Does the Navy safeguard our daily bread? (1936)

From the July 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Two opinions about the Navy have been jostling for front place in the past six months. One is that the Navy is rotten: just a lot of old tin-cans waiting for an enterprising dictator to sink them. The dictator, the ex-Labour leader Mussolini, is supposed to have bawled the British fleet off the Western Mediterranean into an Eastern funk-hole, and to have assumed the mastery of the sea. The other opinion is that the fleet retired voluntarily, too proud to fight, or according to some crooked hidden plan of those who decide the foreign policy of the British capitalists.

Which of these is the truth we do not know. Probably the supermen who are in control do not know. Probably the naval experts who advise them, like the professional economists, are all at sixes and sevens, and able to provide every variety of contradictory opinion on demand. As for the theory of a cunning piece of double-dealing, perhaps it is true, as alleged by Continentals who have studied British diplomatic and Governmental methods, that the reputation for cunning enjoyed abroad by the British ruling class is due to pure mischance. The benighted foreigners watch the elephantine blunderings of the British Cabinet and conclude that it must be an elaborate smoke-screen hiding deep-laid plans and plots, simply because it is unbelievable that Baldwin and Co. can really be as silly as they seem.

However, these are realms into which it is profitless for us to go. Instead, let us try to answer another question about the Navy.

What the Navy does for the British Workers

What the Navy does for the British investors who have some £3,000 million invested abroad we know, but what do the workers get out of their masters' expensive little toy? Mr. Kenneth Lindsay, M.P., one of Mr. MacDonald’s ex-Labour Party group, has answered the question. Mr. Lindsay is Civil Lord of the Admiralty and presumably knows all about fighting ships. Speaking in the House of Commons on May 28th, 1936, he told the M.P.s that he identified himself with Mr. Winston Churchill’s statement, “the purpose of the Navy is to ensure the arrival of our daily bread.” He went on to say that “the Admiralty programme was based on months of careful studies. They aimed to make the British Navy 100 per cent, efficient.” (Manchester Guardian, May 29th, 1936.) This should give comfort to us all, the knowledge that the Navy is seeing to it that we are all rightly and adequately fed and that the gentlemen in control have been burning the midnight oil to ensure 100 per cent. efficiency. But not so fast. On turning over the pages of the same newspaper from which that piece of news was taken we find more news about our food. Dr. G. W. Theobald, of the British Post-Graduate Medical School, London, says that at least ten per cent. of our population has to be fed on a weekly budget of 4s. or less for each individual. (Dr. Theobald’s proposal was not more steel for the Navy, but that “every school should instruct girls to take iron for one month in the year to prevent anaemia.”) Another doctor, speaking at the joint conference of the Royal Institute of Public Health and the Institute of Hygiene, where Dr. Theobald made his speech, commented on the inadequate food of working-class mothers: "One finds mothers towards the end of the week living on bread and tea, and saving pennies to buy meat and pies for the boys.” Dr. M’Gonigle and M. J. Kirby, in a recent authoritative study, ”Poverty and Public Health,” have shown that there are 20,000,000 people in this country who are too poor to be properly fed. Mr. Lloyd George, in a speech at the Central Hall, Westminster, on March 13th, 1936, added his testimony (Daily Telegraph, I4th March, 1936):—

We have it on the authority of men of science, who have devoted the whole of their lives to the study of this problem, that over 40 per cent. of our fellow-countrymen are inadequately fed in a land of exuberant plenty and abounding wealth.

There are still millions living in habitations that are unfit for human beings to dwell in, and side by side with these conditions we have statistical and revenue testimony as to the enormous fortunes and huge incomes enjoyed by a few.

We find then that if the Navy’s job really is to ”ensure the arrival of our daily bread,” it falls down badly on the job. Or rather, it ensures that the working class get bread but very little else, for, according to the Medical Officer of Health for Chorley, tea and bread and butter forms seventy per cent. of the breakfast and tea meals of elementary school children in that town, “the term bread and butter” including “bread with margarine and bread dipped and fried in fat.” (News Chronicle, June 13th, 1936.)

What the Navy is really for

Of course there is no need to elaborate the argument. The Navy does not and never did exist for the purpose imagined by Mr. Churchill and Mr. Lindsay. British capitalists might at one time, even if they cannot now, boast of being mistress of the seas, but it was not for the sake of British workers. The purpose of the Navy, as of the rest of the armed forces, is to defend capitalist investments at home and abroad against attacks from all quarters. Mr. Philip Jordan, in an article on ”Empire Defence” (News Chronicle, June 12th, 1936), gives a reasonably accurate account of the reason why the Navy is engaged on keeping open the "pipe-lines” of British commerce: —

”These pipe-lines British naval strategy is concerned to preserve; for upon their unimpeded maintenance depends the ease with which tribute and life flow into imperial Britain: gold and diamonds from South Africa, cotton from Egypt, spices from Ceylon, all treasure from India, tin and rubber from Malay, wool from Australasia; and from all and more of them interest on the loans with which British capitalists dowered them in early and late days.” (Italics ours.)

Among the purposes of the armed forces is defending capitalist property against the working-class. It includes keeping the working-class in perpetual poverty, for only so can they be compelled to submit to exploitation for the good of the class which controls the political machinery, including the armed forces, and through it the accumulated wealth of the country.

What is the moral? An obvious one. The working class must themselves gain control of the machinery of Government and use it, including the Navy, for the purpose of ending capitalism. Then for the first time will the whole population be well-fed, well-clothed and well-housed.

Edgar Hardcastle