John Prescott: a Labour man through and through (2025)

John Prescott in 1966.

From the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many of the obituarists of the late Lord Prescott quoted him as saying that despite all his achievements, he’d be known for that one punch on a protestor on the campaign trail in Rhyl. The more serious obituaries covered his career as a politician, achieving the high office of Deputy Prime Minister, and alluding to the Jaguars and the affair. Tony Blair himself came out and was full of praise for Prescott, and acknowledged how much his premiership needed its deputy. Corbynites remembered the time he defended their man on Question Time. Above all, though, his Lordship was a man of the Labour Party through and through, and it is worth going back behind the Punch and Judy of high office to the thing that first brought him to prominence: the 1966 seamen’s strike.

The seamen’s strike

Prescott was one of the co-authors of a pamphlet Not Wanted on Voyage: The Seaman’s Reply published by the National Union of Seamen, Hull Dispute Committee, in June 1966. It was written because ‘owing to the biased nature of the Pearson Inquiry Report recently published it is vitally necessary that a counter-balance is put out to put the seamen’s fight into perspective’. They alleged that ‘so biased is the Pearson Report against the seamen’s case that one cannot but feel that it was simply set up to capture public opinion, including trade union and Labour Party opinion – which so far has supported the seamen – and marshal it against us’.

Much of the pamphlet deals with the minutiae of overtime and pay rates, but the core claim for the seamen was for a 40-hour week at £14. As the historian EP Thompson described the strike: ‘The British seamen, after decades of near company unionism had accomplished that most difficult of industrial actions (in an industry whose members may at any point be scattered across the seven seas), a national strike with high morale and solidarity’ (Writings by Candelight, p. 53). The Wilson government infamously alleged that the strike was prompted by Communist Party agitators, claiming ‘The moderate members of the seamen’s executive were terrorized by a small professional group of Communists or near Communists.’ As Thompson notes, there were no Communists on the seamen’s executive.

The authors alleged ‘Our case has not been treated on its merits. Social justice has been overridden by political expediency.’ They claimed that ‘the Government’s obsession with the incomes policy has been evident throughout the strike. We had to be beaten, because our claim was a “breach in the dyke of the incomes policy”’. Hence, although the powers were never used, the Wilson government declared a state of emergency over the strike. ‘There is a wealth of evidence we could produce to show that behind the Government, in its resistance to our just demands, stand the International Banks, the financial powers that really direct the Government’s anti-wage policy.’

Prescott and his co-author went into detail as to how the make-up of the Pearson Commission indicated that the fix was on, in particular, how the appointment of Joe O’Hagan (General Secretary of the furnace maker’s union) to the commission was intended to neutralise any opposition in the TUC, as he held the chair of the General Purposes committee. This is indicative of their approach of looking at the personnel involved in the structures of power. They went into great detail over the personal connexions between shipping owners and the press barons.

They noted of the shipping industry:

‘In the past, British shipping contributed on a major scale to the earning of foreign exchange, but in this field too, its recent record is one of consistent decline. Between 1952 and 1962 shipping’s contribution to Britain’s earnings abroad fell by over £111 million, or by an average of 3½% per year.’

Likewise: ‘Most of our major competitors developed the bulk container transport method during the 1950’s, whilst our shipowners […] did nothing’. This, they alleged, was down to the ‘shipowners’ incompetence’. Their complaint, essentially, was that the wrong people were in charge.

‘This backward, selfish group of owners, through their spokesman, arrogantly claim (ignoring the whole miserable record we have described) that “the national interest” so often thrown at the seamen by Press, TV and Government, IS THE SAME THING AS THE SHIP OWNERS’ INTERESTS’ [emphasis in original].

They urged the nationalisation of the industry but clearly envisaged that as being a mere change in the personnel at the top, and still cast the question of how shipping serves ‘the national interest’ in a world of competing states.

Poacher turns gamekeeper

Prescott and his co-author also alluded to Labour’s previous record, stating:

‘The goodwill of the bankers, the ill-will of the working class. How familiar a story that is of Labour Governments, when we cast our minds back to Ramsay MacDonald and the 1929-31 government.’

Nowadays, we could add a few more Labour governments to that list.

Prescott had first stood for Parliament the same year as the strike. In 1970 he got elected MP for Hull East. By the 1990s, he was the shadow transport spokesman, extolling ‘public private partnerships’ as an alternative to nationalisation and a way of getting the industry to serve the national interest. He would later be part of the Blair government that institutionalised PFI as the default way of funding government projects.

By 2002 he was standing in the House of Commons, updating MPs on the situation with regard to the firefighters’ strike:

‘This Government cannot be asked to find additional money outside the agreed Government spending limits. To do so would risk fundamental and lasting damage to the economy. An inflationary pay rise for the firefighters would lead to inflationary pay rises elsewhere in the public sector, and that in turn would lead to job losses, inflation and mortgage rises.’ (tinyurl.com/PrescottHOC20022226)

He affirmed that ‘The Bain review has proposed a way forward. That is the basis for discussion.’ He clearly learned the lessons of the Wilson government. ‘The goodwill of the bankers. The ill-will of the workers’. An epitaph for Prescott and the Labour Party.

Pik Smeet

Working class China (2025)

Pamphlet Review from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalist China and Socialist Revolution. By Simon Hannah. Resistance Books, 2023. 67pp.

This pamphlet begins with some indisputable truths: ‘The working class in China is massive – the largest in the world. But they often work in terrible conditions with few effective rights and no independent trade unions. They labour under an authoritarian government calling itself “socialist with Chinese characteristics”.’ Its author then goes on to further characterise modern China as a country run by a ‘pro-business’ party, which, while calling itself ‘communist’, is so only in name. Nor is he impressed by those on the political left who defend China simply on the grounds that its government has massively developed the country’s productive forces and in so doing has lifted millions out of absolute poverty. He points out that this process has not been a prerogative of China and that globally capitalism has ‘lifted millions of people out of abject poverty, whilst condemning millions of others to live in misery’. He goes on to say that ‘the Chinese state corresponds to all the definitions of a capitalist state’, in which ‘both the state sector and the private sector follow capitalist imperatives of growth’.

Nothing here at all that socialists would disagree with. But disagreement does start when he asserts that this state of affairs (ie, China being capitalist) only began in 1976 ‘with the economic and political reforms after the death of Chairman Mao’. The author does recognise that things weren’t great under Mao and that the various schemes adopted by his regime such as the ‘five-year plan’ and ‘the Great Leap Forward’ were abject failures that heaped suffering on the people and led to, among other things, mass famine. Yet, at the same time he definitely soft-peddles that disastrous rule, even referring to it at one point as ‘a new course towards socialism’, albeit one that didn’t go to plan. But little is said about that overall, with the main criticism reserved for what happened after Mao’s death when Deng Xiaoping took over leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and, as quite rightly observed here, opened up the economy to the world market, something he described, in a supreme exercise of smoke and mirrors, as ‘using capitalism to develop socialism’. The writer then goes into significant detail to show how this process of integration into the world market continued and intensified in the decades that followed continuing to the present day and how it was coupled with increasingly authoritarian political control by the CCP, which has managed, sometimes by brute force, to keep the lid on protest, as, for example, in the slaughter of students and workers at the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989. As for the current situation in China under the leadership of Xi Jinping, he quotes the words of a recent Hong Kong opposition activist: ‘Today’s CCP, with its fusion of both political and economic power, its hostility towards people enjoying basic rights of association and free speech, its xenophobia, nationalism, Social Darwinism, cult of a corporate state, “unification” of thought, etc., is now comparable to a fascist state’. And he points to the fact that China, in its mix of state and private ownership, has more billionaires than any other country in the world, while workers are largely denied independent trade unions and, if they protest, are likely to be arrested or battered into submission by the police.

None of this can be denied, but what is hard to understand is how the author can see redeeming features in what happened previously (ie, under Mao) and can somehow see what is happening now as fundamentally different from – and worse than – the repressive and tyrannical state capitalism that existed then. He correctly points to the fact that ‘state ownership does not equate to socialism’, but it did not under Mao either. Mao’s journey was just as much down ‘the capitalist road’ as that of his successors.

As to how China will develop in the future, the author rightly sees this as unpredictable, but avers that the ruling party may not be ’as homogenous and united as it pretends to be’ and its leader, Xi Jinping, not quite so impregnable as he may seem. So he does not see it as impossible that China may develop into ‘a liberal democratic capitalist state on the model of Western democracy’ or into ‘a Russian style capitalism controlled by a small and powerful aristocracy’. But, as he makes clear, any such arrangement would still be capitalism. As an alternative to this, he calls for a society ‘not based on profit but on need, social development and human capacity’. As to whether this can happen in a single country or whether it must be global, there appears to be some contradiction in his mind. The fact that he sometimes makes reference to ‘socialist countries’ suggests that he does not necessarily see socialism as a world system, as we insist it must be. At the same time he does talk about the need for ‘an international working class movement’, and the ‘Anti-Capitalist Resistance’ group under whose aegis this pamphlet is published states its aim as ‘social transformation, based on mass participatory democracy’. Whatever the case, it is clear that socialism, meaning a system of free access to all goods and services based solely on human need, cannot exist in just one country. It must, by definition, be a world society and one that has to be consciously brought into being and then organised cooperatively by a majority of workers who have taken democratic action to opt for it.

Howard Moss

SPGB Meetings (2025)

Party News from the January 2025 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.

Party News (2025)

Party News from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

London branch stood a candidate in the local council by-election in Junction ward of Islington council on 28 November. It is a ward that we had contested three times before. This time, a candidate endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn, the local MP, stood and mounted an intensive campaign of leafletting and door-knocking, resulting in more local interest than normally in such elections. In private he claimed to be a socialist but, fortunately, did not add to the confusion by repeating this on his leaflets. Not that this prevented the Tory candidate claiming that there were ‘four varieties of socialism on offer’. Apart from the Corbynist and the Labourite, we were the only one of the other five candidates who did any leafletting. Five members distributed some 3000 leaflets, covering every accessible letterbox in the ward. The result, on a turnout of just over 21 percent was: Labour 785; Jackson Caines (Corbynist) 550; Green 219; LibDem 156; Conservative 113; Independent 97; Socialist 22.

There is another council by-election pending, in Lambeth, due to a councillor climbing further up the greasy pole by becoming an MP which the branch is intending to contest when he finally gets round to resigning.

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

We may be much more entertained by charity now. But on account of the Band Aid format, we are now arguably less knowledgeable about why some people suffer terribly around the world – and in no better a position to put an end to it. 

(The Conversation)

Today, political scientists and pollsters use ‘the working class’ to describe members of the work force who do not have a college degree. By that definition, the number of working-class Americans has been declining as the country has grown wealthier and more educated. According to the Census Bureau, nearly 38 percent of Americans had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2022, up from just 17 percent in 1980. There’s a major exception to that common definition, however. Marxist scholars use “working class” quite differently—typically encompassing anyone who depends on wages to survive, regardless of their educational experience. 

(Reason)

In fact, the Democratic Party, the party of the slavocracy, of Jim Crow and of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Vietnam War, has never been a party of the working class. It has, and will always be, a capitalist party. Sanders’ political role…is to use his nominally ‘independent’ designation to provide the Democratic Party with a veneer of credibility in order to contain opposition to the whole capitalist system. 

(WSWS)

What happened during the pandemic especially, was a good tutorial about how to do things. First of all, what pandemic showed us was the Hollywood utopian, you know, imagination of the future of humanity is absolutely bullshit, because when crises happen, people tend to help each other and be in solidarity, and they become even more, even loving, you know, towards each other. So we have to imagine politics as a, you know, natural disaster or like a disaster, like a pandemic, and we have to act like that.

(New Internationalist)

Bregman believes we should be more positive about human potential. ‘We’re at a point in our history where we have such amazing opportunities to make the world a wildly better place’, he says. ‘Our best days are in the future’. 

(Prospect)

A ‘very rare’ 77-year-old slice of the cake served at Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s wedding sold for £2,200 ($2,800) this week, according to auction house Reeman Dansie. The cake, which no longer looks edible, survived for almost eight decades since the wedding day on November 20, 1947.

(CNN)

Yunus’ claims to be overseeing a transition to ‘true democracy’, aimed at realising ‘social justice’ after the increasingly authoritarian rule of Hasina, are belied by the brutal attacks on garment workers

(WSWS)

‘The Turkish police catch 100 to 150 migrants every night. They have no mercy on them. They break their arms and legs. 

(BBC)

I’m all for supporting a new and viable political group but let’s look at what we already have before trying to reinvent the wheel.

(Guardian)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Halo Halo! (2025)

The Halo Halo! column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bash the bishop

Not going to do a ‘told you so’ but how often have we said, don’t put your faith in leaders? The Church of England was founded by Henry VIII, the serial wife abuser and uxoricide. Mad at the Pope who wouldn’t allow him to divorce his first wife, Henry formed the Church of England, put himself in charge of it and disbanded Catholic monasteries, convents and religious institutions. As is the case up to the present day, a lot of wealth was held by these establishments. So Henry snaffled the lot.

In November 2024 the CEO of the C of E – known as the Archbishop of Canterbury – resigned after it was found that he had failed dramatically to safeguard the victims, young males, of a serial abuser. ‘The Bishop of Birkenhead said she couldn’t guarantee that abuse is not still going on in the Church. “We still have this institutional problem where we are not putting victims and survivors at the centre. In some ways, we are not a safe institution”’. The British monarch is always supreme head of the Church of England. Twenty six bishops including the Archbishop of Canterbury have a seat in the House of Lords and are entitled to vote.

Anime

Anime is animation, hand drawn or computer generated. It originated in Japan.

The Web says that in 2023 the global Anime industry was worth over thirty-one billion dollars. So what does anime have to do with religion?

The Catholic Church is holding a jubilee this year. Designated Pilgrims of Hope, it’s being held apparently as ‘a year of hope for a world suffering the impacts of war, the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a climate crisis.’ Sure, that’s going to make a big difference to a world that continues to be beset by all the ills inherent in the capitalism system.

So, the church has, like football teams and various big business and military organisations, got itself a mascot. The mascot is of a young blue-haired, wide-eyed, cross-wearing female named Luce, Italian for light. The word ‘mascot’ comes from the French meaning ‘lucky charm.’ Sounds a bit secular to us. The resemblance to anime characters is unmistakable.

The Vatican said that the mascot was ‘part of the Vatican’s goal to engage with the pop culture so beloved by our young people’. She, Luce, (pronouns not specified), debuted at an Italian comics and games convention in October 2024. One assumes the ad agencies responsible for this are laughing all the way to the bank. Public reaction, as to any form of capitalist or religious propaganda, should be that of The Who – won’t get fooled again.

A more appropriate mascot would have been the Pardoner from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The equivalent of a snake-oil salesman, the Pardoner travelled around swindling folk, persuading them that if they bought his relics they would be absolved from their sins.

DC