Cooking the Books: Pocket money (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of August Starmer proclaimed that ‘things will get worse’ but that later they will ‘get better’. There is, he said, ‘a budget coming in October, and it’s going to be painful’, adding ‘we have no other choice’ (tinyurl.com/yc3tt3u3). By now we will know how painful and in what way.

Only as recently as May the Labour Party was promising to deliver ‘more money in people’s pockets [their emphasis in bold], improving living standards everywhere and helping working people keep more of the wealth that they create’ (tinyurl.com/2yz4j8se).

Some 40 percent or so of the adult population in the UK get a part of their money income from the government such as child benefit, state pension or universal credit. The government can also increase the minimum wage, and it can reduce income tax rates resulting in take-home pay going up. So it does have some power to literally put ‘more money in people’s pockets’.

It also has the power to take money out of people’s pockets. We already knew that the present government has the will to do this as one of the first things it did on entering office was to cut most pensioners’ income by £300. So when this government says it will make things get worse, that’s one politician’s pledge that we can be sure will be honoured.

This doesn’t necessarily have to take the form of reducing the nominal amount of money paid to people. It could also take the form of not increasing this more than the rise in the price level. Otherwise, how else could workers get to ‘keep more of the wealth that they create’?

What Starmer was implying was that the Labour government was going to inflict pain on people by reneging on its promise to put more money in their pockets. He is claiming that this is needed as a condition for things to get better later. ‘To accept short term pain for long term good’, as he put it. It’s a line that workers have often being sold — you’ll get jam tomorrow if you tighten your belts today.

The jam tomorrow is presented as a growing economy that will bring the government more in tax revenue and so enable it to ‘put more money in people’s pockets’ by increasing benefits or reducing income tax as well as to spend more to improve education, the health service and social amenities generally. But while the government does have the power to make things worse in the short term, it doesn’t have the power to create a growing economy. That, therefore, is essentially nothing more than a hope.

It is possible that the economy will grow a little faster but this would not be as a consequence of what the government may do. The capitalist economy moves through a never-ending series of boom-slump cycles and the Starmer government could be lucky and still be in office when it enters a boom phase. This won’t last of course since sooner or later the economic downturn phase will follow. And then workers will again be asked to tighten their belts in the hope of jam tomorrow.

Such good chaps (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Good Chaps. By Simon Kuper. Profile Books. 2024. £9.99

This is effectively the sequel to Kuper’s excellent Chums, reviewed in the September 2022 Socialist Standard. The focus this time is the idea that English gentlemen (and it’s usually men) have always been trusted to follow the rules and ‘play the game’, this being an intrinsic tenet of a public school and Oxbridge upbringing. Kuper catalogues how in recent years this seems to have gone very badly awry.

In the 1960s and 70s, these types started to get rather pushed out of politics and the upper echelons of the civil service and other professions, though far from disappearing entirely. Under David Cameron (Eton and Oxford) they started to reassert their natural right to govern again, but with a twist – this being that the gentlemen’s code they had abided by in earlier eras had largely been eroded by the type of ruthless competition that capitalism promotes, and the narcissism and inflated egos that go with it. It found ultimate expression, of course, in the tawdry and shambolic government of Boris Johnson (Eton and Oxford).

Of particular interest to Kuper is the financial base to this political superstructure – exemplified by the buccaneer capitalists that massaged Johnson’s ego so thoroughly and who have sought influence through the connections to which they can buy access. Many of these have been arriviste Mayfair hedge-fund managers and private equity tycoons – the same types of people behind the likes of Reform UK and GB News (often people bizarrely casting themselves as ‘outsiders’ to the traditional City of London and media establishments). And of even more interest still, many in these circles have been Russian oligarchs. As ever, Kuper sums up this type of development beautifully:

‘The moment Russians became British citizens, they were allowed to give to political parties. From about 2012 through 2022, they were the foreign nationality that topped the list of British political donations. Naturally, they gave to the ruling party rather than the powerless Opposition.

The Tories were delighted. It was as if extraterrestrials had stepped out of a spaceship on Parliament Square and inexplicably begun handing them money. The Russian you met over whiskies in 5 Hertford Street was charming. Of course he wasn’t working for the Kremlin! Don’t go all Le Carré on me. And if you did make the effort to perform the most basic due diligence on where his money came from, well that might get in the way of taking it’ (p.94).

Kuper details many instances of Russian donations and influence to the Tory Party. To cite just one example, these include Lubov Chernukhin, whose husband became – at the tender age of 32 – deputy finance minister under Putin and later chair of the Russian state development bank. By 2023, she had donated £2.4 million to the Tories and was a member of the Party’s secretive ‘Advisory Board’ which was restricted to mega-donors who were entitled to monthly meetings with the Prime Minister and Chancellor. This is just one of several instances of this type and in case you are wondering, the embarrassing connections with the father-and-son press magnates the Lebedevs are also described in all their glory.

As the Tories fell from grace in the last couple of years (and some of the Russian connections became embarrassing after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine) the money started to dry up. There’s an interesting chapter on how Labour started to hoover up significant donations before the General Election instead, including from David Sainsbury, Dale Vince and Gary Lubner (of the family that own Autoglass and who reportedly gave £5 million alone). Kuper says Labour’s donors tend to have more of an obvious ideological affinity with them (rather than being people who will simply cosy up to whoever is in power) though it will be fascinating to see whose interests ‘the government of service’ will effectively serve – even if rather more indirectly. We think we can guess.

Dave Perrin

50 Years Ago: ‘Vote for them but . . . ’ (2024)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The publicity organizers of the International Socialists certainly know how to produce an election poster to catch everyone’s eyes. Their technique is so simple too, even the most politically apathetic passer-by cannot fail to notice a poster designed to produce a laugh. ‘Defeat the Tories’ it cries, ‘Vote Labour, but no to social contract’. ‘Vote Labour, but’ indeed! It’s a bit different from the usual IS rubbish of ‘Vote Labour, then . . .’ (and then kick them out and put us in their place.)

Unfortunately it has a slight flaw. No-one seems to have told the IS that there is no provision on a voting slips for ‘buts’. How convenient it would be if there was, but there is not, there are no if’s, and’s or but’s about it at all. If you vote Labour you get Labour, you get continued uncontrollable capitalism, you get futile reformism, you get nothing for the future of the working class, and you get nowhere towards Socialism. And whether you get social contract or not is totally irrelevant.

No matter how sincerely a Labour government wishes to protect the interests of the workers, no matter how benignly they impose their unwanted ‘leadership’ upon us, they can do nothing other than be puppets of the economic forces of capitalism. It makes no difference whether Tory or Labour govern, the real power is that of the capitalist system and only its replacement by a genuine Socialist society will do.

When will International Socialists realise the futility of ‘Vote Labour’, and when will they realise that Socialism will only be achieved when we have awakened the social consciousness of the working class throughout the world? Socialism will be won by struggling to free the minds of the workers from their capitalist bonds, and never by putting in a Labour government and then trying to overthrow it by violently accentuating the evils of capitalism.

[From the article, 'Vote For Them But . . . ', Socialist Standard, November 1974]

SPGB November Events (2024)

Party News from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

Editorial: Fireworks on November 5? (2024)

Editorial from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we go to press the US presidential election is approaching its conclusion amid a febrile atmosphere of fear and mutual loathing, with each side trolling the other during a punishing schedule of rallies in the decisive swing states, and Trump-backer Elon Musk offering to pay $1m a day to petition-signers in Pennsylvania.

‘What happens on 5 November could change the world we live in,’ pants the Guardian, reflecting the breathless fascination of the world’s media for an election which may in truth have a significant bearing on tariff-versus-free-trade tensions playing out across world markets, as well as on Israel and the Middle East war, Russia’s war in Ukraine, the growing power of China, and implications for US carbon commitments. Many fear the consequences of a Trump victory. Many others fear the fireworks Trump may unleash if he rallies his fanbase to reject a defeat.

According to Pew surveys, domestic US voters are not overly concerned with geopolitical questions or foreign trade, and even less with global warming. 81 percent of those polled say their main concern is the economy, which a barrage of Republican disinformation has represented as a failed basket-case under Biden. This isn’t so, objectively speaking. The economy is in fact very healthy, at least for wealth owners, but for many workers it’s a catastrophe of low wages and high prices. Both things can be true, of course. A healthy economy of desperate workers is capitalism’s ideal operating condition.

Many US voters probably grasp, at some deep level, that they don’t matter, their views don’t count, and their needs will go unmet. The Democrats make no apology for standing primarily for the urban, college-educated, white-collar ‘middle class’, by implication writing off the rural, non-college, blue-collar majority as a rabble and a lost cause. If capitalist democracy is a rigged circus anyway, some will think, why not elect the most outrageous clown, if only to wind up the establishment and the liberal woke opposition?

From an outside perspective, this vicious race to the bottom looks frankly surreal, framed as it is partly by America’s privately owned and heavily polarised news media, with Fox touting Trump and CNN touting Harris, and partly by their peculiar libel laws, disguised as ‘free speech’, in which anyone ‘has the right’ to slander and tell lies about anyone else without the legal obligation to substantiate or retract.

Unlike the recent UK general election, there is no foregone conclusion here, with polls showing Trump and Harris neck and neck. But we can certainly predict that, whoever wins, and failing a global environmental disaster or nuclear war, American workers will not see much if any difference. Governments can’t control markets anyway, regardless of ideologies. They are like rollercoaster riders, hanging on for dear life as capitalism hurtles through its booms and slumps, powered by its own insatiable frenzy. The main effect of capitalist elections is not to bring about real change but to promote the illusion of change while the runaway acceleration of exploitation remains unaddressed and undisturbed.

So, whichever way it goes, the working class won’t win. There is no way to win, except by abolishing capitalism in favour of truly democratic global common ownership. Otherwise, all the glamour and fireworks are merely sound and fury, signifying nothing.