50 Years Ago: Who likes facing Labour’s future? (2026)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A generation of workers have placed their trust and wasted their lives on the pie-crust promises of ambitious politicians. More than thirty years have passed since the Labour Party issued its post-war election manifesto: Let us Face the Future. People like Barbara Castle, who were rising ‘stars’ of the left, when Aneurin Bevan was chief demagogue, have lived to stand in the crumbling ruins of all the misguided hopes which they themselves helped to build. Once again the ludicrous spectacle is one where the reformers proposed and capitalism disposed. We are now living in their future.

Every group of workers in the NHS has been (and will continue to be) ruthlessly exploited by their Labour government overlords. (Yes, we know and by the Tories.)

The nurses, whose devotion to their patients has been mercilessly used by successive governments, were forced to organize, demonstrate and threaten strike action. Then the ambulance crews were pushed into the same position. The ward orderlies and laundry workers caved in under the weight of increasing drudgery and near starvation wages. The extreme reluctance of any of these workers to add to the suffering of the sick and aged, has been cynically played on by the Tory and Labour governments.

The latest miserable episode is that of the junior doctors. Driven by being on duty or on stand-by for as much as one hundred hours per week and working for as many as eighty hours with virtually unpaid overtime, they banned overtime. This brought about the closing down of wards, casualty departments and even entire hospitals. If this reads like a nightmare, that is what capitalism does to dreams of reformers. (…)

Aneurin Bevan once said the Tories were ‘lower than vermin’. What does that make the Wilson, Castle and Foot mob? Regretfully, calling names however well deserved, does little to raise the level of class-consciousness. When the working class wake up, they will contemptuously brush aside these petty upstarts and, in fact, dismiss all leaders. Ultimately the responsibility rests with the workers. Their political maturity (or lack of it) is reflected in how they vote. The power to continue the agony of capitalism derives from the votes of the workers. The power to end it will come from the same source.

[From the article, 'Who likes facing Labour’s future?' by Harry Baldwin, Socialist Standard, February 1976.]

Notes by the Way: What, the Workers think of their well-off leaders (1948)

The Notes by the Way Column from the August 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

What, the Workers think of their well-off leaders

Writing on the Dock strike Mr. Trevor Evans (Daily Express, 30/6/48) says that Mr. Deakin, General Secretary of the Transport Workers’ Union “made the elementary mistake last Sunday morning of arriving at the gates of the dock where he was to address the strikers in a chauffeur-driven, impressive limousine.”

Mr. Evans thinks that the above is the kind of thing that has undermined Mr. Deakin’s influence with the members of the union. Doubtless he is right. On the same day, however, Mr. Alexander Werth, Manchester Guardian correspondent in Moscow, expressed the view that the differences of wealth between the poor and the privileged in Russia have no such effect. “There are,” he writes, ” no murmurs when a chief engineer or a general is given a three-room flat in a new block in Moscow.”

Mr. Werth may be right, hut perhaps it is merely that he didn’t hear the murmurs. As he explained (Manchester Guardian, 25/6/48) that ”many Russian town-dwellers still live in conditions of what we would consider intolerable squalor and overcrowding,” and that in Moscow u four or five to a room is not uncommon,” it seems much more likely that the privileges of the lucky few are resented even if it is not wise for the Russian worker to express his resentment aloud.

The Communists and Unofficial Strikes

Recently the Communists have been giving their support to “unofficial” strikes, as when the Dockers came out. It would be a mistake to think from this that the Communists have consistently done so. Until they decided to come out in opposition to the Labour Government, which they had supported at the General Election and for long afterwards, they opposed unofficial strikes and denounced the strikers as the following examples will show. On 26th November, 1945, Mr. Ian Mackay, Industrial Correspondent of the News Chronicle, quoted from a speech made by Mr. Harry Pollitt at the Annual Congress of the Communist Party held in London on 25th November. Mr. Pollitt said :

“I am going to face you with the direct issue. You are either in favour of the party line as set out in the report or the line that mass strikes are the only way to realise the workers’ ends. If you are in favour of strikes I warn you that you are playing with fire in a way that can help to lose the peace and reduce this country to ashes . . . You can get a coal strike in the coalfields tomorrow if you want it. But if you do will it advance the working-class movement of this country or the prospect of our nation remaining first rate in the family of the United Nations?” (News Chronicle, 26/11/45.)

While Mr. Pollitt was making his speech London gas workers were actually out on .strike.

As recently as September. 1947, when the Grimthorpe miners were out on strike the Daily Worker featured a speech by Mr. Arthur Horner, Communist Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, under the bold heading: “Horner Says Grimethorpe Men Are Wrong.” (Daily Worker, 9/9/47.)

The Daily Worker commenced the report of Horner’s speech with the following summary : “The 140 Grimethorpe strikers were accused yesterday by Mr. Arthur Horner. the Miner’s secretary, of holding their 700,000 mining colleagues to ransom and threatening to destroy all the benefits of the five-day week.” Mr. Horner’s argument was that the Union bad given a pledge to the Coal Board and Government that the miners would produce as much coal with the 5-day week as they did before in 5½ days. If they did not produce the output lack of coal can “bring down the Labour Government.” Of the Yorkshire men he said:

“The attitude of the Yorkshire miners was also wrecking the whole policy of reforms which the Union was aiming at.”

These were hard words for a Union official to apply to his own members and they contrast strongly with his remarks to Lord Hyndley, Chairman of the Coal Board, made at Whitley Bay during the Mineworkers’ Conference. To Lord Hyndley who was on the platform, Mr. Horner said : “By and large we can say you have done well and we will continue to help you to do very much better.” The Daily Herald (9/7/48) reporting this, says it was made “with a slight bow to Lord Hyndley.”

Labour Government and Profit Boom

Under the heading ”Has the Profit Boom Ended?” a City Correspondent of the Daily Herald (27/6/48) wrote that “there is substance in the belief that for some companies the industrial profit boom is at an end, and lower earnings during the next year or two may mean dividends cannot be maintained at the current level.”

The Labour Government holds that it is not only practicable but necessary to plan the running of the social system. They have plans for everything and claim to be able to mould the system to their will. How then did it come about that there has been a profit boom? It would seem either that the boom in profits was in accordance with the Labour Government’s plan, or that it happened because their planning did not work. In either event it leaves them with some explaining to do.

Full Employment, for how long?

The Central Wandsworth Labour Party (Mr. Bevin’s constituency) has published a leaflet urging electors to join the Labour Party if “interested in maintaining full employment and all the other advantages that the Labour Government have gained for you.”

It also tells us that “unemployment is less than it has been since the first count 50 years ago.”

The conclusion we are asked to accept is that so long as we have Labour Government unemployment will remain at the present comparatively low figure of 300,000. It is very doubtful whether Mr. Bevin and the other leaders still believe that they can prevent capitalism from producing its periodic industrial crises, but whether they still believe it or not we shall in due course see unemployment jumping up to the million or two million mark again when the increased production campaigns here and elsewhere have run their course.

Mr. Aneurin Bevan on Tory vermin

In a speech at Manchester Mr. Bevan, Minister of Health, let himself go about the Tory Party. “They are lower than vermin,” he said. (Daily Mail, 5/7/48). For them he had “a deep burning hatred in his heart.”

It was not always so however. In 1940 when the Labour Party decided to enter into coalition with the Tory Party under a Tory Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Bevan said:

“The Government have been in office for two weeks and like my hon. Friend the member for Llanelly . . . I felicitate them upon the way in which they have set about their task.” (Hansard, 30th May, 1940.)

The Press naturally made much of Mr. Bevan’s abuse of the Tory Party but actually a more revealing passage in his speech was one that attracted no comment. He said that Churchill’s policy would mean ”cinemas, mansions, hotels and theatres going up, hut no houses for the poor.” (Daily Mail, 5/7/18.)

It is the last phrase that is significant. Mr. Bevan and the Labour Party charge the Tories with seeking to meet the needs of the rich. The Labour alternative is to try to help the poor by building comparatively low rented (and small) houses for them. It is only Socialists who seek the abolition of both rich and poor, of both the property-owning class and the propertyless working class.

Edgar Hardcastle

Labour in sickness and health (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are told the NHS is a ‘national treasure.’ That it was built by socialists. That it belongs to us. That if we just had the right funding and the right managers, it could be restored to its former glory.

But we know better. The NHS is often cited, especially by those still enthralled by the Labour Party, as an example of ‘socialist’ legislation passed during the 1945–1951 Attlee government. Even people who now admit Labour is not socialist cling to the NHS as proof that it once was.

Let’s be clear: the NHS was never socialist. It wasn’t created to empower workers or take profit out of care. It was built to keep the workforce functional – to patch us up and send us back to work. A healthy worker is a productive worker – and a productive worker generates value for the boss. That’s why the capitalist class signed off on it. Not out of compassion. Out of calculation.

Sure, there was high-minded rhetoric at the time. Aneurin Bevan, considered the founder of the NHS, said: ‘No society can call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means’. And William Beveridge, architect of the welfare state, said: ‘A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolution, not for patching’. Later he stormed the barricades of the House of Lords as he became a Liberal peer.

The real context was fear. The ruling class had just dragged us through mass unemployment and a world war, and it now faced an angry, armed working class returning home. It saw what had happened in Italy. Reforms were made not to end capitalism but to save it from social and industrial unrest.

Bevan once asked: ‘How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political power to keep wealth in power?’ He blamed the Conservatives, calling them ‘vermin’. But take the party labels off, and the question becomes sharper. The problem isn’t just the Tories. It’s a system that ensures poverty exists in the first place.

Bevan couldn’t see that. For him, the enemy wore a blue rosette. For us, the enemy is the wages system, the class system, the profit system. That’s what’s killing the NHS. That’s what’s killing us.

Now, 75 years on, they’re not even pretending. The NHS has become a marketplace. Drugs are bought from profit-hungry pharmaceutical firms. Cleaning is outsourced to contractors who cut wages and corners. Just this month, a scandal was revealed over botched cataract operations performed by private clinics cashing in on NHS contracts.

We used to joke the NHS was held together with duct tape and goodwill – now they’ve outsourced the duct tape and privatised the goodwill. They say this is a Tory problem. But what has Labour done?

Wes Streeting – dubbed ‘Wes the Rat’ by campaigners – is Health Secretary and says he’s ‘not ideological,’ which is odd for a politician. He wants to ‘use spare capacity in the private sector’. He calls patients ‘customers.’ He says the NHS is no longer ‘the envy of the world’ – not because it’s been gutted, but because it hasn’t been modernised. That’s code for markets, contracts, fragmentation. The same failed model, just rebranded.

Starmer campaigned in 2020 on ending NHS outsourcing. That pledge disappeared like a junior doctor’s lunch break. Now it’s all about ‘outcomes,’ ‘efficiency,’ and ‘value for money’. In his worldview, health is a product, not a right.

He’s cited NHS England as an example of excessive bureaucracy, duplications, and inefficiency. NHS England’s functions are now being absorbed into the Department of Health and Social Care. The transition will take about two years – less time than it takes many trans people to get a first appointment on the NHS waiting list.

Around 9,000 jobs are being axed in the process, as AI systems take over. One of the main tech firms involved is Palantir, a data analytics and armaments contractor with deep ties to the American MAGA state.

Palantir’s NHS involvement began with a £1 (one pound) trial contract in March 2020, part of the pandemic response. Then came:

• July 2020: £1 million contract
• December 2020: £23 million, two-year deal
• June 2023: £25 million contract
• November 2023: £480 million for the Federated Data Platform (FDP)

Now, the NHS is locked in.

Palantir was co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, a Trump backer who once called the NHS a ‘monstrosity’. The company built software for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), the CIA, and for predictive policing systems. Its platforms – Gotham and Foundry – have been used for deportations, drone strikes, and surveillance. The CEO, Alex Karp, bizarrely refers to himself as a ‘socialist’ and a ‘neo-Marxist,’ despite running a firm helping military and police forces worldwide. He studied the Frankfurt School and Marxian philosophy but now says Western tech should serve national power and defence. In his book The Technological Republic, Karp argues that declining interest in Western civilisation has left tech without ‘patriotic duty’. Palantir, in contrast, builds tools for ICE and the US military – showing where its duty lies.

This company now runs NHS data infrastructure. There was no public debate. No vote. Just a quiet, technocratic handover, sold as ‘integration’ and ‘efficiency’. It sounds like an IT upgrade. In reality, it’s a power shift – from public stewardship to corporate control.

Palantir claims it doesn’t own the data. Maybe not. But it owns the system. The architecture. The infrastructure. That’s vendor lock-in – like getting a free coffee machine and finding the pods cost £12 each and are only sold in Texas.

This isn’t reform. It’s enclosure. The same old privatisation, dressed up as innovation. And the outcome? A two-tier system. A burnt-out workforce. A public service run like a business where care takes a backseat to cost-cutting.

They say the NHS is free. But people pay for it – with taxes when they pay them, with our labour and with our time. It’s not free. We are. Free to wait. Free to suffer. Free to die while shareholders get dividends and algorithms determine care.

The Socialist Party stands for more than better management or fresh branding. We advocate the abolition of the wages system. The end of profit in care. A world where there are no customers, no contracts, no markets – just people, meeting each other’s needs.

Health is not a service. It’s a condition of freedom. The NHS can’t be saved. It must be superseded – by a system where care is not rationed, outsourced, or monetised. Where no one waits, no one pays, and no one profits. That’s not utopian. That’s socialism. And we’re not asking for it. We’re organising for it.

A.T.

The National Health Service (1949)

From the November 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage-labourers."

Thus wrote Marx in the Communist Manifesto 101 years ago; it is still just as up to date now as when written. The doctors in those days was a wage-labourer as to-day, in spite of the fact that many looked upon him as a minor capitalist. The doctor was dependant for his livelihood upon the sale of his labour power, his ability to work, to give advice, to dispense, to diagnose, to operate and to heal. For these services he received his rewards whether he worked as a private physician, or whether he sold his services to a local municipal council, or worked for a hospital or institution.

The National Health Service of the Labour Party has not changed the doctor’s economic relationship to society one iota, except that it should have made it plainly visible to the doctors themselves that they are members of the working class, whose wages can by Government decree be drastically reduced.

When the Labour Party decided to inaugurate the National Health Service, which means in effect the Nationalisation of medicine, Bevan approached the doctors to ascertain what the average General Practitioner was earning. The representatives of the doctors were not a little concerned with such a question, knowing that some form of nationalisation was in the air. If they plugged for high wages (or salaries) by stating they were earning let us say £3,000 to £4,000 a year, their income tax returns could easily be investigated; and if it were discovered that they were paying income tax on, let us say £1,000, the ministry would know at once what was happening. The long and protracted negotiations between the Minister of Health and the medical profession were not a little due to this awkward position which the doctors very reluctantly had to face. In the struggle the Labour Party won, and Bevan triumphantly proclaimed to the doctors that the State would pay them a salary commensurable with that which they were earning, that is what the doctors said they were earning. That being done, they became pafd wage labourers of the State, Civil Servants of a type.

It is quite well known that every doctor formerly lost a large percentage of his fees by bad debts. Although doctors have the legal privilege to sue for unpaid fees, very rarely did any doctor take advantage of such facilities of the law. If Doctor Brown sued poor old Mrs. Jones (who let us say was bedridden and poverty stricken), his name would be mud in the district, and his fellow-practitioners would soon scoop up his practice. Under the National Health Scheme, since the Government collected the cash in weekly instalments that everybody must pay, a guarantee could be given to the doctors that there would be no loss of fees. This did not appear to enthuse the doctors who sulked and acted as if they were getting a raw deal. Is it possible that they were taking cash and forgetting (it is easy enough) to record it for His Majesty’s Inspectors of Inland Revenue?

The net result of all this is that many of the doctors are not very interested in the National Health Service, which has been witnessed by thousands who have consulted doctors under the new plan. For the nationalised physician it means more work for less fees, hence the reason why they have discussed the possibility of mass resignation at an early date.

Another economic aspect of the National Health Service must not be overlooked. Since its introduction a year ago, the value of the shares in all the drug companies has increased and record profits have been made. At the recent shareholders’ meeting of the Boots Drug Stores, the chairman declared that “they had had a record year with profits over £600,000 and that had they had more staff to cope with orders, they would have done a great deal better.” It is, therefore, no accident that the National Health Insurance has been introduced. In actual fact it is no insurance at all from the workers aspect, but a national disease treating scheme, whose real function it is to get workers back to work as soon as possible. It means that the big problem of absentee-ism has been tacked nationally. No longer can a worker offer an excuse that he was ill and could not get a doctor or afford treatment. If the Health Insurance insures anything, it insures that the worker is got back to work in double quick time! Strange is it not that this peculiar service has been introduced at terrific costs in time and labour, by a political party which has been shouting itself hoarse to get increased production! The net result is lower wages for workers by compelling them to pay insurances, lower salaries and more work for doctors, and larger profits for the big drug houses.

Thus does the Labour Party in but another field not only carry on the task of running capitalism in the interests of the real ruling class (the capitalists) as we have consistently claimed, but does it more efficiently and effectively than previous capitalist Governments.

Horace Jarvis

Notes by the Way: Religion in Russia. (1955)

The Notes by the Way Column from the August 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religion in Russia.

One of the heads of the Russian Church, the Metropolitan Pitirim of Minsk, addressed a Press conference at Lambeth Palace on the position of the Church in Russia.

His figure of “over 20,000 churches” shows little change from the figure for 1945. (Statesmen’s Year Book, 1952, p. 1413.) 

He claimed that there are eight seminaries and two academies, at which over 2,000 young men were in training for the priesthood. “He said that 85 per cent, of Russians had remained faithful to their Church.” (Manchester Guardian, 12 July, 1955.) 

He had rather a lot to say about the funds of the Church and must have made some of his English audiences envious.

“Questioned about church finance, the Metropolitan said that it was all provided by the gifts of the faithful. Fingering a diamond-set medallion of die Virgin Mary, he added that he had several of these treasures, as well as two fine cars which had been given to him. 'By this you can judge our material position,' he said; 'it is all given by the people, who love their priests.' ”

(Manchester Guardian, 12 July, 1955.) 

The Daily Mail reported him as saying also that every clergyman in Russia is provided by the faithful with a car. 

The “Socialism” of the I.L.P.

The Socialist Leader, organ of the I.L.P., in its issue of 16 July, comes out with its proposal for the coal mines. It asks “ Why not stop paying the former coalowners?” This, it thinks, would enable the Coal Board to avoid increasing the price of coal.

It is typical of the I.L.P., now as in all the years of its history, that whenever a problem of capitalism comes up, it thinks of all sorts of solutions except the one to which it is nominally committed—Socialism. It is also typical of the I.L.P. when it makes its proposals to help the capitalists run capitalism that it thinks it knows better than they do how it should be done. Past experience gives no support even to this. When the two Labour Governments, of 1924 and 1929, were running capitalism, composed as they were predominantly of members of the I.L.P., there was nothing in their record to encourage such belief.

It is also characteristic of the naive attitude of the I.L.P. that its article on the coal situation should discover, as if it is a matter for surprise, that the Government has not put up coal prices in the interests of the mineworkers. Why should it and if it accepted the new I.L.P. proposal the same would be true. When will the I.L.P. wake up to the fact that nationalisation is State capitalism and is not in the interest of the workers, and has nothing to do with Socialism?

How High are Co-operative Society Profits?

The co-operators insist that their dividends on purchases are profit, not a reduction of prices. They do so on principle, but they also have a particular reason in that some manufacturers of proprietary articles will only supply them to Co-operative societies on condition that no dividend is paid to purchasers in respect of these articles. Co-operative News (9th July) writes:—‘The manufacturers regard the payment of dividend as a cut in price, which is pure nonsense.”

But apart from this, some Co-operators are keen to show that their stores make just as large profits as do private Capitalists. Co-operative News (14th May, 1955), published some facts about Co-operative profits. The writer showed that the Co-operative Wholesale Society last year paid out £6,174,067 as dividend; which on a capital of £27,431,064, is a rate of 25.25 per cent. He compared this with the Imperial Chemical’s distribution of a 10 per cent. dividend (but did not deal with the further profit, not distributed, which would have enabled I.C.I. to pay 30 per cent).

The writer showed, too, that on the retail co-operatives’ capital of £220,500,000 their dividend of £38,000,000 is 15.2 per cent. It looks like good Capitalist business.

Can the Workers Understand?

In the Socialist Standard of 50 years ago (August, 1905) was an article with quite up-to-date applications. It derided a furious agitation then being carried on by Labourites as being for a farcical object of no value to the workers. It went on to examine the reason given by Labourites who claimed to want Socialism, for wasting time on such trivial issues. Their explanation was one we still hear. They said that, desirable as Socialism is, you cannot expect the ordinary worker to understand it but must gain his interest by putting to him other simple immediate issues that he can understand, and thus lead him on step by step.

The writer of the article in the Socialist Standard argued that the case for Socialism was in truth simpler than the tortuous case for reforms and that these sidetracking proposals could only serve to confuse the workers and take them away from the real issue, that of establishing Socialism.

From 1905 we may jump 50 years to the recent Blackpool Conference of the Transport Workers Union. On 12th July, 1955, the delegates accepted the lead of their new general secretary Mr. A. E. Tiffin, and rejected resolutions for widespread new nationalization measures. Mr. Tiffin reminded delegates that the Labour Party had just fought an election on Nationalization and lost it, and the reason was, he said, that the workers don’t understand what Nationalization is all about.

“. . . We have to face the fact that nationalization at the present time has not yet been sufficiently explained to our fellow citizens as to convince them that further nationalization is in the interests of the whole nation."

“. . . even our own people in the industries we nationalized do not really understand what was the basic motive for nationalizing them." (Times, 13 July, 1955.)

The leaders also did not understand what they were doing and had, said Mr. Tiffin, relied on trial and error methods. “We should know precisely what we are going to do before we engaged on more Nationalization and not leave it to trial and error.” (Daily Herald, 13 July.)

So after half a century they can’t understand their own programme though Nationalization was, 50 years ago, just one of the side-tracking, time-wasting reforms advocated by Labourites on the plea that it was more easily understood than Socialism and would help us on the way.

Now let us return to another of these useless agitations, the one dealt with in the Socialist Standard of August, 1905. The article in question pointed out that this agitation had already been going on for 25 years and had never mattered. What, then was it? It was the demand for the abolition of the House of Lords! Three years later at the 1908 conference of the Labour Party a resolution demanding its abolition was passed unanimously (Report, p. 68) and this demand was reaffirmed at later conferences.

And here is an extract from a speech about it:—

"The first thing the Tories should understand is that if they tinker about any further with the British Constitution they must be informed that if we get a majority we will put an end to the House of Lords . . ."

Who made this speech and when? It was none other than the ebullient clown of the Labour circus, in one of his profound, statesmanlike moods, Mr. Aneurin Bevan. (Times, 24 May, 1955.) And it was made in 1955 after three Labour Governments had been in office and done nothing about it; showing, incidentally, how little it matters even for their purposes. All they have ever done is to fill a lot of the plush seats of the House of Lords with superannuated Labour M.P.s.

Edgar Hardcastle

Theatre Review: Nye (2024)

Theatre Review from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nye  by Tim Price (Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff)

The celebrated Welsh actor, Michael Sheen, takes the lead role in a new play about the celebrated Welsh politician, Aneurin (‘Nye’) Bevan. With a script by Tim Price and under the direction of the National Theatre’s artistic lead Rufus Norris, the scenario has Sheen, dressed in pyjamas and close to death in a hospital bed, going back in memory through the key moments of his life. A series of scenes, sometimes surreal in their framing, show him progress from stammering schoolboy to coal miner, from trade union activist to rebel Labour MP, and finally from the back benches of parliament to government minister overseeing the establishment of the NHS.

The play has already had what can be called ‘rave reviews’. The Times declared that ‘Sheen burns with genuine passion’, the i paper called it ‘a taut and fluid triumph’, and other words used to describe it have been ‘spectacular’ ‘mesmerising’ and ‘unrepeatable’. The full house of around 2,000 at the performance I attended were indeed mesmerised, as was I, by Sheen’s performance and indeed by the performance of the whole cast of actors around him, taking parts such as Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, his best and most longstanding friend, Archie Lush, and his bitter political adversary, Winston Churchill. One could not but be powerfully drawn into Bevan’s journey, both mental and political, and in particular into the leading role he played in setting up the ‘welfare state’ immediately following the Second World War as Labour government Minister for Health and Housing. His role in this, and particularly in the NHS, is the play’s main raison d’être, so that even the staunchly conservative Telegraph had only words of praise for Sheen’s performance and went so far as to refer to the production as ‘a valiant and valuable affirmation of the NHS’.

The question of course that a reviewer in the Socialist Standard must ask, even while sharing the widely positive view of the production itself, is to what extent its unmitigated praise of Bevan and his politics is justified. Prior to the formation of the NHS in 1948, workers who could afford it generally contributed to various small insurance policies to provide a form of insurance for medical treatment. But many did not. And this was cumbersome and inefficient, and above all a hindrance to workers’ productivity. It was decided by the wartime coalition government, therefore, in line with the recommendations of the 1942 Beveridge Report, to reorganise the health system under central control. Both main parties, Labour and Tory, committed to such a reform in their 1945 election manifestos, and so when Labour won an overwhelming victory in that election, it fell to that party to put it into operation.

The justification for this and other welfare reforms was summed up in the Beveridge Report:

‘Social insurance and the allied services, as they exist today, are conducted by a complex of disconnected administrative organs, proceeding on different principles, doing invaluable service but at a cost in money and trouble and anomalous treatment of identical problems for which there is no justification.’

In other words, it was going to be more efficient and more cost effective for the services in question to be streamlined and brought directly under state control. So while no one would deny the famous adage of Bevan’s, repeated in the play, that ‘no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of a lack of means’, it has to be borne in mind that the main rationale of this reform was to make the system of workers selling their energies to an employer for a wage or salary more efficient and not first and foremost to benefit those workers.

The Socialist Party’s frequent characterisation of the NHS as ‘a cheap back-to-work service’ or a ‘way of patching up workers’ may seem a little over-cynical, especially as the nation-wide hospital and free medical advice and treatment system that was set up under the supervision of Bevan as Labour health minister in 1948 was clearly of benefit to workers who no longer had to find the money to pay for medical treatment. But, that said, there can be no doubt that it was not introduced with benevolence in mind. Indeed, such an arrangement was soon mirrored in various other countries whatever the professed ideology of the governments in office there. The fact is that ‘welfare’ reforms were necessary to guard against social breakdown, a situation potentially detrimental to capitalism and its profit-making imperative.

Yet of course, as many reforms, the NHS never worked quite as intended. The ‘free’ health service soon became unpredictably ‘expensive’ and certain charges (eg, for prescriptions) were introduced, and it has rarely not been in a state of crisis. Today’s increasing waiting lists, difficulties in securing GP appointments and overwhelmed emergency units show how the economic forces of capitalism constantly beguile the intentions of well-meaning reformers such as Bevan.

There can be little doubt about Bevan’s sincerity, at least in the early and middle part of his life and career, as focused on in this production. He was a spellbinding orator not afraid to be seen as a rebel and to use the strongest terms possible to state his credo (once famously referring to the Tories as ‘lower than vermin’). But, in the end, his was the idealism of someone who threw his energy into political life under the impression that capitalism could be adjusted to work in the interests of the working class. And what, as a celebration of the man, this play fails to convey is that this impression was a mistaken one and indeed that Bevan himself, in later years, moved from expressions of triumphant idealism towards pragmatic acceptance of capitalist politics and its limitations. It was in a private pay-bed in an NHS hospital in fact that he ended his days, the bed from which we are taken in this play through the key moments of his life. But thoroughly recommended as a spectacle.

Howard Moss

Doing the Splits (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

How seriously should we take the splits in the Labour and Conservative parties over the Common Market ? Is there likely to be some massive realignment of capitalist politics, with Roy Jenkins leading a coalition of Liberals and pro-Market Labourites in a new party ? Will the great machine of capitalist politics suffer irreparable damage, or can we still sleep of nights secure in the knowledge that it will continue to deceive, coerce and exploit us ?

To begin with, nobody should allow themselves to think that the splits have anything to do with principles. Of course all members of the capitalist parties say their political allegiance is based on principle, but issues like the Common Market, which they say are also matters of fundamental principle, cross the party lines so that George Brown agrees with Heath, Wilson with Enoch Powell and so on. This shows how flexible are the “principles” of our parties and it tells us something about their splits.

One notable, but not unusual, feature of the splits over the Common Market is that both the big parties are suffering at the same time. This makes it difficult for either of them to adopt the attitude of pious shock which they affect when only the other side is split. Then they can say that such disputes are evidence of their opponents’ irresponsibility. When they themselves are divided on some issue they claim that this goes to show what a lively lot they are, vibrant with debate yet tolerant and united enough to contain the argument and apply it for the benefit of all those voters outside. This is all part of the jolly game of politics.

In this country, it is the Labour Party who have become famous for their splits, very often splashing them into the public eye. This has tended to promote the idea that the Tories are more stable and united but there is some evidence that this is not true. Since the 1929 Labour government, the Labour Party have had only four leaders—Lansbury, Attlee, Gaitskell and now Wilson—and of these Lansbury was never more than a caretaker after the defection of MacDonald. During the same period the Tories have had seven leaders —Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Home and Heath—and in almost every case they have changed to the accompaniment of a public dispute.

At the same time, behind those gentlemanly Tory facades, there have been fierce splits over matters of policy. For example, Macmillan was much occupied with persuading his party to move out of the Edwardian era (which he was said to personify) and to accept the decline of the British Commonwealth. This seemed to be no more than accepting the obvious and the inevitable, but Macmillan was bitterly fought by a strong section of the Tories headed by Lord Salisbury, who always looked and spoke and thought like an archetypal Tory backwoodsman. For Salisbury, the final blow was the surrender of independence to Cyprus and he resigned to snipe at the Tories for their policies on the old Empire and to mumble about the shocking treatment being handed out to our kith and kin in Rhodesia.

Life was no more placid for the Tories before the war. They were split on the best method of dealing with the rebirth of German capitalism; when that matter was settled in the forties they found scapegoats for their own doubts and disunity in Baldwin and Chamberlain. Of these two, Chamberlain always kept a pretty firm grip on his party, at least until the end, but Baldwin’s career at the top was almost continual turmoil, as he was under constant attack.

The Labour Party do not have the Tories’ reputation of the party of gentlemen and usually conduct their rows like public house brawls. Perhaps that is why they are so famous for their splits, which have very often blinded the voters to the fact that Labour is always solidly united on the basic issue of trying for power to run British capitalism. Their most damaging split, in 1931, was not on any fundamental issue; they were united in the opinion that the working class had to suffer in some way during that time of crisis for British capitalism. None of them ever suggested Socialism as a way out of the whole sorry mess.

Having survived the debacle in 1931, Labour had a comparatively tranquil time until they came to power after the war, when the group which eventually became known as the Bevanites were constantly rocking the boat, which was in any case leaky and unstable. Here again the splits were never on fundamentals but were always over the best—often, quite openly, the most vote catching — methods of running British capitalism. In the end, at the Brighton conference of 1957, Bevan shocked many of the followers to whom he was a new Messiah by publicly making his peace with Gaitskell. The conference was debating nuclear armaments and Bevan, who was supposed to be the man who would guide us all to Socialism, argued that British capitalism needed these arms to protect its position against the other capitalist powers and that failure to recognise this would be electorally disastrous.

At that time the Labour Party, in the aftermath of Suez, were smelling the approach of power. In the event the Tories hung on and when the election came in 1959 Labour’s defeat threw them into another uproar of dispute, with the Gaitskellites arguing that the party’s traditional policies (or rather their traditional propaganda, because the policies were so easily ignored by governments) should be abandoned. This was to be, not because the policies were not socialist, not even that they went against working class interests under capitalism. It was simply that they lost the party votes. The next couple of years saw another row, this time over nuclear weapons, until Wilson came along and settled the whole matter by running British capitalism with a single-minded concern for the interests of the ruling class, while assuring everybody that he was doing something entirely different.

It very often happens, that a split reveals a future leader—sometimes in the role of peacemaker, like Wilson, sometimes as a man of honesty. In this Common Market split in the Labour Party, Roy Jenkins has come into prominence; he has been a consistent supporter of British capitalism joining Europe and perhaps one explanation of all the coverage he has had recently is the publicity boys’ surprise at finding a politician who says the same thing on more than one occasion.

It is distinctly pathetic, to see the Labour Party putting so much faith in Jenkins, perhaps as an overreaction to the exposure of Wilson as a tawdry trickster. They were once similarly hopeful about Wilson, as they were about all the many leaders who disappointed them before. Once again they are ignoring facts; the records show that Jenkins is no less cynical, no less a vote-grabbing politician, than the rest. For example, in a book he wrote in 1959 — The Labour Case — he avowed that Labour’s policies could be carried out “. . . without any question of an increase in the tax burden. On the contrary, they should leave room for substantial reductions.”

Apart from the fact that Jenkins was here descending in his anxiety to grab votes for his party, to pandering to the ignorance of workers who think the level of taxation affects their material interests, it is clear now that he was making another of those empty politicians’ promises. The Wilson government based a lot of their policies on steeply increased taxation—and Jenkins, as Chancellor of the Exchequer for about two years, was directly responsible for a lot of it. He was the inspiration for a lot of the Wilson government’s attacks on workers’ living standards, frequently lecturing us from the television screen on our spendthrift ways which were causing such terrible poverty among the grouse moors and the slums of Park Lane and Eaton Square. In a recent debate in the Commons (see The Guardian, 10 November 1971) he denounced unemployment just as if his government was not in power when it first became a serious problem and attacked the Tories for their ". . . silly little argument . . . that unemployment was an inevitable result of wage claims, and that those responsible must just take the consequences.” Yet this is what he said when he was Chancellor, at a union conference which was debating a motion condemning an incomes policy backed by legal sanctions:

An uncontrolled wages situation could undermine the Government’s central purpose, by putting back into people’s hands the purchasing power that the Budget had siphoned off . . . (The Times 25/4/69).

Jenkins is said to be a “liberal”, yet he did not resign over the racist laws passed by the Wilson government, which outdid the Tories in pandering to working class colour prejudice. He supported the reintroduction of prescription charges — much higher than the Tory charges which Labour had stopped; the raising of the school leaving age, the end of free school milk, the cuts in the housing programme. He was prominent in a government which kept the British nuclear weaponry. And that is only part of the list of anti-working class acts for which honest Roy, martyr to his conscience, must take his full share of responsibility.

So if the Labour Party decide to put their faith in Jenkins as yet another new saviour, they will be as bitterly disappointed as they were with Wilson, MacDonald and the rest. Jenkins may look and speak like a stern, unbending schoolmaster but what he actually is, is an ambitious capitalist politician. His function is to get power to run the affairs of the British capitalist class and to carry this out he is quite ready to join in the deception and the trickery which make an essential part of capitalist politics.

When the uproar over the Common Market has died down and workers who have been so fascinated by it, and who have been deceived into taking sides, have settled back into their proper, lowly place in capitalist society another incident will have been written into the history of politics. Then the whole futile business can start all over again.

Ivan

Labour and Tories at home (1955)

From the November 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The annual conferences of the two major parties were studies in political contrast. For the Tories it was a splendid spectacle—a jamboree of quietly exulting hearts.

For Labour it was a half-hearted acceptance that “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark," a reluctant realisation that Nationalisation is no well-seasoned Socialist plank but a worm-eaten structure full of bureaucratic dry-rot over which the paint of 80 years' propaganda has worn very thin.

Now a three year policy committee is to be set up to try to substitute new planks for old. There will, of course, be much hammering and sawing by the party chippies and at the end a bag of political sawdust and shavings. 

The Conference chairman, Dr. Edith Summerskill, began the proceedings with a diagnosis of the ills of the body politic. She discovered the Tory Chancellor as the malignant cause. One felt, however, that her forceps were not so anti-septic as they might have been. The Labour Party do not like Mr. Butler, not because of his blue blooded origin, but because of the pink Fabianism he adroitly puts to the Tory cause. Now the Conservative front bench has taken to importing back room boys, Mr. Butler, with their aid, has devised vote-catching policies and captivating slogans. He appears a shrewder and more imaginative politician than his Labour counterpart Mr. Gaitskell, one of Labour's bright boys, who has taken a degree in something.

Dr. Summerskill also lamented the fact that the Labour Party has lost its emotional appeal for youth. She said they now take full employment for granted and even want something more. In short, the Labour Party are unable at present to exploit the fear of mass-unemployment. She added that Labour used to think work was synonymous with happiness. While it may be true to say that to be out of work is to be unhappy it does not necessarily mean the converse is true. Dr. Summerskill, it seems, is mildly astonished to discover that because a youth may earn his own living it does not follow that “ his cup runneth over."

Indeed, the very work which Dr. Summerskill once thought was synonymous with happiness can itself be a source of industrial frustration and as pernicious in its effects in one way as unemployment is in another. One has only to think of the large number of youth working on semi-automatic processes. The routine and drudgery often involved in junior clerkships. The thousands of boys and girls in blind-alley occupations or the soul destroying tasks of many unskilled occupations; or even the gap between what career examinations so often promise and what they actually yield. All of which is perfectly consistent with a system based on costs and profits.

To work is one thing. To earn a living is Capitalism's distorted version of it. “ To work for money,” said Marx, “ is not really to work at all.” It still remains a major indictment of Capitalism that it cannot effectively gear the creative capacities of men to the productive processes. Perhaps because many of the industrial young lack a productive outlet they seem deficient in social outlook, and seek relief from the treadmill of aimless work in the treadmill of aimless leisure.

The Tories claim, however, to attract more to their youth organisation than does the Labour Party. This may merely signify that young suburbia places a greater prestige value on a half-pint drink in the local Conservative Club than in the local boozer or Working Men’s Institute. The Labour' Party is, however, setting up a new youth organisation to compete with the Tories in catching 'em young.

Strangely enough, it was Gaitskell whom his rival Bevan once contemptuously called a dessicated calculating machine, who made the biggest emotional impact on the Labour Conference by himself emotionally announcing that “he was a true Socialist." This public avowal of faith, the first it seems he has made, earned him the biggest ovation of the Conference. It might earn him the party leadership from the discredited Bevan and the ageing Morrison.

And of what did this public avowal of true Socialist faith consist, which wrung the heart of Mr. Gaitskell and the withers of the Conference? It was that vague innocuous tenet that has done service for every political creed—“ Equality of opportunity.” Mr. Gaitskell, however, further qualified it by adding, ‘“reward should go to work and merit and not to wealth and position.” Here was the authentic voice of the Intelligentsia who believe that the division between intellectual and manual labour is an eternal dispensation. Such “equality of opportunity” would exclude any opportunity for equality.

Bevan, as usual, was “full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” While the Bevan demands for bigger and better doses of Nationalisation earn support from the constituent Labour Party, it is against the political trends of the time. Moreover, words like Public Ownership, Workers’ Control and even Nationalisation, are becoming political swear words, offensive to the delicate ears of sober Labour leaders and eminently respectable T.U. chiefs.

The last-named regard Bevanism as a disease, whereas it is merely a symptom. No doubt the Labour Party strives to have differences with the Tories but its net effect is to produce differences within itself which militate against it being an effective political whole. Thus the price of some permanent difference with the Tories would be the price of a permanent split; clearly an impossible situation. Yet for the Labour Party to be free of splits would be tantamount to declaring itself politically redundant. That is its perpetual dilemma. Because the Labour Party is part of an established two party system in a monolithic political structure its internal weaknesses are a matter of concern for Labour and Tory alike. The Labour Conference gave no sign that they would be remedied.

Tory Conferences are never complicated by attempts at policy making. Every delegate is deeply aware of his political station in life to which it has pleased the Conservative Central Office to call him. Only the Leader makes policy. To question it would be sacrilege. The Leader in his wisdom does of course delegate power to eminent colleagues and consult High Finance and Big Business.

Following the Churchillian precedent, Mr. Eden was not present at Conference proceedings. On the last day, however, he turned up and made a moving speech. Leaders on such occasions always make moving speeches. The Conference usually opens with a prayer, then the annual platform pep talk from the Conservative Elders, followed by well prepared speeches from the Conservative young and closes with a moist-eyed, deep-throated rendering of “Land of Hope and Glory.”

Nevertheless, the modern Tory Party, unlike their rivals, present a suave facade of party unity. There may be dissensions but they are conducted in well-bred, modulated voices. Deep down there may be fierce jealousies and rivalries but they scarcely ruffle the silken surface. Even when Churchill, old, arrogant and overbearing, became an embarrassment to the Tories there was no strident “Churchill must go” campaign. People who pricked their ears caught faint murmurings but no one heard distinctly, for the Tory door was shut and the windows closed. Just as when Butler, who blotted his copy book at Munich, lost out to Churchill’s white headed boy, Eden, for the premiership, no one yelled—“we wuz robbed.” While the Tories divide they never split.

After the crushing defeat of the Tories in 1945 many said “ they were sunk.” The same view was held in their 1906 debacle. But the Tories have a strong survival instinct. Quietly, efficiently, they salvaged the craft, gave it a coat of new paint and refloated it. Also they were able to cash in on their opponents’ mistakes and the disappointment Labour’s terms of office brought. The tide turned. People, who in 1945, voted against old Toryism began to vote for “New Look” Conservatism. In 1945 the Tories’ greatest liability was their pre-war domestic policy. In 1955 the Labour Party’s greatest liability is their post-war record.

The Tories are supposed to be traditionally stupid, a myth probably self-perpetrated to their own advantage. Actually they are shrewd and flexible politicians. “Dishing the Whigs” is as adroitly practised by them as it was by Disraeli. Because they are the traditional representatives of wealth and property, they regard themselves as the rightful rulers of the realm. The difference between them and the Labour Party is that Labour believes it can govern. The Tories know they can.

As for the Welfare State it is much more Tory “Socialism” than Labour “Socialism”. Long ago Industrial Feudalism was a Tory ideal, where workers would have “rights ” as well as duties. Indeed the New Welfare State is only old Tory reformism writ larger. While it may have features not wholly satisfactory to the Tories it is the current expression of their age-long political paternalism. While circumstances may make them modify it here and there they will keep its main structure unimpaired.

At present they seem to have a decided political edge on their rivals. Only the possibility of a slump, it appears, can boom Labour’s falling stock.

Ted Wilmott

50 Years Ago: Has Bevan Sold the Pass? (2007)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

A lot of people who have for years worshipped Aneurin Bevan have now turned against their hero because of his support for the H-Bomb at the Labour Party Conference. Bevan says that he is as strongly against the bomb as ever he was and that his speech and vote at Brighton (decided on “after a lot of agonising thinking”), were only designed to find “the most effective way of getting the damned thing destroyed” : but this is a bit too subtle for those who have passionately believed that Bevan was hundred per cent, against the bomb and now find that he isn’t.

But actually the disgruntled Bevanites have little ground for complaint for, as it happens, Bevan has changed his politics hardly at all. If any deception has been carried out it is their own self-deception; an obstinate refusal to take note of what Bevan has for years been saying and doing.

If a few of them are genuine pacifists who resolutely refuse to support armaments or war, they are fully entitled to be opposed to Bevan who supported World War II and the Korean War, and conscription and re-armament, but they cannot pretend that Bevan has deceived them about his record of war-supporting.

With others the revulsion of feeling may appear to be more soundly based, but again it will not stand examination. They take the view (like Bevan) that armaments are necessary and that war is sometimes unavoidable and must be supported no matter what the cost in death and destruction. They reject the Socialist view that war arises from capitalism and can only be got rid of by establishing Socialism. They can stomach it all, the millions of dead and maimed, the trench warfare, machine guns and artillery, the bombing raids, the napalm and even the A-Bomb— but the H-Bomb. No !

(Front page article by H, Socialist Standard, November 1957)

The General Election (1951)

From the October 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

After weeks of speculation and anticipation by newspaper political writers, Mr. Attlee announced the date for the general election, October 25th. It has been suggested that he might wait to make the announcement at the Labour Party Conference and thus stimulate some electioneering enthusiasm amongst the delegates, or that he might wail till after the Conservative Party Conference and so keep his political opponents guessing. All the time it was recognised that the Prime Minister would select a date for the election that would be as favourable to his party as possible.

One may well ask, “How can one date be more favourable than another?” There are many who give loyal and steadfast allegiance to one or the other of the main political parties and who can be relied upon to vote accordingly. There are many, many others who have no political tie-up and who will vote at the election according to the state of their liver, the personality of a candidate or the latest international scare. This is known as the floating vote and it is courted by all vote-catching parties.

To capture this floating vole strategy is employed. If through some action or some event, the stock of the political party that is in power rises and it is in favour with a large section of the community, then the time is favourable to invite re-election. Similarly, if for some reason the parties in opposition are temporarily in disgrace, the time is propitious to spring an election on them. If the opposing parties can be caught unawares or at a time when they are ill-prepared for an election campaign, so much the better for the Government party’s chances at the polls.

One thing is obvious from this, the whole business of an election, from the standpoint of the capitalist political parties, is a vote-catching affair. Policies are moulded to attract votes, candidates are selected with an eye on their vote-drawing abilities, and any manoeuvre that will entice or stampede working class voters to give support to one party or another, is considered legitimate.

In the past the Conservatives have scared votes away from the Labour Party by such devices as the “Zinovieff Letter incident” and the cry “They will take your savings.” At the last election the main tenor of the Labour Party’s campaign was a vague threat of the terrible things that the Conservatives would do if they were to get back into power. “Keep the Tories out," was the cry.

Working class votes can only be juggled around in this manner whilst the workers themselves are ignorant of the manner in which they can use the political machine to serve their own interests. Whilst they can see no alternative to capitalism they will allow their votes to be shunted backwards and forwards at each general election. Many will treat the election just as they treat the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, taking sides according to their fancy, and others, hoping to gain something from the process, will support the party that makes the fairest promises.

Whether Mr. Attlee, by his selection of a date for this general election, has rung the changes on the Conservatives, we are not aware. One thing is certain though, he has outmanoeuvred his own party critics, Mr. Bevan and his supporters. Mr. Bevan, who has claimed that the Labour Party would do well to be out of office for a while, will now have to pull his weight to make the election campaign a success, unless he is prepared to retire from the contest. He has been rocking the Labour Party boat for a month or so past, now he will have to take a turn at the oars. If the Labour Party is defeated at the polls, then Mr. Bevan’s eloquent criticism will be diverted from his own party and he will thunder his condemnations from the opposition benches—at the Conservatives. From all angles he will be brought to heel.

This general election will be a contest between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. Nobody seriously considers a victory for smaller parties. The two giants have much in common. They are both parties of capitalism. They both adhere to the wages system, capital and property institutions. Faced with the problems born of capitalism, they work out a series of futile solutions and present them as a policy programme. In a world where masses of wealth are in the hands of a few, whilst the many have only just enough to live on, both parties are prompted to seek a remedy. They both claim to be in favour of some slight redistribution of property and oppose one another bitterly over their respective schemes. But see them join hands and bare their teeth when socialists suggest that it is not this slight redistribution of property that is required, but common ownership of the means of production and distribution.

The Conservative proposal is for what is termed a “Property owning democracy." This boils down to a vague plan for helping more workers to buy their own houses. The implications are wider.

“A true property-owning democracy must be based upon the wide distribution of private property not upon its absorption into the State machine.” ("This is the Road” p. 14, Conservative Party, 1950.)

The Conservatives think that if everybody owns a little private property, if everyone has a stake in the property institution, then it is more likely that nearly everyone will continue to support a system based upon property ownership. Those who own the millions will feel that their system is safe if those who own the ha’pennies and pennies can be kidded that they are property owners too, and have a stake in the system.

The Labour Party would preserve the system of property by different means. Property would to some extent be taken out of the hands of private individuals and placed under the control of the State. The main difference being that the State manipulates the property on behalf of the private owners. The idea that this makes for a more equitable distribution of property arises from the mistaken notion that the State is an institution which represents society as a whole, whereas, in fact, it is an institution that has grown out of property society to serve the interests of the property owners and to maintain “law and order” in a society of class antagonisms. All property that is taken out of the hands of private capitalists and vested in the State is really placed in the hands of the capitalist class as a whole.

Even the Liberal Party, or what is left of it, although nobody is likely to take it seriously, has its solution to the “property problem.” Co-partnership in industry is the plan. Every worker has his little tiny bit of property and. of course, becomes a staunch defender of the private property system to the delight of those who own enough property to make it worth owning.

None of these schemes solves the workers’ problems. The process of development in capitalist society is for property to concentrate into fewer hands. Any crumbs that may be thrown to the workers will be to save them from getting so hungry that they threaten to take over the feast for themselves, and to encourage them to produce more of the good things for their masters.

The process of bringing certain industries under State control is not an original Labour Party idea. Governments composed of Conservatives, Liberals and Communists have instituted State control. Certain industries are essential to the operation of all others. All industries must use transport, must have coal, gas or electricity, need telephone and telegraph systems and a postal system. To have varying rates of charges in any one of these basic industries and to have the wastefulness and chaos of capitalists' competition in them, is detrimental to all other industry. Centralised State control can eliminate most of the troubles. Conservatives will use it as well as Labourites, just as the Labour Party will adopt the Conservative “property-owning democracy” idea, under a different name, if it is considered a good vote catching stunt.

Now, as in 1950, you are asked to vote for one or the other of these parties. The details of their respective programmes differ but little from the programmes that they presented two years ago, and they differ but little from each other. The question of property is fundamental to all their other proposals and promises. Only those with no property are bothered by the housing shortage. Only those with no means of living except by finding employment are worried about unemployment. Only the wives of the propertyless are harassed by rapidly rising prices. Those with property do not fret over health services, sick pay and pensions. The problems of capitalist society are the worries of the propertyless workers. War, that outstanding problem of this century, arises directly from the property basis of present society. Wars are the result of the continuous struggle between groups of capitalists in their endeavours to accumulate more and more property.

At this election time the workers have nothing to gain by supporting either of the two main parties. They should oppose them both. All the items that fill the pages of their election pamphlets, housing, high prices, industrial disputes, food shortages, pensions, armaments, health service cuts, foreign policies, etc., all these have a common solution—the ending of the system that gives rise to them. Socialism is the only political creed worthy of working-class interest.

Property means ownership. Individuals, companies, cartels, trusts and-states own the means of producing the needs and comforts of life and dispose of these means to suit their own interests. They make them into capital, they invest them with a view to making profit and in the profit-making process the workers go to the wall, are kept poor and are called upon every so often to sacrifice life or limb in a war to make the property of one group of capitalists safe from the grasp of its rivals. Election time is the opportunity for the workers to show that they have had enough of their propertyless status and that they are determined to take the property away from its present owners, the capitalist class, and to transfer it to society as a whole.

With the means of production in the hands of society it can be used to produce the necessities, comforts and luxuries of life for all to enjoy, not for a privileged few. Wealth can then be produced for use and not for profit. That will put an end to all the pettyfogging vote-catching schemes of political parties because the problems they promise to cure will no longer exist. There will be no poverty, hence no housing problem, no unemployment, no overwork, no prices, high or low, no strikes. There will be people working to produce things and having the use of them when produced. There will be no wars as there will be no private property to fight over.

To the workers at this election we say. Do not be bamboozled into voting for the Conservatives because you think that with a Conservative Government the Labour Party will be more militant and that Trade Union officials will work better on your behalf. Do not be tricked into voting for the Labour Party because you think that it will be the lesser of two evils. Both parties support Capitalism and that is the evil. Do not think that Socialism is unattainable at present and so you are bound to vote for one of these capitalist parties. Socialism is only unattainable whilst you think that way. Pay attention to the Socialist Party of Great Britain which does not ask for your vote but for your understanding.

Capitalism will last just as long as you support it. The sooner you manifest your opposition to it the sooner will it be abolished.

We cannot hope to tell you enough about Socialism in this limited space but we will do everything in our power to help you to an understanding of your position in capitalist society and how to achieve a new society in which you can lead a secure and pleasurable life.

Capitalist politicians of all shades have been telling you for generations how their “practical” policies will solve your problems. You know whether they are solved or not. They will go on soliciting your votes at election after election with further “practical” policies. They will make you think that you are a most important person for a week or two before election day and promptly move the troops in on your job the day after if you strike for a little “practical” increase in your pay. That goes for Labour and Conservative, not to mention Liberal and Communist. The fact is that their policies are most unpractical as far as solving your problems js concerned. Time has shown that. The only practical solution is in the abolition of Capitalism and the establishment of Socialism. To that end we say, Do not vote for capitalist parties on October 25th but work with us for the overthrow of this system and the building of a new one that will be in keeping with our interest. As there is no socialist candidate in the field, abstain from voting. If you fear that your voting paper may be mis-used or if you want to give some expression to your zeal for Socialism, go to the poll and write “ Socialism ” across your ballot paper. It will at least indicate to our opponents that there is a rising tide of revolutionary feeling which will in time sweep away their rotten system with all its parasites and hangers-on. What have you to lose? Go to it.

W. Waters.

Notes by the Way: Mr. Bevan being Statesmanlike (1956)

The Notes by the Way Column from the September 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Bevan being Statesmanlike

When he is not calling other supporters of capitalism vermin the Rt. Hon. Aneurin Bevan sometimes writes sober, statesmanlike articles for the Capitalist Press as in the Sunday Express (5 August, 1956). His subject was "Why I want Ike to Lose.” Although Bevan is not a Socialist he likes to parade himself as one on the strength of his continuing support for State Capitalism (nationalisation), and one would have expected the article to be a trumpet blast for setting up an English-model “Welfare State" in U.SA and a repudiation of Eisenhower because he and his party are not likely to do it. But not at all. The article said nothing about America's need for Bevan’s State Capitalist schemes (and naturally nothing about Socialism). It said hardly anything about any policy, beyond a tepid preference for Adlai Stevenson on the ground that be would change the American attitude towards Chiang-Kai-Shek, and might finally end McCarthyism. All he could say about Stevenson was that “his views are not particularly advanced, judged by Europe's standards, and there are even some Conservatives who might not think him sufficiently progressive."

No, Mr. Bevan’s main and almost his only theme was that Eisenhower is sick and consequently liable to reactionary pressure—as if the course of American capitalism is going to be determined by Eisenhower, well or ill. But Mr. Bevan evidently thinks it is:—

“I find the project depressing in the extreme. The President is obviously a sick man and by all the evidence he is likely to become more and not less sick. We shall therefore have less than half a man failing to do what is by general consent a job more than enough for a man in full possession of robust health. The most important political office in the world will be in feeble, fumbling and wavering hands, and it is little consolation that it may be done by the democratic choice of the American people themselves."

So Mr. Bevan can pass by without comment the fact that the American people by democratic choice are about to rivet themselves to capitalism again; this be does not think worth notice; but he is very depressed because American capitalism may be in the hands of a semi-invalid. As if by comparison with the real issue it had any importance at all, except for Mr. Eisenhower.

•  •  •

Bevan Looking in the Mirror

This attitude towards politics does explain why Mr. Bevan got so angry with Attlee and now dislikes Attlee's successor, Gaitskell. When Bevan looks in the mirror be sees a whole man, in robust health; obviously better fitted to lead the Labour Party and become Prime Minister than these fumbling half men.

But how does Bevan work out, in wider spheres, his policy of supporting the robust and opposing the weak? In the same issue of the Sunday Express “Cross Bencher" reported that Mr. R. A. Butler is a robust man, too: “His cheeks glow. His step is light. And he is only 53.“

And what about Colonel Nasser, who is described as  “a tall, strongly built man, with great physical stamina? "

•  •  •

Nationalisation and the Arab Workers

The Arab workers' trade unions in Egypt and other Middle-Eastern countries, have given delighted support to the act of nationalising the Suez Canal and the threatened nationalisation of oil plants and oil pipe-lines. They think their troubles will be over when “their country owns their oil and their canal." They have a rude awakening in store when they find that the beneficiaries will be their exploiters, the local Capitalist class. But what a pity they could not learn from the experience of workers in Britain, Russia and other countries about the illusory benefits of State Capitalism. The people who ought to have told them are the British and other trade union leaders who have international contacts, but they, of course, still cherish the same illusions themselves.

Colonel Nasser has used against the Western Powers the argument that as Egyptian workers built the Canal “Egypt" should own it. But the same can be said of all the accumulated wealth of Egypt and all other countries; the workers produced it but somebody else owns it. The Colonel very well knows that nationalisation is not going to take the wealth of Egypt out of the hands of the rich who own it. If he had any such dangerous thoughts and suggested applying them he would soon be got rid of.

•  •  •

U.N.-The Dream Fades

Except as a face-saver and rubber stamp organisation for the big Powers, nobody seriously considered United Nations as a body to provide a solution for the Suez Canal dispute. A correspondent of the Manchester Guardian at Geneva comments on the parallel disillusioning with one of U.N..'s subsidiaries the United Nations Economic and Social Council. He comments on the failure of this council in the fields of world trade and economic development and goes on:—

“What is considered even more serious, however, is the growing impression among the delegates that, just as in the field of effective world security, the United Nations is becoming almost impotent in the economic and social fields as well. It seems as if there were an unspoken agreement among the industrial as well as the less developed countries that the United Nations has been reduced to a forum where lip-service has to be paid to ideals which no longer apply to the level of sophistication which has now been universally reached. Articles of the United Nations Charter seem to serve as no more than good debating points."—(Manchester Guardian, 9th August, 1956.)

•  •  • 

The Results of Keir Hardie

On the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Keir Hardie he has been acclaimed by both wings of the Labour Party and by the Communist Daily Worker. He is not acclaimed by the S.P.G.B. any more than he was when he was alive; though we must in fairness admit that when we contemplate the low level of the present Labour Party notabilities it does add a certain relative lustre to Keir Hardie. And this, of course, pin-points our "attitude towards his reformist activities and his masterpiece the formation of the Labour Party. His admirers tell us what fine and enduring work he did but they are vague about what it was and why it should be admired. Surely the test to be applied to a man who believed that the way to get Socialism was to build up a trade union-political, refformist Labour Party, is to examine his success in achieving what, he said, it would achieve.

 

Mr. Bevan, in an article “The man who still points the Way ” (Reynolds News, 12 August, 1956), has this to say:—

“We are not yet even within sight of the 'just society' that Keir Hardie dreamed about The society we belong to is not only still unjust it is also unstable. We lurch unsteadily from one crisis to another with the sole satisfaction that our feet are better shod than they were in Hardie's day."

Mr. Bevan puts it very well, but what becomes of the claim of Hardie and the other reformists about the superior wisdom of reformism? And incidentally what were Mr. Bevan and the other members of the Labour Governments doing to leave society in such a mess?

One of Keir Hardie's mistaken beliefs was that the problem of war could be dealt with under capitalism. Now, half a century later, Mr. Bevan tells us in effect, that if we disappear in an H.-Bomb war it will be nice to know that our feet are dry.

•  •  •

Zilliacus Egypt and Israel

Mr. Zilliacus, Labour M.P., for Gorton, is one of the Labour Party M.P.'s who do not approve of Eden's policy towards Egypt, or of his own leader’s policy. He wrote to the Manchester Guardian (6 August, 1956), to put his point of view. He attacked Mr. Gaitskell's statement that the Suez episode “Must be recognised as part of the struggle for the mastery of the Middle East" and declared that “to contemplate going to war is madness," this because Nasser has behind him the whole of the Arab world as well as support from outside.

But point four of his four point explanation of his position included “as an immediate emergency measure, the arming of Israel . . ."

One wonders therefore just what Mr. Zilliacus does think. Against whom is Israel to be armed if not against Egypt and the Arab countries? And since this involves the possibility of war what happens to the view that contemplating going to war is madness, especially as he also wants “the guaranteeing of peace between Israel and the Arab States?"  “Guaranteeing" frontiers means being prepared to go to war.

•  •  •

They’re Fascists !

Trying to interpret events in the international dogfight in terms of how much you like the politicians and how friendly you think they are becomes confusing because the actors keep on changing places and changing colours.

Sir Anthony Eden likens Nasser to Hitler (to which the Colonel with more politeness seems to have made no retort in kind), but similarity to the late Nazi leader and his crimes is just what the Greeks have been seeing in Eden because of Cyprus.

The Communists have had the same trouble. Some readers of the Daily Worker have objected to the Communist Party’s support for dictator Nasser’s policy on the ground that Nasser is anti-Israel, while Communists in Stepney “are pro-Israel." To which another Daily Worker reader retorts that the manner in which the rulers of Israel treat the Arab minority is “fascist-like." (Daily Worker, 8 August).

But a well-known “expert" on world affairs, Mr. Stephen King-Hall thinks that the British Government should use their trump card, the existence of Israel which he describes as “the only, democratic State in the Middle East." (Manchester Guardian, 8 August).

The odd thing is that they all now use “Fascist” and "Nazi” as terms expressing abhorrence, forgetting how all of them have been willing to do a deal with Mussolini, Hitler or anyone else when in need of allies.

Which prompts a further note on the use of language. Why has not “you're like Stalin,” come into common use as term of abuse? What did Adolf have that Josef hadn't got?

•  •  •

Profits from “Welfare” work

“Industrial Relations News” of New York announce publication of a book called “The Dollars and Sense of Human Relations in Industry.” It sets out to answer the question “Do Human relations programmes pay their own way?”

The publicity leaflet notes that “companies to-day are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on human relations courses for supervisors, house organs for employees, recreation facilities, attitude surveys, and many other types of human relations programmes”

It’s their money and they want to know what they get for it in addition to a nice warm feeling.

So the editors “investigate the many areas in which good human relations can result in definite dollars-and-cents contributions to company success.”

This sort of thing must be a bit of a problem to honest christians who have been brought up to believe that they have to choose between wealth and goodness and can't have both. Under this enlightened, modern capitalism christian Capitalists have to have both whether they like it or not. They seek goodness by providing welfare for their wage-slaves and the only result is to give them more dollars and cents than ever.

Another line on “human relations” concerns protective clothing worn in factories and warehouses, dealt with in an article “How Clothing Can Help Production" (“Furniture Record,” 13 July, 1956). The writer, Mr. F. S. Winfield, Managing Director of Raynor, Webber and Stiles Ltd., claims that much study is given to the advantages of such clothing apart from its function as protective against accidents and against damage to ordinary dress.

Putting women workers into smart uniform, working garments prevents envy from interfering with concentration oft work:—

“The modish new spring skirt of a young unmarried operative cannot, for instance, be the object of rueful contrast during working hours with, say, the sad-looking frock that middle-aged widow has had to make do for with a couple of years."

It has been found, the writer says, that “identification of rank by colour differentiation has a marked effect on discipline and bearing . . . ” 

And when one firm decided to put all its men into clean overalls, washed each week by the firm, the result, within a week, was “an appreciable improvement in the tidiness and appearance of the machine shop.”

The article ends:—

"As more and more firms undertake to issue their workers with protective clothing, it becomes increasingly clear that the American conception of the provision of these facilities as an investment certain to show profitable returns in extra smartness and extra enthusiasm is a correct one."

The personnel experts call their study of how to get profitable reactions from the workers “human relations.” It is about as human as the preparation of thousands of pay sheets by an electronic computer.

Edgar Hardcastle