Bad language
Of course, Willie Whitelaw has been under a strain lately, what with a representative of the common people sitting harmlessly on the Queen’s bed and the discovery that the royal person has been guarded devotedly by a sacrificed homosexual. But there is no excuse for him saying: “I should have thought than many people in the House and in the country would have believed that . . .", when what he really means is “Yes".
Whitelaw watchers will recognise his words as a typical piece of parliamentary language, in the coils of which MPs have an apparent need to entangle almost everything they say. But behind this oblique urbanity is a steely core. The job of Members of Parliament is to legalise and oversee the exploitation, repression and killing of tens of millions of useful people in the world. To describe this process clearly and directly would result in a charge of using unparliamentary language.
There is no greater offence an MP can commit. No Member is allowed to call a person who supports capitalism's exploitation of the majority a thief; it would be out of order to describe an MP who supported war a murderer. No matter what deceit they may practise, they are always honourable members; none of them may be denounced as a liar. Yet the social system which every MP stands for rests on legalised robbery; it is sustained by acts of socially organised killing and justified by a persistent deception.
When socialist delegates arrive at the scats of power they will not obscure their actions and principles in misleading verbiage. They will be too indignant at the degradations of capitalism and too impatient to abolish the system to have time for urbanity.
Life after death?
People who narrowly escape death have been known to say that the crucial moments were enlivened for them by the rapid flashbaek of their past life, which is supposed to work wonders by way of remorse for their misdeeds. Well, Lord George Brown is not dead (although he has joined the Social Democrats) but recently he must have wondered if the end had come because it seemed just like a flashback for him.
It was all the fault of Michael Foot (Labour Party) and Len Murray (TUC) who presented, for the scrutiny of critical media hacks, the latest thoughts of the Labour Party on how to end the slump and get back to the days of full exploitation, sorry full employment. These thoughts were in a report grandly entitled Economic Planning and Industrial Democracy—the Framework for Full Employment. As might be inferred from this, the report's dominant theme is planning. If there ever is another Labour government they will set up a national planning council; a national planning college; they will plan investment, prices, wages. They will erect, from the bureaucratic reserves of Whitehall, a new ministry for economic and industrial planning.
Now what might well have troubled George was the memory of the time when all this was tried before, with himself as king planner. As the man in charge at the Department of Economic Affairs (no relation) he excitedly produced his National Plan (no relation either) for the rebirth of British industry and the birth of a new prosperity for everyone. But the DEA disappeared over the storm-wracked horizon when British capitalism was, in Prime Minister Wilson's words, ‘blown off course'. It perished in the reality that the Labour Party could not control the economic weather—although that was exactly what George Brown and his plans were supposed to be able to do.
As capitalism spirals into slump, the best the Labour Party can offer is this tawdry attempt to raise the dead. They offer us a corpse of a policy, which has already been exposed as a lifeless futility. This is an apt comment on their impotence and cynicism; they learn nothing and, even worse, forget everything except the technique of uttering worthless verbiage.
George Brown is himself now little more than a ghost. It would be more humane if his old comrades were to leave him in peace, untroubled by memories of those days of despair.
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