Re-armament
The Investor’s Chronicle runs a service for its readers which answers their questions about buying and selling shares; each week it prints four or five of those which are of most general interest. In the issue of 12-8-50 this question was one of those thought to be of widest interest: “Can you name a sound engineering share which offers a good yield and which might benefit from re-armament?” The questioner was recommended to buy an engineering share which, though nominally five shillings, now stands at twenty shillings; the dividend is 26¼ per cent, and the yield 6½ per cent. And in the issue of 26-8-50 this question was one of those printed: “I think that the Far Eastern set-up, coupled with re-armament, augurs well for the wool-producing companies and should be glad if you will please give me a recommendation if you agree with my views.” The person who replied to this enquirer did agree with his views, for he draws his attention to a New Zealand company whose shares, now at par, pay 8 per cent. Wool hasn’t disappointed those shareholders who followed this advice, since the prices quoted at the Sydney wool-sales on August 28th went up 50 per cent.; a little later. South African wool showed even bigger increases in price.
Lower Income Groups
Some people, then, stand to gain considerably if the war spreads. But war, as we are regularly reminded, entails sacrifice. Sacrifice on whose part? Here the Investor’s Chronicle again comes in useful. It is unblushingly frank on this matter, disdaining the usual talk about “equality of suffering.” First of all its commentator Candidus pours scorn on the idea of having a capital levy. Then he goes on: “There is no escape from the simple facts of the case. To the extent that re-armament is not provided from extra effort and by America, it can only come from reduced consumption in the directions where the great mass of consumption now resides—in the ranks of the lower income groups.”
Scroungers
At Birmingham on August 22nd a man was charged with persistently neglecting to maintain himself, and was sent to jail for two months. He refused to work for his living, and tried to get the National Assistance authorities to support him instead. This case is important, because it establishes a precedent, which always weighs heavily with the judge when he is reaching his decision. Professor Charles Oman refers to the "inveterate respect for precedent which sways the legal mind.” It seems that the rule now is to be that people who do not work for their own living, although they are capable of doing so, are to be sent to jail. This rule should be enforced thoroughly. Numbers of shareholders and landowners are to be found around Lombard Street and scattered up and down the country, who have never earned their own livings, and who have no intention of doing so: worse, they make other people work for them, people who themselves have to live on much lower incomes. These property owners are thus offending more than the man who got two months: but with immediate action by the police, and a few salutary sentences from the judges—say five years’ penal servitude for a first conviction—no doubt this kind of offence could be stamped out. The fact that these criminals have a lot more money than the man now serving his sentence will make no difference, for every secondary schoolboy is taught that England is famed for her enjoyment of that inestimable privilege, which our ancestors fought and indeed died for, the privilege of Equality before the Law. Is it not well-known that every British citizen, whatever the length of his purse, gets exactly the same treatment in the law-courts? The police should therefore act speedily on this question.
Leopold
The recent disturbances in Belgium over the return of King Leopold provide a good illustration of how the Communists and Social Democrats waste their time. The Daily Worker (4-8-50) praised the leaders of “this historic movement,” or at any rate the Communists among them. After Leopold returned, said the article, “it took the Belgian working class just five minutes to get angry and five days to get organised.” It applauds the “working class unity” that was attained; it describes the strikes, the riots and the processions, and talks about “ this great class battle.” And it leads up to the triumphant conclusion when Leopold agreed to hand over his powers to his son Baudouin—though it blames the Social Democrats for not having insisted on his complete abdication.
When all the shouting and the shooting was over, what had happened? Before the agitation against the king, the Belgian workers were being exploited by the Belgian owners under the nominal presidency of someone called Leopold; after the agitation, the Belgian workers were being exploited under the nominal presidency of someone called Baudouin. Which makes a lot of difference. And yet to obtain such an insignificant change, the “Left-wing” parties strained all their energies, and three men who were following the lead of these parties were shot by the police at Grace-Berleur. The three men were called “martyrs,” and the name is just; the men were martyrs to the ideas of those “leaders” of the working class who, instead of encouraging the workers to understand and bring about Socialism, spend all their time in noisy pursuit of aims which in the end bring no benefit at all to the workers.
Smile, Please
From the Daily Mirror (7-6-50): “A group of people want Britain to smile more, and the first stage of their plan is a Happiness Week for thousands of city folk. It goes into operation in Manchester in 10 days' time. Everybody in the Levenshulme Ward of the City will be asked to smile—at their work, at play, in the streets and at home. Albert Sidi, business man, first thought of it. Smiling James Bowes, councillor for the ward, took it up. Now the church is supporting it, and the Lord Mayor of Manchester, who will be president of the week of smiles. Mr. Sidi said yesterday: ‘ We intend to make people smile and be happy whether they like it or not.’ ” And the point of all this? Mr. Bowes told the Daily Mirror: “It’s a wonderful idea. If we can make people happy they’ll work better. . . .”
Whatever the long-suffering citizens of Levenshulme think about all this nonsense, this last part should make shareholders and profiteers grin like Cheshire Cats.
The Public
The dictionary defines “the public” as “the people in general; all the people.” But in the minds of our politicians and statesmen it has come to mean something quite different. Adam Smith, in his “Wealth of Nations” gives us a hint of this new meaning when he says: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” The implied distinction here between worker and member of the public is repeated with more emphasis by Captain Gammans (“Everybody’s,” 25-3-50): “ Nationalisation has no appeal now to the British public, and, judging from the number of strikes in the Nationalised industries and the growing drift from the Nationalised coal mines, it is losing its magic for the worker as well.” Captain Gammans evidently considers that the same man cannot be both a worker and a member of the public. And if the public, in the sense in which the word is being used today, contains no workers, it must consist entirely of the owning class. This is borne out by the phraseology of the financial columns in the newspapers, which regularly refer to the public as being that body of people which owns shares and other capital. For example, when the City Editor of the Daily Herald suggested (9-8-50) that company law should be amended to rule out directors’ estimates from a company’s prospectus, he said: “Had that been done in the Crittall case and in other cases where the ’estimates’ have been optimistic, the prospectus could never have been issued, and the public’s money saved for more worthy objects.” Here the public covers those people who have money for “more worthy objects,” i.e. capitalist investment. And no worker has any money for investment worth mentioning; if he had, he would not be in the ranks of the working class. It seems then that the new meaning of the public is simply “the owning class.” So the next time you hear of some politician proposing that we reduce wages for the “public” good, or go to war in the “public” interest, you will be able to understand what he really means.
Priority
When Mr. Attlee is replying to Mr. Churchill’s criticisms his theme-song should be “Anything you can do I can do better.” For the Labour Government has brought the country through the “work harder to recover from the war” stage, and is now leading the workers into the “work harder to prepare for the next war” stage. With any luck, it might still be in power when the third part of the workers' eternal triangle is reached, the “work harder to win the war” stage. If it is, it will have proved that it can run the country just as well as any other capitalist government; though that, perhaps, is not saying much.
It was while the rallying-cry was still “work harder to recover from the war” that Mr. Aneurin Bevan made his pronouncement to the working class reported in Reynolds News (17-7-49): “‘Work first, independence second. Socialism third ’ was the order of priority for British workers, Mr. Aneurin Bevan told thousands of Northumberland miners at Morpeth yesterday.” Like his colleagues in the government, Mr. Bevan regards Socialism as a vague and undefined objective for the dim and distant future; but the word is nevertheless useful, since it performs the same function for the workers as the carrot on the end of the stick does for the donkey. The workers never get it, but they are continually being exhorted to produce more so that some day they might.
St. Leger
But Mr. Bevan put work as Priority No. 1 only for the working class; there are others to whom he was not addressing himself. After five years of Labour Government there are many who have undoubtedly attained the second of Mr. Bevan’s objectives, independence, but who regard the other two, work and Socialism, with strong aversion. They need have no fear. Under this government they are equally safe from both.
The Sunday Express gives details of the activities of some of them. Talking of the St. Leger race-meeting,' it says (3-9-50): “The new fashion is to rent a house in Doncaster for the meeting. The Earl and Countess of Derby have taken a modern villa near the course, and Lord Irwin has followed suit. . . . Mr J. V. Rank, the rich miller and race-horse owner, has rented two houses. But there are still some stately homes where the week is celebrated in the traditional manner. The Earl of Scarborough, Lord-Lieutenant of the West Riding, always has a gay party at Sandbeck Park. His neighbour. Lady Galway, is entertaining Jockey Club Steward Sir Humphrey de Trafford, Lady de Trafford, and Sir Rhys Llewellyn. And parties are being taken by the Marquis and Machioness of Hartington, by Baroness Beaumont and by Sir Richard Sykes.”
Marx and the Labour Party
From the Daily Herald (31-7-50): “The Labour Party’s rejection of much of Karl Marx’s teaching had not been a source of weakness, said Morgan Phillips, the Party’s secretary, last night.”
Well, certainly not to Karl Marx’s teaching.
Alwyn Edgar
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