Caught In The Act: One of us (1990)

The Caught In The Act Column from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of us

One of Parliament's discarded traditions was that the Labour benches should be thickly strewn with men whose roughened hands and accents betrayed their antecedents as coal miners, dockers, steel workers and the like.

Some of these Honourable Members were so uncouth as to make caustic speeches about the archaic rituals, the ambitious toadying and the cross party amity which seemed so necessary to life in the Commons and to wonder how these things could be endured by a party which was supposed to stand for social revolution. Others were so struck by what they saw that they could hardly wait to kit themselves and their wives in the finery needed to participate in revolutionary activities like Buckingham Palace garden parties.

Among these vacillating members were some points of stability — people whose wealth and heritage gave them an immunity against the rampant naivety. These were the MPs who tried to deceive themselves that they were impelled by their consciences onto the side of tho class whose exploitation provided their exalted status, who tried to avert any accusations of patronising their less wealthy Labour colleagues by outdoing them in outrageous left-winging — or rather eccentricity.

One frequent outcome of this was promotion into government rank, which quickly emphasised to them that they were in Parliament to protect the interests of the ruling class and not to sympathise with a sentimental jumble of misconceived substitutes for political principles.

Electioneering

In the first Cabinet of the 1945 Labour government there were five ex-public schoolboys (including two Old Etonians) amongst them Hugh Dalton and Stafford Cripps, whose opinions and work as managers of the finances of British capitalism disqualified them from any claim to be socialists. Both were enthusiastic propagators of the ruling class message to the British workers, that they had to work harder and receive less so that their exploiters could win back their place in the world economy of capitalism.

If at times rich people sat uneasily alongside ex-miners and dockers it was because they were not considered to be One of Us. They winced as they kissed voter's babies (employing a nanny to bring up their own children, they could never be sure they were holding the child the right way up); supping obligatory pints of mild in the constituency working men's club was little short of agony to a sensitive soul longing for the sanctuary of evening sherry among elegant friends who did not speak with those dreadful accents.

That, at least, is one agony that time and political developments have eased, for as Labour has established itself as the alternative government for British capitalism its MPs are more likely to be economists, barristers, doctors or journalists than toilers by hand. The eccentrics are now members like Dennis Skinner, who performs the intellectual juggling act of supporting capitalism by being a member of the Labour Party while having a reputation for making irreverent and penetrating comments on the essential hypocrisy of the system

Tory trade unionists

The Tories have not been free of such problems After their defeat in 1945 party chairman Lord Woolton decided that the way back to power lay in getting out among the people All over the country the Tories took to the streets at outdoor meetings 

Among their London speakers was Bob Bullbrook, a thick-set man (which could also be said of his brain) with a voice like an injured buffalo. Because he was a trade unionist (he liked to introduce himself to his audiences as a gas worker, which was not liable to pacify them) Bullbrook was something of a protected species in the Tory Party so they adopted him as their candidate in some constituency where Labour sat on an Everest-like majority. Of course he failed to scale it and. unlike other Tory hopefuls, he was not rewarded with the candidacy of progressively winnable seats. When the Conservatives came back to power their interest in outdoor propaganda faded and with it Bob Bullbrook. In spite of his energy and misguided commitment Bullbrook was not One of Us.

But one example of the threatened species did survive, at least for a while, Ray Mawby was more or less forced onto the Tories in his constituency Totnes — by the party hierarchy in their eagerness to reassure all trade unionists that their interests were close to the hearts of Conservatives in even the poshest, most secure of parliamentary seats.

Educated at a council school and trained as an electrician, Mawby's dour and unappealing personality grated on the Old Etonians and ex-officers who sat alongside him. He lacked what are politely called the social graces, speaking like an electrician who has just had a nasty shock from a wrongly wired up plug and probably shovelling his peas in with his knife. His fellow Tory MPs. on the assumption that so charmless a bounder must be Labour, would sometimes ask him to pair with them (what Mawby replied was not recorded and in any case was probably not suitable for a publication intended for family reading) This treatment did not reduce his ardour for capitalism nor for corporal and capital punishment for those who offended against the system's law and order

After holding a couple of minor jobs under the Postmaster General (which hardly helped to sustain the propaganda about the welcome awaiting trade unionists in the Tory Party) Mawby was contemptuously and relievedly deselected by the Totnes Tories and, no doubt to the satisfaction of a lot of trade unionists, he was then forced to sign on the dole. It was as much as he could expect he was. after all. not One of Us.

Madness

A lot of energy is expanded in analysing the collusive aspects of capitalist politics and the effect this has on the way the system is organised and governed. Bitter, rejected people like Mawby are prone to develop ideas about how much moro efficient — more repressive, predictable, exploiting — capitalism would be were it not for irrelevant prejudices that power should be wielded by those who went to the 'right' school and university or who wore in a ’good' regiment — or active in an ideologically right trade union. That neat, simple theory has led the outraged sensibilities of many a political reject. The snag is that it does not match with reality.

Whoever has been in charge of capitalism, and whatever their origins, the effects on the system and on the working class whose exploitation nurtures the entire set-up, has been unnoticeable. At one time it may be a languid. superior Trollope-addict like Macmillan: at another a professed meritocrat like Wilson or Heath: at another a philistinic small town grocer like Thatcher

These leaders offer material enough to assuage the appetite of the hungriest sociologist searching for an illusory insight and solution for capitalism's desperate problems. One vital fact fails to engage their attention: by its nature this social system cannot satisfy human needs, it must produce schisms.

Ray Mawby once said it would need a psychiatrist to discover why he went Conservative. Well yes — that goes for them all: it is not absolutely necessary to be mad to support capitalism but it helps 

Ivan