News in Review: China's Bomb (1964)

The News in Review column from the November 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abroad

China's Bomb

Sir Alec Douglas-Home always stood up for an independent British nuclear armoury on the grounds that it gave the British capitalist class a place at the top negotiating table.

There may be something in this. The disputes of capitalism are finally settled by force, or by the threat of force—even when the amiable, wise-cracking Lord Home was Foreign Secretary. It is reasonable to suppose that the power with the biggest bomb will be the power with the biggest say in international affairs.

That is why the three first nuclear powers once hoped to keep the Bomb's secret to themselves, so that world capitalism was an orderly affair of just two big power blocs with Britain as a buffer between them.

This was a forlorn hope. Many other nations have been trying to develop their own bomb. The French were the first to succeed and now, in spite of a certain amount of hindrance from Russia, it seems that China has also arrived as a nuclear power.

The top table is getting rather crowded. 

The prospects are that it will get more crowded still. The Indian government, which always reserved the right to reconsider its original decision not to manufacture nuclear weapons, greeted the news that China had the Bomb with the announcement that India could also develop one if it wanted to.

All of this should please those who hold the theory of the deterrent, because the more nations that get the Bomb the more they can all frighten each other into peaceful intentions. Or is the opposite true?

In fact, wars are not caused by armaments, or by the lack of them. Capitalism is like a jungle, with any number of competing nations clawing and savaging each other in the ruthless struggle for advantage.

No humane considerations, no moral concepts, come into this. A government will coldly take the decision to manufacture a weapon which it knows is capable of literally atomising tens of millions of people in the blink of an eye. And having so decided, the members of the government will go home placidly, play with the dog, bath the baby and themselves sleep innocent sleep.

There is no sanity in this. To the requirements of property society, the human race is deliberately making the means of perhaps wiping itself out.

Capitalism marches on. It expands into places where it has not been before. It develops its productive abilities in fantastic leaps and bounds. At the same time it deprives, exploits, degrades and terrorises its people to an undreamt of intensity.

Politics

Immigration

Today the Communist Party is posing as the friend and champion of the interests of the immigrant worker. But, as with most other matters, it has not always taken up this position. Seventeen years ago, for instance, the Communist Party was engaged in an anti-Polish campaign. In 1947 the two Communist members of the House of Commons were continually asking questions about the Poles in Britain. Some of the comments then made by Willie Gallacher indicate the level to which the Communist Party was prepared to stoop. On February 4, 1947, the following exchange took place during question time:

Mr. Lennox Boyd: Is it not a fact that the vast majority of Poles are desperately seeking employment in this country?

Mr. Gallacher: Let them get employment in their own country. (Hansard, Vol. 432, Col. 1555.)

On July 29 again:

Vice-Admiral Taylor: Can the right hon. gentleman give us an assurance that none of them will be forcibly sent back, and can he tell us how many have refused to accept work?

Mr. Bellenger: I cannot give an assurance of that kind, but these Poles cannot remain on British benevolence indefinitely.

Mr. Gallacher: We do not want them. (Hansard, Vol. 441, Col. 251.)

In the same year the Communist Party published a book by their leader, Harry Pollit, under the title Looking Ahead. In here we read:

I ask you, does it make sense that we allow 500,000 of our best young people to put their names down for emigration abroad, when at the same time we employ Poles who ought to be back in their own country, and bring to work to Britain displaced persons who ought also to be sent back to their own countries? We want our own workers to have confidence in their own land, to take a pride in building it up. (p. 72.)

Who was it said, “the working men have no country? ”

Business

Dahlia affair

Could there be anything less offensive than a dedicated dahlia grower?

Just listen to his endless talk of ray and disk florets. Look at those sensitive, earthy hands caressing the prize blooms. A very perfect gentle chap, it seems.

Yet behind that placid exterior lurks a desire to undermine the basis of society. What happened when dahlia growers in the Midlands organised a cheap air trip to the United States?

Why, they invited other dahlia fans to go as well and if that is not subversive, antisocial and plain criminal, what is?

Fortunately, virtue triumphed. The Midland Dahlia Society booked their flight with B.O.A.C. but they broke the rules of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) when they advertised it as open to non-members. Virtue was a spy employed by rival airline Alitalia, who reported the matter to the IATA and so got the trip called off.

But virtue was not unreservedly rewarded. The Alitalia man—their Manchester manager—came back from holiday to a doormat load of poison pen letters, which shows how much people hate a wrecker of dahlia growers' outings.

Nobody seems to have got upset with the real culprit. The IATA does not only lay down rules about economy fares. It also governs all other aspects of flying freight and passengers all over the world, and the charges which are made for this.

In other words, it is an international organisation which tries to regulate the markets in air traffic. Quite often this means that the IATA restricts traffic, as it has in the Dahlia Society affair.

Such carve-ups are quite common under capitalism; they exist in all manner of enterprises and their object is to safeguard the profitability of those enterprises. This—the profit motive which underlies all capitalism's operations—is where the disappointed dahlia growers should vent their frustration.

And so should all those poison pen writers, who perhaps see something particularly mean and degrading in useful men wasting their time spying upon other useful men wasting their time thinking up ways of avoiding commercial restrictions.

At Home

The Sun

The International Publishing Corporation—the Daily Mirror group to most people—are noted for their mastery of the technique of ballyhoo. At one time, no newspaper had its finger so sensitively upon the pulse of public ignorance as did the Mirror—and none exploited that ignorance so cynically nor so remuneratively.

But recently there have been new scents in the wind. Is the Mirror losing its grip, as the IPC gets larger? The group's latest paper—the Sun—is trying, among other things, to prove that the finger is still unerringly there, still knows how fast or how slow beats the reader’s pulse.

“The only newspaper,” claimed the Sun, “born of the age we live in.” Self consciously, the paper detailed the type of person it is confident of attracting. The New Young Men with the Hardy Ames suit, with the open plan bungalow on the new estate, the foot on the second or even the third rung of the ladder. The people with a conscience—and, naturally, with the big buying power.

All of this splurge was really aimed at potential advertisers, to persuade them that space booked in the Sun would pay off. It is the advertising revenue, and not the circulation figures, which now decide whether a paper lives or dies.

The Daily Herald, when International put it to sleep, had a daily sale of well over a million copies, but couldn’t attract enough advertising to pay its way. In contrast, the colour supplement of the Sunday Times, which is virtually given away, is a money-spinner—and is therefore being widely imitated—because it attracts some rich advertising.

What this adds up to is that in the newspaper world it is only the really Big’uns who now stand a chance. This may mean that the Sun, backed by IPC’s massive resources and under the practised and ruthless control of Hugh Cudlipp, may eventually survive.

Which would merely add another mouthpiece of capitalist propaganda to the rest. And if the Sun lives up to its promise to be a “radical” paper, a paper with a “conscience,” a particularly unctuous and nauseating mouthpiece it will be. “The only newspaper born of the age we live in.” Ugh.