That was an interesting flurry of by-elections. Now that the votes have been counted, the shouting has died and the government are left with some nasty wounds to lick, it is time for the summing up. Not, mark you, in the sense that the political correspondent of the Daily This or the Sunday That has summed up. They can tell us efficiently enough why one candidate beat another, and what effect this might have upon the government. There is need, now, for a different perspective to be put on these matters. What are the by-elections worth? Will they change anything?
The government are certainly in difficulties although there is of course nothing unusual in that. Have we ever known a government which has not run into squalls in its attempts to organise capitalism? Even so, at least one of the present problems is in some ways unique. We refer, of course, to the Common Market negotiations, which face the British capitalist class with their most agonising decision for a long time. The gamble they took years ago, that the European Economic Community would not become a viable enough organisation to cast doubt on the value of the Commonwealth Preference system, has not come off. This has left the British ruling class in the humiliating situation of having to bargain away some of their cherished advantages for a chance at the European market—provided they can also break the stony resistance of de Gaulle.
Should they abandon New Zealand to its fate in the world meat and dairy market? Can they persuade the six in Europe to let them keep the protective tariffs for some Commonwealth products and still take advantage of the Common Market? These problems are such that the Empire builders in the palmy days of Victoria never thought to be confronted with. Neither did their modern counterparts in the Conservative Party. That is why the Tories—and the Labour Party, for that matter —are split over the Common Market.
Nor is all well on the home front, where the government are desperately trying to hold a broken line on their wages policy. Keeping wages in check has always been a problem for capitalism's governments, in this country and abroad. For governments are there to run society in the interests of its ruling class, who rule because they own. The ruling class are the people, in one way and another, whom we work for and who pay us our wages. The big problem, for us as well as for them, is that the more we get as wages the less they get as profit. That is why wages are such a persistent cause of dispute to capitalism and why governments have to try to hold them down. Since the war, with employment at a high level, the pressure has been for wages to go up. And since the war, from Cripps' freeze to Lloyd’s pause and guiding light, governments have tried to keep them in check.
The Tories have presented their wages policy as sober and responsible and have damned anybody who runs counter to it as the blackest of black sheep. Mr. Macmillan told the last Conservative women’s conference:
Some employers, selfishly secure in the knowledge that they can recoup themselves from higher prices at home, may give in too easily to unreasonable demands. Some unions, arrogant with organised power, will try to grab too large a slice of the cake.
This, and the other speeches in the same style, may have impressed the well-hatted Tory women but its effect upon, say, the dockers and the nurses (who, said the Prime Minister, should have a large and immediate increase — “ If we could be guided solely by our hearts ”) and the other workers in the pay queue was probably negligible.
Because workers, whether they are “respectable” civil servants or less “respectable” dockers, and whether they are called selfish and arrogant or any other name, will always struggle to improve their wages. They cannot get away from it; the relationship of worker to employer which pervades capitalist society sees to that. While capitalism lasts, there will always be a class struggle over wages and other conditions of employment.
But if the Common Market and wages are two of the government’s worries, can we say that they had any influence on the by-elections? Do workers weigh up such matters and cast their vote accordingly? If they do, there must be a crushing majority in this country in favour of the Common Market, to judge from the lost deposit of the anti-Common Market candidate in Derbyshire West. And if the workers do weigh up the issues involved in an. election, how thoroughly do they do so? They apparently missed the fact that the post war Labour government, despite its professions to having human interests at heart, started the British hydrogen bomb programme and took this country into the Korean war, which might at one stage have exploded into a world conflict. Whatever the reasons for the Labour Party's defeat in 1951, its zeal for prosecuting capitalism's wars was not amongst them.
Similarly, the Conservative Party is kept in power by the ignorant docility of the working class. The Tories do not see their votes decline as a result of their being the men who gambled with world war in their Suez adventure. They do not lose M.P.'s because they are the government in charge of the British bomb tests, which play their part in poisoning the atmosphere in the search for an all-powerful weapon of destruction. If the Tories do suffer a decline, as they did in 1957 and 1958, it is not for these reasons and they can soon come bouncing back into favour and into an even more secure majority, as they did in 1959.
Why, then, are the votes at present running against the government? The people who profess to know —the newspapers’ political correspondents — have their theories. The Guardian thinks that it can be put down to “impatience” (they are impatient with the government themselves); The Economist has spoken of ineffective public relations; another observer has said the electorate are “bored” with the government. If these reasons have any substance, it would be nice to know why the electoral mood can change so easily. Were the workers bored and impatient in 1958 but patiently interested enough in 1959 to put in an overwhelming Tory vote? And why, basically, are they bored and impatient?
The truth is that workers vote for capitalism, whether it is capitalism organised by a Labour or a Conservative government. These governments can often be made to look foolish and impotent by the caprices of the very social system they are trying to run. The Attlee government did look foolish over the 1947 fuel crisis and over potato rationing. The Tories are impotent to control the opposing pressures of wage claims and the temptation to inflate the currency. It is an easy thing to poke fun at a government which is in such difficulties. Yet simply to vote against a government, to switch support from one capitalist party to another, is just as foolish and futile. And worse; because to do this is to fly in the face of all facts, all the evidence, all history, it is a depressingly ignorant thing that the millions of working class voters do at election time.
Yet we do not need to look very hard at the world around us to realise that there is a desperate need for an end to the political ignorance of the workers. Consider, for example, the letter which The Guardian published on June 1st. last; a tragically moving letter from a mother whose little girl had died from leukaemia. This mother is convinced that her child's death was caused by radiation from bomb tests and perhaps she is right. Some radiation, we know, is natural but we also know that bomb tests can cause leukaemia and other frightful illnesses. And the men who decide on the bomb tests also know this, of course. The mother wrote bitterly of the world’s important statesmen assuring us that the danger from tests is “negligible” and of what the word means. For her, ‘negligible” risk meant a baby obese from the multitude of drugs which were pumped into her, a baby choking on its own blood in the night and crying for help to a helpless mother.
This is capitalism. The bomb tests go on, regardless of the pain and suffering they cause, because they are necessary to capitalism, and that is what the bored and the impatient and the ignorant vote for. That is the perspective in which we must view the by-elections. The dead child's mother pleads for the major political parties to take notice of what the ordinary people of this country want. But in fact she can only get the sort of world she wants when the ordinary people decide that they will not leave their wants to be interpreted by political leaders, major or minor. It is worth thinking over this one, the next time we have to put those crosses on the Ballot papers.
Ivan
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