How do the Labour Party propose to unseat Thatcher and her abominable crew? They tell us that this is a priority, that life in Britain will not be worth living again until this thing called Thatcherism is dead. By Thatcherism they mean a mixture of hard-faced indifference to the people's suffering and a mission to intensify that suffering — and all at the whim, or to solidify the dogmatism, of that woman in Number Ten. The existence of Thatcherism, say members of the Labour Party, is to be seen in the unprecedented dole queues, depressed wages and living standards, ruthless cuts in government spending on housing, hospitals, social services. education . . . The conclusion which we are invited to draw, before we go to the polling stations, is that when the Labour Party have slain Thatcherism and have got themselves installed into power things will be very much better.
But is it true that political parties behave as the Labour Party says the Tories are? Capitalist parties are, after all, concerned to get power and they can hardly hope to do that by upsetting too many of the voters. At times — in fact for much of the time — they carry out policies which should not be popular. like sending workers to die in the wars of their ruling class or imposing cuts in workers' living standards. But they can manage to do this without incurring too much electoral damage if they seem to be in control of the situation and provided they can persuade the voters that all the suffering and restrictions are a necessary preliminary to a bounteous future. So the Tories can get away with a Falklands war and with a Nigel Lawson and a Norman Tebbit.
It is, then, nonsense to say that a government deliberately creates unemployment; indeed if they had the power to do this, perhaps at the whim of a Thatcher, on any significant scale, they would also be able at whim to stop creating it — to abolish unemployment. But so far that trick has evaded every government faced with the problem. The same facts apply to workers' pay. No doubt, if British capitalism could run profitably and competitively while allowing free rein to pay claims the government would not be inclined to intervene. Wages would rise on demand, while the government looked benevolently on, waiting to reap the electoral harvest. It is not any politician's evil intentions which are responsible for expenditure cuts or for wage restraint; these things are part of a government's desperate. futile efforts to manage the uncontrollable capitalist system.
The Labour case against the Tories, with which they hope to destroy Thatcherism, now rests on a promise to organise the British economy to such effect that unemployment falls, production expands, medical and social services and education blossom and wages rise smoothly and predictably. They make it sound all so easy that it is fair to ask why their predecessors, many of whose memories are honoured in the Party, found such triumphs so far beyond their ability. Implicit in these promises is the assumption that capitalism can be controlled and that Labour will succeed in that, while the Tories fail, because their motivation is more humane. This claim, however, does not line up with historical fact. One thing which was abundantly clear whenever Labour has been in government before, in 1929. 1945. 1964 and 1974, was that they were not in control, whatever their motivation. In fact they continually whined that their good intentions were being undermined by events outside their influence — economic storms, currency crises and the like.
There is no evidence that things will be any different if there is another Labour government. They have learned nothing from their experiences, they still aim at running British capitalism, which means that their programme is simply a rehash of the plans and policies which were exposed as failures when they were tried before. To begin with, the Labour Party are again feeling out the prospects for some sort of pact with the unions which will provide for voluntary wage restraint. Labour now say that they have rejected the concept of statutory restraint, just as they did in the past before they went ahead and tried to impose it. This sort of voluntary policy used to be called the National Plan or the Social Contract; the latest version is called the National Economic Summit. Just as George Brown in 1964 called the union leaders and the employers' representatives round the table to sign a Declaration of Intent to ignore the realities of capitalism, so a future Labour Chancellor will get the same people into something called the New Economic Assessment. Whatever comes out of it will sound very grand and make some good copy for the reporters but it will completely avoid the basic cause of our economic problems — the essential anarchy of commodity production, the essential class rivalry between employers and employed.
In the past such arrangements may have succeeded in holding back wages for a while but in the end a government have been forced to intervene — unless, as is happening now, a slump is in operation helping to do this for them. The Labour Party's latest policy statement A New Partnership — A New Britain promises ". . . an immediate and substantial programme of public investment and repair. It is true that expenditure cuts have affected workers badly; for example in the case of hospitals the Observer of 4 August 1985 reported that many urgent operations are being postponed through a lack of hospital beds (‘nothing short of mental cruelty" said one eminent cancer specialist); that patients are sometimes being left to recover from operations in corridors; that wards are closing despite a long waiting list for beds. We are all familiar with these disgraceful situations but no one should be under the impression that all of this is happening at the malevolent design of wicked Tories. In the past Labour governments have acted in the same way. Richard Crossman, who was a Cabinet minister in the Wilson government of 1964/70, recorded in his diaries that the Labour Chancellor. James Callaghan, was in 1964 "committed to a huge cut back not only of consumption but also of public expenditure, on the social services in particular" and that in January 1967 Callaghan "proposed a cut of £500 million during this period, concentrating on housing and health".
It suits the Labour Party now to try to gloss over the memories of the times when they were "concentrating" on attacking at the most sensitive points of working-class poverty. Now, apart from their more specific promises, Labour is busily putting it about that they will build a better Britain because they are simply more humane, cleverer and calmer than the Tories. When Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson recently made his desperate effort to rally Tory morale with assurances that brighter times are in the offing. Labour's Shadow Chancellor Roy Hattersley warned that this was a case when "panic is accompanied by predictable and increasing ineptitude". Well Hattersley may be right; perhaps the government are in a panic but, if Crossman is anything to go by, the Wilson government was not free of the same problems. Crossman recorded the paralysing effect the financial and economic crises of the 1960s had on James Callaghan: “As Chancellor Jim was for some months psychologically out, clearly exhausted, nearly physically broken . . . " (which was. perhaps, why the Labour Party went on to elect him leader and so made him Prime Minister). Callaghan. of course, resigned as Chancellor when, in spite of their repeated assurances that they would not devalue the pound because of the depressing effect this would have on our living standards, the Labour government found themselves compelled to do so — which again shows how out of control the situation was. Crossman was also scathing about some of the other people who, when he stood up to sing The Red Flag with them at Labour conferences, were supposed to be his comrades in the struggle to introduce "socialism" to Britain. Michael Stewart was ". . . a bit of a nightmare . . . bureaucratic, vain and enormously sensitive about his own status”; Roy Jenkins was "conspiratorial"; Tony Benn "a complete flop". A lot of the other ministers were "a terrible collection of old lags who should be got rid of'.
So what this all means is that, by any standards, the Labour Party offer no real alternative to the Tories. Perhaps, through a mixture of plausibility, an apparent confidence in their own talents and a desperate hope that the voters have short memories, they will indeed unseat Thatcher and her crew. It will make no difference, to the capitalist system or to the problems endured by the working class. So who cares? Only those who are aware of the pressing need for a real alternative and for a genuine, permanent, fundamental change in society.
Ivan
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