “so not less for the class struggle. The period for sudden onslaughts, of revolutions carried out by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where the question involves the complete transformation of the social organisation, there the masses must be consulted, must themselves have already grasped what the struggle is about, and what they stand for.” “This is what the history of the last fifty years has taught us. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long and persistent work is needed …” Thus Engels in the last thing he wrote: The Preface to “Class struggles in France.”

The point Engels makes above is a fundamental of Scientific Socialism. But the Dean ignores it. He believes that a handful of men with some knowledge of the trends of history and with determination can lead the masses from a semi-mediaeval system direct to Socialism – that society which needs for its establishment a working class desirous of Socialism and organised politically to achieve it and which needs also, as Stalin said, “a high productivity of labour” (p. 209). The Bolsheviks won the support of the peasants and power with their “Bread, Peace and Land” programme. And the Dean believes Socialism has been achieved in this way.

According to Hewlett Johnson, Russia is a classless state. This does not mean, however, that its citizens enjoy economic equality for, to quote from his book, the classless state “was never intended to mean strict equality, save at the end of a very long process. It left freedom, of instance, for inequality of wage.”

Thus again the Dean distorts the teachings of Socialism. In the first place, Socialist writers have shown that with the end of classes, the state will disappear, since it is only necessary where class-rule obtains. The state arose with the private property and the growth of an exploiting and exploited class. When private property is abolished – and classes cease to exist – the state will have no function left and will wither away. It is strange that the Dean does not know this considering that he claims to have studied Socialism, especially since the state is dealt with by Engels in his “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” – one of the most widely-read of Socialist classics. The Dean uses a useless phrase when he talks of “the class-less state.”

Secondly, Socialism does mean economic equality, in spite of all Hewlett Johnson may say to the contrary. It involves the abolition of the wages system, and the creation of a society wherein every member has free access to the means of life.

Now, in Russia, of course, the worker has not “free access to the means of life.” There exists in Russia, as elsewhere, money, invested in Government bonds, buying and selling and other paraphernalia of capitalism. This being so, we cannot see the point when we read: “The Soviet plan stands in vivid contrast to the planless world of capitalism … where if I possess money I can buy; if not, I must continue in unrelieved want” (p. 89). In Russia, as in other countries, those with large incomes have the advantage; as in other countries, the rich will see they are comfortably housed, well fed and pleasantly entertained. The poor in Russia, like their fellows in all capitalist countries, will have to make do with shoddy.

Certainly Russia has its privileged section of the population and they will buy (because they can afford to do so) the bulk of the luxury articles which the average worker cannot afford. These privileged people are the party officials, technical experts, writers, doctors, lawyers, etc. Some of these people receive incomes a hundred times bigger than that of the average worker. With the legality of inheritance in force, accumulation of wealth is to-day bound to be taking place in Russia among the wealthy. They are the exploiters, and the Dean is wrong when he says (p. 282) “exploitation of man by man is entirely abolished.” They can obtain their big incomes only out of the wealth produced by the workers.

It is not surprising, then, that the Socialist slogan, “from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs,” was thrown overboard by the Bolsheviks in 1936 Constitution, and replaced by the slogan, “From each according to his ability and to each according to the work done.” These Russian exploiters claim that their work is more specialised, more important, more skilled than that of the ordinary workman. Capitalists of other countries have argued the same way. “We are entitled to profits, because we have to think the thing out.”

Before leaving the Dean’s misrepresentations of Socialism, we must draw the reader’s attention to the fact that he has distorted the meaning of Socialism itself. In this respect, he has again followed the Bolsheviks, who now propagate that Socialism is a transitional stage between capitalism and communism. Socialism never had this meaning until the Bolsheviks found it convenient to foist it into the word. For Marx and Engels, especially after the events caused the disappearance of “Utopian Socialism” just after the middle of last century, Socialism and Communism were synonymous terms. Hence the title of Engels’ masterpiece (which the Dean should read), “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” In his Preface to “The Communist Manifesto,” written in 1890, Engels makes it clear that he nor Marx had in mind what the Bolsheviks mean when the term “Socialism” is used. Why then did the Bolsheviks give another meaning to word? In the first place, they doubtless wished to attract support of the workers at home and in other lands and therefore used phraseology which appealed to workers. Later the Nazis did the same with their “National Socialism(!).” Then, again, it was obvious to the Russian people after 1917 that not yet had the millennium arrived. With the impossibility of abolishing poverty it was necessary to hold out hopes of better things to come. In effect they said: “This, you will get, Comrade Worker, when Communism is possible. But you cannot have Communism yet; we must finish building up Socialism first.” In this respect, therefore, the Bolsheviks have proved themselves equal to other exploiters of the workers: they have (so far) succeeded in keeping them “contented” with promises of a good time in the future. They have succeeded too (incidentally) in adding to the confusion which already existed in the worker’s mind as to what Socialism means.

What of Russian Progress ?

A large portion of the Dean’s book is concerned with showing the great progress that Russia has certainly made since 1917. The reader is told of the enormous strides that have been made in industrial development, agriculture, education, etc. The reader is reminded by the author that these advances must be judged, not by the standards of Western Europe, but by the conditions prevailing in Russia in the days of the Tzars.

The facts given of Russian progress may be true. But what if they are? What do they prove? Not, as the Dean thinks, that a Sixth of the World has gone Socialist. Let us consider education. Illiteracy is being rapidly abolished. But does this prove that Russia is Socialist? Of course not. Any country which wishes to make some show in international trade today – which wishes to keep pace with technical improvements in industry, etc., must have an educated population. It was all the more necessary for the Bolsheviks to attempt a hot-house growth of literacy, for in 1917 Russia was backward in almost every respect. If she wished to hold her own, progress had to be rapid. And as it was with education, so it was with industry, agriculture and scientific progress. As we have said earlier, the revolution of 1917 resulted in a development of capitalism. At the most, the Dean has shown us that this development has been rapid.

There are literally scores of other points which we could take up with the Dean, but we think sufficient has already been written.

In conclusion, then, we will content ourselves with emphasising these points:-

1. The book contains nothing new about Socialism or Russia.
2. Hewlett Johnson has borrowed most the Communist misconceptions about these subjects, and without first having critically examined Communist propaganda, he passes it on to his reading public.
3. The Dean fails to prove that a Sixth of the World is Socialist. His book, then, carries a false title.
4. The Dean is not a Socialist as he does not understand Socialism. In spite of his claim to have studied Scientific Socialism, we must say that he shows little sign of having benefited from his study.
5. Russia to-day is passing through a period of capitalist development. This is inevitable, for in 1917 none of the conditions were present which are imperative for the achievement of Socialism (i.e., an advanced industry and a class-conscious working class).
6. Lastly Socialism will come to Russia as to the rest of the world when the conditions are ripe.

Clifford Allen

Homes for Heroes—Deferred (1943)

From the July 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who wish to improve the housing conditions of the working class have always received considerable vocal support. For a century the housing problem has provoked prolonged debate and intensive efforts from reformists to get something done. Despite these efforts, many workers still live in slums, in unhealthy hovels, and in overcrowded conditions. Recently it was the subject for debate in the House of Lords and in the Commons.

Lord Beaverbrook urged the Government to proceed with its emergency scheme for 30,000 houses for agricultural labourers. His efforts were rewarded by the following compliment from Emrys Hughes in Forward, May 8th, 1943 :

“Good for Lord Beaverbrook. If he devotes his energies to this campaign … he should get our whole-hearted backing and support, with the addendum that he is not shouting half loud enough.” The addendum frightens us; a loud shout may blow these houses down. A report on this scheme came from Bradford (Wilts) and appeared in the Daily Herald, April 20th, 1943. Mr. R. P. Pearce, surveyor, stated “he was very much afraid the amount of timber allowed by the authorities was too flimsy to stand a wind of gale force.” Pleasant prospects !

While the noble Lords were so keenly interested in the workers’ welfare, the Commons were indulging in a “home for heroes” debate. Some significant remarks were made (Daily Herald, May 5th). Mr. Hogg, Tory M.P., stated : “A large part of our population is still living in eighteenth century conditions.” Mr. H. Thorneycroft, Labour M.P., pointed out: “Manchester needs 76,000 houses, and at this moment 68,000 are condemned.” Mr. E. Brown, the Minister of Health, wound up by making no promises either for now or the immediate future, although “he admitted that at least 4,000,000 (houses) would be needed after the war.” For the heroes—hope deferred. Four million is a tremendous advance on earlier estimates; ten years ago, before the war aggravated the problem, 1,400,000 houses were estimated as sufficient to abolish overcrowding !

Now that it is known how many dwellings are necessary to house the workers, statisticians may derive pleasure from ascertaining how long that will take at the pre-war rate of building. Items they should not forget in their calculations are the drive for profit, heavy air-raids with their wholesale destruction of working-class homes, also the thousands of “decent” homes now rapidly deteriorating into slums. The problem will not be solved within capitalism.

Basically, there is no such thing as a housing problem. The problem for the workers is poverty, and that will remain so long as capitalism remains. Before the war we witnessed the erection of great buildings for the use of the capitalists, either for homes or for commercial purposes. Colossal quantities of material and thousands of hours of labour were required to do this work. There was no problem—the places were needed by the capitalists, who could afford to pay, so they were built. The needs of the workers are more pressing, but the barrier is insurmountable—the barrier of poverty. Nothing will be built unless it is required by the capitalist or a profit is expected from them. Again we stress the workers live in slums and hovels because they are poor and can afford nothing better.

Two days after the debate had finished, and the problem had been shelved for a few months, evidence for our contention was given in a report on a village fire. Of the 21 houses of Kelmarsh, Northants, 14 were destroyed. These houses were 300 years old. The Daily Herald, May 6th, 1943, reported : “Forty-four people are homeless and nobody knows what is going to happen to them. … Mothers . . . ran for buckets of water. ‘But we had only three taps,’ said Mrs. Vials. . . . They are being housed in empty bedrooms in a wing of the Hall, home of Col Claud Granville Lancaster, M.P.” Comment unnecessary.

Lew Jones

Voice From The Back: Recruiting Sergeant (2007)

The Voice From The Back Column from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recruiting Sergeant

“Bored with life on his family’s South Carolina horse farm, Willard McCormick decided that military service was the right plan for his future. And when the Army dangled its new, $20,000 recruiting bonus in front of him, the decision got a lot easier. ‘I wasn’t going to go right away, but I heard about the bonus and decided to jump on it,’ McCormick, 19, said a couple of days after signing up. … Since the bonus was unveiled in July, more than 6,200 recruits have signed up to begin basic training before Oct. 1, a move that boosts end-of-fiscal year recruiting numbers, Army officials said. ‘People are calling here saying $20,000 is more than they’ve made in the past two years,’ said Staff Sgt. Brent Feltner, 27, commander of a strip-mall recruiting station in this central South Carolina town . . .The Army’s offer stands out to many in a state where the unemployment level is fourth highest in the country, at 5.9 percent in July, up from 5.5 percent in June. It was 6.2 percent in July a year ago.” (Yahoo News, 1 September) Poverty is still capitalism’s most successful recruiting agent.

Ain’t Science Wonderful? 

“Benefit claimants and job seekers could be forced to take lie detector tests as early as next year after an early review of a pilot scheme exposed 126 benefit cheats in just three months, saving one local authority £110,000 . . . The technology is being tested on people claiming housing or council tax benefit but will be extended at Harrow Job centre for other benefits this year . . . Experts in America, where the most comprehensive scrutiny of the technology has taken place, warn that the technology is far from failsafe. David Ashe, chief deputy of the Virginia Board for Professional and Occupational Regulation, said, ‘The experience of being tested, or of claiming a benefit and being told that your voice is being checked for lies, is inherently stressful. Lie detector tests have a tendency to pass people for whom deception is a way of life and fail those who are scrupulously honest.’” (Observer, 2 September) We wonder if it would be possible to ask members of the capitalist class if they think they deserve their immense wealth while others starve, but what would be the point as the expert said there is a tendency to pass those “for whom deception is a way of life”.

Bitter Medicine

A recent review of the business world and ethics was somewhat critical of the pharmaceutical industry. “There has been a number of scandals including the disastrous ‘Elephant Men’ trial for new drug TGN 1412, which caused massive immune reactions in six healthy volunteers. TeGenero, the firm that developed the drug, went bust after the catastrophe. GlaxoSmithKline has been embroiled in a scandal over anti-depressant Seroxat: it has been accused of hiding critical data showing the drug is linked to suicide in teenagers. GSK has also seen millions of sales wiped out after its Avandia diabetes treatment was linked to increased risk of heart attack and strokes.” (Observer, 2 September) The truth is of course that capitalist business practice has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with profits.

Class Divided Britain

Anyone with any doubts about the class division in Britain today should look at the following. “Britain may appear to be a richer country than a decade ago but the gap between the rich and poor has reached levels not seen for more than 40 years. The highest earners are being dubbed ‘the new Victorians’ as they take an ever-greater slice of the wealth pie, leaving mere employees and white-collar workers sharing the crumbs. Government statistics show that the richest 10 per cent of the population control more than half the wealth (53 per cent) of the country, with the 1 per cent jet-set elite controlling no less than 21 per cent.” (Independent, 2 September)

Expert Wants Revolution

“A revolution of society on a scale never witnessed in peacetime is needed if climate change is to be tackled successfully, the head of a major business grouping has warned. Bjorn Stigson, the head of the Geneva-based World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), predicted governments would be unable to reach agreement on a framework for reducing carbon emissions at either a US-sponsored meeting in Washington later this month or at a United Nations climate summit in Indonesia in December.” (Financial Times, 7 September) Mr Stigson may be on to something important here. Because capitalism pollutes and destroys the planet maybe we need a revolution – a complete transformation of society.

Debt-Laden Workers

Behind all the advertiser’s glib spiels about the consumer satisfaction of buy, buy, buy lurks the nasty reality that many workers find themselves in a nightmare of debt. “Record numbers are visiting the Citizens Advice Bureau because their finances have spiralled out of control. Debt is the most common reason for attending a CAB, overtaking benefit problems. The charity said it had seen a 20 per cent rise in those struggling with borrowing, handling 1.7 million cases last year. Debt accounts for one in three of inquiries at the CAB, with advisers in England and Wales dealing with more than 6,6000 such problems every working day.” (Daily Telegraph, 12 September)

Loads Of Money

Millions of workers survive on less than $5 a day. What a contrast with these parasites: “What price exclusivity? If you ask Lamborghini, one million euros ($1.4 million) should do it — before tax, of course. In a bid to add more prestige to what it already has, the Italian maker of super luxury sports car unveiled the Reventon at Frankfurt’s international auto-show, a very limited edition car that looks more like an arrow than anything on four wheels. With the six-figure price tag, it is the most expensive car that it has ever built. Needless to say, Lamborghini has already sold the 20 cars that it plans to build. ‘As soon as the word got out, we sold out in four days,’ Chief Executive Stephan Winkelmann told Reuters, adding that they could have easily sold another 20.” (Yahoo News, 12 September)

Editorial: Moral panic in the U.K. (2007)

Editorial from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

This summer has seen a moral panic grip the UK media. The death in Liverpool of Rhys Jones, the 11-year old boy killed by a bullet from a teenage gang was preceded by a number of gang-related murders, and resulted in much circulation-driven hyperbole about “what sort of society we live in”.

Why people behave the way they do is of course a hugely complex and multi-faceted subject. World socialists don’t lay claim to any specialist understanding in this respect, suffice to say that how people behave is usually down to what they have learnt, be that formally or informally. This learning may be psychological (e.g. secure emotional attachment and nurturing with a parent in the first few years of life), or it may be material, in terms of (for example) the physical environment, or nutrition during childhood.

Much has been made of the fact that gang-members dripping with “bling” (an average teenager on the street may wear close to one thousand pounds-worth of digital accessories) don’t appear to fit the traditional image of impoverished and desperate members of the working class.

However, in a world that increasingly only looks at the price tag, the outward display of some sort of wealth masks perhaps a desperate cry for some sort of recognition. For the market system a pair of training shoes accords status and belonging. This skewed perspective is a measure of just how warped capitalism is. But in any case, world socialists have never just viewed poverty as being about the absence of things, such as cars or money. Increasingly in the older capitalist nations at least, poverty may owe more to an absence of less concrete – but no less critical – human needs such as self-esteem, a sense of belonging or a purposeful, creative and productive life.

It is likely then, that membership of a gang provides its members with some of the things that this society denies them outright. However warped or misplaced, a gang may provide some sort of shared experience and common purpose, a little excitement and a lot of status. After all, the apparent cause of most of these gang murders is not usually down to drug-related battles, but appears to be summed up in one word: respect.

The market system allows us only limited access to wealth. At the same time it bombards us with images and messages of what we could be having. It pressures us into valuing ourselves against everyone else, then offers an arbitrary set of rules to be followed to access wealth.

Certainly it would be churlish to ignore that a lot of the gangs are commercially-focussed, profit-driven drugs operations. According to Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, head of the specialist crime directorate, this is an expanding economy. “It is a huge growth industry and it has not peaked. The challenge is when you do a big operation there are people, gangs, ready to replace and replace and replace”.

Predictably, less media attention was given to the death – only a few weeks after the killing of Rhys Jones – of 18-year old Ben Ford, who was the youngest soldier to die in Afghanistan. Perhaps if we want to genuinely try and understand what sort of society we are bringing our children into we could start by asking why a youth with a gun in his hand defending “his” turf in Moss Side or Brixton is viewed so very differently from the uniformed youth in Afghanistan or Iraq with an Army issue rifle.

Letter: Socialist MPs and reforms (2007)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

I was interested by Steve Shannon’s letter on reformism and the editorial reply in the September Socialist Standard. I’ve believed for some time that the Party’s principled opposition to reformism is one of its truly distinctive features. Search long enough and you’ll find other political organisations which mouth off once a decade about free access or the abolition of the wages system, but you’ll search a lot longer before you find any which never align themselves with some attempt to rearrange capitalism.

This opposition to reformism is well grounded because reforms are by their nature divisive and therefore work against the vital condition of working class unity. For example, within capitalism, raising miners’ pay will be good for miners but not necessarily for other workers. The only interest guaranteed to be shared by all is an interest in ending their position as wage slaves. Voting for reforms which ‘could benefit the working class as a whole’ would be an empty task if this means benefiting all members. (And what else could it mean?) That leaves the problem pinpointed by Steve Shannon, and reference to the party’s position being ‘long-established’ is no answer.

But there is a way out of this. The editors rightly speak of socialist ‘delegates’ facing the problem of whether to vote for reforms. Who decides how they vote? Not them, but the membership of the Socialist Party. This would have two advantages. It would act as a check on whether the membership had reached the political maturity necessary for bringing about a socialist society. (If they vote for reforms they haven’t.) It would also begin the important process of allowing the electors, and not those they have elected, to have control over what happens.

Still, no hurry in resolving these issues. Looks like there won’t be a minority of socialists in parliament any time soon.

Keith Graham (by email)

Reply:

We can’t accept that all “reforms are by their nature divisive”. Many may indeed benefit just a section of the working class, but surely a reform removing restrictions on free speech or the freedom to organise would benefit all workers (and the socialist movement too)?

By the way, we define a reform as a politically-implemented measure and so don’t include wage increases as a “reform”, or wages struggles as “reformist”, even if these are still changes within capitalism. We are all in favour of workers struggling to get the best deal they can for the sale of their labour power to employers, even though we don’t of course seek support on this basis either. 

Editors.

Cooking the Books: Why they like a bit of inflation (2007)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

“We have succeeded in tackling inflation”, declared Gordon Brown (Times, 31 August). Why, then, are prices still rising?

These days “inflation” has come to be another word for “rising prices” whereas, originally and logically, the two were not the same: a rise in the general price level was the effect of an inflation (over-issue) of the currency, not inflation as such.

In any event, the original question – why, if inflation has been tackled, are prices still rising? – remains valid. The answer is that when Brown speaks of inflation being “tackled” he doesn’t mean that it has been ended, but merely that it has been brought under control. Governments everywhere pursue a policy of controlled inflation, over-issuing the currency by an amount calculated to lead only to a given modest rise in prices. In Britain the target the Bank of England has been set is to keep the rise in the general price level to 2 percent a year.

But why this policy? Writing in the Financial Times Magazine (25/26 September) Tom Harford suggested:

“One reason is that relative prices need to change frequently to reflect changes in the economy: this year, British peas will be expensive because the crop was ruined by floods. But clothes have been getting cheaper for years, thanks to low-cost manufacturers in China. And yet the evidence suggests that it is usually easier to raise nominal prices than to lower them. So a little bit of inflation which ensures the typical price change is up rather than down, means that these relative prices adjustments can happen more quickly and easily”.

This doesn’t sound all that plausible as why is it easier to raise rather than lower the price of an individual product? It is true that, with no inflation and so a stable price level, price reductions would be more frequent as the price of most manufactured goods would tend to fall due to increasing productivity.

It is not only the price of clothes that has fallen in recent years. So has that of electronic goods, but the manufacturers have had no difficulty in doing this; in fact being able to reduce their prices gives them an edge over their competitors. And a stable price level would eliminate many accounting problems.

But this is to forget the working class and the effect on what they have to sell – their working skills – and its price (wages and salaries). With a stable price level and increasing productivity, the cost of living – the main element in wages and salaries – would tend to fall. So, therefore, would money wages.

Keynes, the discredited 1930s economist, argued that

“a movement by employers to revise money-wages downward will be much more strongly resisted than a gradual and automatic lowering of real wages as a result of rising prices” (General Theory, chapter 19).

Since it is the labour of wage and salary workers that is the source of capitalist profit, there is a permanent tendency for employers to seek to restrain wages. If workers can be tricked into not resisting these downward pressures as much if they take the form of other prices rising faster than wages, that means more for profits. An added bonus is that, despite a rising price level being a deliberate government policy, workers can be blamed for it for being greedy and asking for too big wage increases.

Northern Clay (2007)

From the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Currency cranks claim – echoed in some badly edited economics textbooks – that banks have the power to “create credit” by a mere “stroke of a pen”: that if someone deposits, say, £100 in a bank, then the bank can lend out many times this amount, effectively creating new purchasing power at will. But this is not the case – banks are essentially financial intermediaries making a profit from borrowing money (typically from depositors) and then lending it out at a higher rate of interest to others; they do not create something effectively out of thin air.

This is obvious in the case of other financial institutions such as a building society or a credit union. A building society accepts deposits from savers, which is lends out to others to buy a house (originally it was only to its members, the savers, a principle still maintained in credit unions). Without these deposits they cannot function – building societies generally make a surplus (which in theory belongs to their members) by charging house-buyers a higher rate of interest than they pay their depositors. Which is why when interest rates go up and they have to pay more to depositors, they also have to charge house-buyers more and mortgage rates go up too.

Northern Rock, currently the focus of one of the most serious financial debacles in modern British history, used to be a building society, but in 1997 they “demutualised” and became a bank that is listed on the London Stock Exchange. From then on the surplus it made from charging borrowers more than it paid depositors became “profit” which belonged to its shareholders and the explicit aim became to maximise this. This essentially legal change did not change its economic function as a financial intermediary nor free it from the financial limitations common to other banks – and it certainly didn’t acquire any right to create credit by the stroke of a pen. But it did allow it access to a wider range of sources from which to obtain money to lend. Instead of being restricted to savers it could now borrow money on the “money market” where short term debts that can easily be converted into cash are traded. It was still a financial intermediary borrowing at one rate and lending at a higher one, only it now had a wider range of sources to borrow from.

Northern Rock seems to have based its entire banking strategy on taking advantage of the relatively low rates of interest available on the money market in recent years. The papers are reporting that while its loans and assets are worth £113 billion, only £24 billion of this has been covered by depositors. The rest – over three-quarters – has come from money borrowed on the money market.

This use of the money markets to underpin long-term lending such as for mortgage loans is what is sometimes known as ‘borrowing short and lending long’, and is traditionally considered bad banking practice. Although all banks have done it at the margins of their operations to smooth-over short-term fluctuations in deposits and loans, it is only in comparatively recent times that some banks have developed entire strategies based around it and Northern Rock appears to be one of the more extreme examples of it.

The main problem that has now developed is that since the beginning of August the money market, like other financial markets, has been in turmoil. Banks and other financial institutions have been reluctant to lend money on it because of the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, so institutions such as Northern Rock who have been relying on it to borrow cheaply have been in trouble. So much trouble in the case of Northern Rock, that it has had to go cap in hand to the Bank of England, which, as the “lender of last resort” to banks has loaned them the money – or rather opened a credit line for them – so that the bank can survive its current problems. The Bank of England is reportedly charging them an interest rate at around one percentage point above the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (‘Libor’, the rate at which the banks lend to one another). This amounts to what has been described as a ‘penal’ rate of around 8 per cent in total.

Indeed, Northern Rock is probably not just worried about its depositors withdrawing their money (and at the time of writing the government has taken the unusual step of guaranteeing all deposits to stop the ‘bank run’ that had been developing across the country). The underlying issue is more about its inability to continue borrowing money from the money market at a lowish rate of interest – since in many respects it is from the difference between this rate and the rate it charges house-buyers that it makes its profit. Already it is forecasting lower profits for the current year and because its share price has fallen – due to some of its shareholders bailing out too – it is liable to be taken over by some rival. In fact, this is what the papers are predicting and it is probably the only way to save it now that its credibility has been shattered.

One thing that won’t happen – because it can’t – is that Northern Rock’s beleaguered chief executive, Adam Applegarth, will take out his pen and simply create the missing credit. Indeed, what has happened to Northern Rock is further proof that banks cannot create multiples of credit from a given deposit base. If they could do this, Northern Rock would never have had to go cap in hand to the money markets to finance its lending operations in the first place.

Poverty and famines (2007)

From the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why do famines occur? Because there’s not enough food or because people haven’t enough money to buy it?

To many people famines are caused by not enough food being available. This seems reasonable enough: why would people have to starve if there was enough food to feed them? It’s a good question, but it assumes that today food is produced to feed people whereas in fact this is not the case. It should be, but it isn’t. And it isn’t, because we are living in a capitalist society where food is not produced simply to satisfy people’s need for it but – like everything else – to be sold on a market with a view to making a profit. Food is a commodity which, like all commodities, can only be acquired if you have money (or something else) to exchange for it. If you don’t, then you starve. It’s as simple as that.

In 1981 the International Labour Organisation in Geneva published a study on famines by Amartya Sen, an Indian academic working in England, entitled Poverty and Famines. An Essay in Entitlement and Deprivation. Sen studied five famines: the Great Bengal famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famines of 1973 and 1974, the Bangladesh famine of 1974, and the Sahel famines of the 1970s.

His conclusion was that the widespread “food availability decline” theory of famines was mistaken. In its stead he proposed that they should be explained on the basis of a failure or a decline in some people’s “entitlement” to food, i.e., in the end, on their not being able to acquire enough money to buy it or enough of it:

“Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat”. (p. 1, his emphasis).

“Starvation . . . is a function of entitlements and not of food availability as such” (p. 7).

Sen went on to win the so-called 1998  Nobel Prize for Economics (actually a prize awarded by the Bank of Sweden, not the Nobel Prize Committee) for  his work on famines, welfare economics and political liberalism.

Socialists recognised that Sen, in saying that famines were not caused by there not being enough food or by there being too many people, was saying something very near to what we had always said. Modern-day famines arose in the  context of the capitalist profit system under which people had to buy what they needed to live and to do this they had to have first acquired money, either by selling their ability to work for a wage or a salary or by growing and selling some cash crop. When, for whatever reason, some people find themselves unable to acquire money, they would not be able to acquire food. If this was widespread, as periodically happened in different parts of the world, then there would be a “famine”, irrespective not only of the capacity to produce enough food but even in the presence of adequate supplies of food.

Sen, however, was not a socialist, but a left liberal supporter of the capitalist market economy. Hence his solution was not to abolish a system where people’s “entitlement” to food (and everything else) depended on their having money; it was to increase such entitlements by arranging for them to have more money or at least a regular supply of money. He wanted to reform the money system not abolish it.

Socialists have no quarrel with Sen’s definition of famine, but they do challenge his definition of “poverty”. Sen defines poverty in terms of lack of access to means of consumption, to not having enough to live at some minimum level of nutrition or comfort or decency. This means that he and others who think like him have to try to fix what this minimum level is. Inevitably, the result is a more or less arbitrary definition that only applies to a minority of the population; most people not being considered poor because their income is above this low level. The “poor”, in other words, are defined in such a way that they will only ever be a minority of the population. The Christian bible may say that “the poor ye shall always have with you” – but, according to Sen and other economists, this will be only as a minority.

Marxists define poverty in terms of lack of access to means of production.  Anybody in this position is obliged to obtain their living by selling the only thing they do possess – their ability to work – to some employer. They are poor in terms of not owning means of production. Some, indeed most, may be able to obtain a monetary income above the “poverty line” defined by economists such as Sen but, being deprived of means of production, they still suffer from poverty.

It is true that, under capitalism, where “entitlement” to food, clothing, housing, etc depends on having money, there will always be some people who (through, illness, incapacity, old age, etc) can’t sell their ability to work or, because of its low quality, can’t sell it for a high enough price to cover their basic needs and so, without hand-outs from the State, would be destitute. This – destitution – is the proper term to describe their situation, not “poverty”. In the Victorian England of Marx’s day it was called “pauperism”. It is true that only a minority of the working class find themselves in this situation. But this does not mean that the rest — those in regular work — cannot be described as suffering from poverty, deprivation. In the wider, Marxian sense, if you don’t own sufficient means of production to live without having to work to obtain money then you are deprived, or poor. Which is the situation of the vast majority of people under capitalism.

As to solutions, as a self-confessed left-wing Keynesian and “welfare economist”, Sen sees the solution to “poverty and famines” as lying in increasing the “entitlement” of “the poor” by giving them or allowing them to acquire more money. It is not difficult show why, on theoretical grounds, this would not and could not work as it goes against the whole logic of the capitalist system.

Capitalism operates by extracting surplus value — which the employing capitalist hopes to turn into money — from the working class. The monetary expression of surplus value — profit — is the lifeblood of capitalism and any attempt to tax it away risks clogging up the whole economic mechanism, thereby provoking an economic slump. Attempts to transfer money from the rich to the poor by various left-wing governments (whether Labour, Social Democratic or “Communist”) have always failed, with the leftwing government either being voted out of office or accommodating itself to having to give priority to profit-making over meeting people’s needs. The capitalist system simply cannot be made to work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers. It runs on profits – extracted from the working class – and can only ever work in the interest of the profit-taking, capitalist class. The sort of reformism advocated by Sen is futile.

Under capitalism, the working class are not entitled to – have no “right” to – anything. They are only allowed to work if some employer thinks they can make a profit out of selling what they produce and, if unable to work, are only maintained by the State (out of the surplus value produced by the working class) at a level sufficient to stop them rioting or turning to crime. The solution lies not in trying to transfer money from the rich to the poor but in abolishing the money system altogether on the basis of the common ownership by the whole people of the means of production.

This would end the poverty of the working class as well as the destitution of the minority dependent, if lucky, on State hand-outs or charity. “Entitlement” to food and all the rest would not then depend on having a source of money, but simply on being human, a member of society. Everybody, not matter how little they might be able to contribute, would still be entitled to live and live as well as society can afford. In other words, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. Common ownership not class ownership. Production solely for use not production for profit. That is the only way to abolish “poverty and famines” from the face of the Earth for ever.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Back to the Iron Age? (2007)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

“They eat food from skips, wear discarded clothes and want to topple capitalism”, wrote Brian O’Connell in an article headed “Masters of free lunch” in the Irish Times  (4 September). He was describing the activities of a group of people who call themselves “freegans” – “a combination of the words free and vegan, whose aim is to live as non-commercially as possible”. They “don’t believe in working for money”, nor in paying for the things they need to live.

Socialists don’t either, but in the context of a society based on the common ownership of the means of life where there’d be no need for money or buying and selling, not as a lifestyle choice within capitalism. No doubt it is theoretically possible to live within capitalism without using money, but to what end? Not even 5 percent of the population (and that’s probably an exaggeration), let alone a majority, could live like that. Not that skip diving for food and other things needed to survive is ever likely to appeal to more than a tiny handful of people.

So, we are talking about an inevitably very marginal activity, and one that depends on most other people working for wages and producing the wealth of society, including the thrown-away products the freegans gather and consume. As everything produced under capitalism is the result of exploitation, they are carrying to its logical extreme the practice of those who refrain from buying certain products on ethical grounds. They see themselves as the ultimate “ethical consumers”, even if they are doing through voluntary choice what a number of others are obliged to do through economic necessity.

But how is such a lifestyle going to “topple capitalism”? We can’t deny that they are against capitalism or what one of them is quoted as calling “a profit-driven commodities economy”. The trouble is that that’s not all they are against. They also denounce “industrialism” and “globalism”. They want to renounce the real and potential benefits of industrial production and go back to living a simple agricultural life with an Iron Age technology but without using animals.

According to O’Connell:

“Freeganism has its roots in traditional activities such as gleaning, or historical collectives such as the Diggers, a group of agrarian communists who flourished in mid-17th-century England . . . [T]he first official use of the word ‘freegan’ appeared in 2000 and began to gain popularity through a website, Freegan.info, set up in New York by Adam Weissman and Wendy Sher in 2003”.

Hang on a minute! Website? Doesn’t that assume the existence of “industrialism” and in fact a highly developed technology? And is not the internet one of the more prominent aspects of “globalism”?

The freegans are right, however, to want to recreate the social relationships of early human society, which were co-operative and sharing and based on giving and taking rather than buying and selling. Socialists want this too, but we say this can be done without having to renounce the advances in sanitation, medicine and comfort that modern science and technology have brought, including the ability to find ecologically-acceptable techniques of energy generation and industrial production. We want to restore the original common ownership of the Earth’s resources – for the Earth to become, as the Diggers put it, “a common Treasury for All” –  and the social relationships that went with it, while retaining both industrialism and globalism.

Life of Cobbett (2007)

Book Review from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett’. By Richard Ingrams. (Harper Perennial £8.99)

As a former editor of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams knows a thing or two about being sued for libel and so is well-placed to write a biography of William Cobbett. Cobbett (1763–1835) was a journalist and political agitator. His first brush with the law came when, after a spell in the army, he tried to expose corruption among the officers in his regiment. In response, he was effectively threatened with being tried for treason and so fled to France and then the US. The Establishment were able to use comparable threats against Cobbett and others many times in order to persecute and clamp down on ‘radicals’.

After returning to Britain, Cobbett became an advocate of political, especially parliamentary, reform, a cause he pushed in his remarkable paper the Political Register. In 1810 he was charged with criminal libel following articles he had printed about an alleged army mutiny. It’s astonishing to learn that it was no defence to such a charge to show the truth of what had been written. Cobbett was sentenced to two years in prison.

In 1817 he upped sticks to America again, following the suspension of habeas corpus and worries for his safety. He came back after two years and in 1820 stood as a parliamentary candidate for Coventry in the general election that followed the death of George III. He lost, unsurprisingly given the smear campaign against him and the physical intimidation of potential voters for him.

Cobbett had started his working life as an unpaid labourer on his father’s farm. In 1830 widespread rural hunger led to rick-burning and other actions, in the so-called Swing riots. Cobbett was accused of stirring up the unrest and charged with seditious libel, but this time the jury could not agree and he was acquitted. He was elected MP for Oldham in 1832, after the passage of the Reform Act, but was able to achieve little in this role.

Richard Ingrams brings out many other aspects of Cobbett’s life: his enormous popularity, his love of the countryside, his detestation of Thomas Malthus and William Wilberforce. He has produced a very readable biography that fills in much of the political background and also has the merit of including many quotations from Cobbett’s own writings.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: Sinn Fein policy is futile (2007)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Speaking against the internment and the “jailing of Irishmen” by the authorities at Curragh, Mr. Seamus South “appealed to the people to join Sinn Fein, which, he said, was a lawfully constituted organisation… Their aim was the re-unification of Ireland as a thirty-two county republic and the re-establishment of an All-Ireland Parliament. They had been accused of wanting to create a civil war, but they did not want that.” (Mr. South was speaking at a Sinn Fein meeting at Listowel, and was reported in The Kerryman (24/8/57).

Whether Sinn Fein achieved their aim of re-uniting Ireland and re-establishing an All-Ireland Parliament, they would not solve the problems facing the Irish people—the problems of poverty and general insecurity.

The mass of the people suffer from these problems because they own little or no property in the means of life. They are either propertyless industrial or farm workers—when they are not unemployed—or their farms are too small to enable them to make sufficient money to live a comfortable life.

Only when Irish workers and poverty-stricken small farmers unite together to make the land and the other means of life the common property of all, together with the workers of other lands, will they be able to solve their problems. Emigration is not the solution—only Socialism is!

(From article by Peter E. Newell, Socialist Standard, October, 1957)

Greasy Pole: Gordon Brown – At Last (2007)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

To be fair to Gordon Brown, after waiting all that time he did move quickly to correct any mistaken expectations about the style in which he intended to do the job of Prime Minister. This was important, because any change of government or leadership is liable to mislead a lot of people that thenceforward things will be significantly different. Remember the relief with which the voters booted out the Callaghan government in 1979, apparently assuming that a few years under the Iron Lady would make Britain, and thereby themselves, Great again? Think back, then, to 2 May 1997 when a relieved electorate said good-bye to the rule of Thatcher and Major, to Tory sleaze, the likes of mad John Redwood and Peter Lilley, the vaporising of large swathes of industry and all. And then most recently there was the removal of the saviour of 1997, Tony Blair with the cowboy swagger which (along with a few other things like war in the Gulf) he had so diligently copied from George Bush, with his attention to the rich and powerful like Levy and Murdoch, with scandals like Cash for Honours and the bribery at BAE – all covered, when in difficulty, with that vacant, intensely irritating gaping grin. In contrast to all that Gordon Brown – solid as Ben Nevis in form and voice, as averse to glamour as to a baboon, stood in welcome contrast. Surely, desperately, from now on the lives of all the everyday, exploited people who work and argue and vote would be different? Better than before?

But didn’t Brown himself have something to do with this? Did not his drastic refashioning of the  government make it seem that there had been a general election and not just a reshuffle of the same tired ministerial crew by a tired new prime minister? What about the appointment of Ed Balls, with the looks of an eager, energetic primary school kid, as head of a brand new Ministry for Children, Schools and Families? The motherly Jacqui Smith as Minister of Justice, whose frequent appearances on TV stood in such ameliorative contrast to the vengeful rasping of John Reid? Of course Brown did have some luck; politicians sometimes do. The first outbreak of foot and mouth disease could have been a disaster for him but as it turned out it gave him the opportunity to rush back from a brief holiday in homely Dorset (Blair, it was muttered, would have been immovably under the sun at some millionaire mate’s freebie Caribbean mansion) to oversee the control of the disease and keep the slaughter to the minimum. Such was the warmth of Brown’s honeymoon with voters that they seemingly forgave him that, in spite of his well-publicised attachment to the rigours of Presbyterianism, he was unable to switch off the rain and so save all those acres of England from their immersion in the summer floods.

Thatcher

Unable to organise divine interference with the weather, Brown had to resort to more usual, human, methods of impressing the voters, which meant that he had to disseminate confusion in the shape of contradiction. He was, he suddenly announced, about to launch “a new type of politics” – which sounded an alarmingly original idea until he elaborated: “I believe Britain needs a new type of politics which embraces everyone in the nation, not just a few. A politics built on consensus, not division”. Hardly had the nation wherein everyone was to be embraced in politics digested this astounding declaration than Brown remorselessly drove on, giving an example of a favourite politician: “I think Lady Thatcher saw the need for change and I also admire the fact she is a conviction politician. I am a conviction politician like her”. (He did not mention other conviction politicians like the dictators whose convictions encouraged them to organise genocidal slaughters).Thatcher may have been amused or irritated that, after all those years striving to be every Tory’s ideal of a confrontational politician, she should be admired by someone who claimed to be in favour of operating the consensus. In any case she bore it well; she was, said an aide, “delighted to have such flattery” – although it’s not clear whether she felt the same about Tory MPs like John Bercow and Patrick Mercer (last heard of as he was sacked by David Cameron from the Front Bench for making racist comments about black soldiers) who were impressed enough by Brown’s drive for consensus politics to be recruited into his flourishing regiment of “advisory” committees.

Perhaps to restrain himself from trying to lasso the entire Tory front Bench, Brown decided it would be prudent to return to the more normal, divisive type of politics – such as he became familiar with during his time growing up in the Scottish Labour Party. And again his luck was in because on 4 September the rail union RMT called a brief strike which shut down much of the London Tube system. As a result thousands of Londoners had to endure an intensity of crowding in underground trains which impressed even them, accustomed as they were to everyday cattle truck conditions. The strike arose because of the workers’ anxiety about the stability of their pensions following the bankruptcy of Metronet, the firm responsible for two thirds of the Tubes under the ill-fated Private/Public Partnership favoured by Brown and Blair.

Inflation

This might have been Brown’s chance to eradicate any lurking remnants of guilt about his part in promoting PPP by embracing the Tube workers into the comforts of his consensual politics. But clearly he is not just an admirer, but also an imitator, of Thatcher. He attacked the strikers for the inconvenience which their action had caused to the travelling workers of London and complained that by trying to protect their meagre pensions they were aggravating “inflation”, which must surely bring the country to its knees. He did not dwell on the unhappy fact that a strike has to cause problems; there would be no point in it otherwise and the fact that the withdrawal of the Tube workers was so disruptive is a measure of their importance. After all, City traders who make fortunes shifting money around could stop work tomorrow and life would go on much as usual. A few days later at the TUC, confronted with a well mannered demonstration by civil servants waving banners audaciously suggesting Fair Pay For Public Servants (according to the Office for National Statistics the growth in pay in the public sector, far from running riot, is at its lowest for a decade) Brown went into one of his familiar rants: “let me be straightforward with you – pay discipline is essential to prevent inflation, to maintain growth and create more jobs.” We are accustomed by now to the persistent misuse of the word inflation and the assumption that a rise in wages must lead to higher prices when the fact is that workers are not the cause of what Brown calls “inflation” but  in many cases its victims.

Brown had a long wait to get the job he had coveted, against all Blair’s manoeuvring and treachery, so it may have been with some relief that he could promise, immediately on his arrival at Number Ten, to bring in a new age of politics. How many times had we heard that before, from how many subsequently discredited Prime Ministers? It is no surprise that Brown offered nothing better than those who went before. When he is eventually winkled out of Downing Street and his time at the top of the greasy pole is evaluated the question will be – was it worth waiting for? 

Ivan