Letters: Anthony Greenwood (2007)

Letters to the Editors from the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anthony Greenwood

Dear Editors,

I don’t really have any plans to join the cabinet any time soon (Greasy Pole, September). I rather suspect I would need to have a conscience-ectomy first. I know my grandfather Tony Greenwood became very depressed towards the end of his career, both at some of the awful things his role had demanded and also at his wider, belated discovery that even cabinet ministers really have very little power to change anything for the better in the context of a capitalist state. He did manage to do some good things around housing once upon a time, and he was justly proud of his pioneering environmental legislation, but basically he was disappointed and frustrated with the results of his career in politics. My mum was a greenham commoner and has always warned me that men of integrity should keep out of party politics since it is poison for the soul, and made my grandpa very unhappy.

Leo Murray (by e-mail)

Reforms again

Dear Editors

Could I make a couple of comments on your reply to my letter about reformism in the October Socialist Standard?

1 You say “We can’t accept that all ‘reforms are by their nature divisive’.” Neither can I. Women are by their nature child bearers but it’s obviously not true that all women are by their nature child bearers. An exactly analogous thing is true of reforms, so you are replying to a position no one has taken up.

2 You say “we define a reform as a politically-implemented measure and so don’t include wage increases as a ‘reform’.” But, just as one example, the new NHS contracts for GPs three years ago were both politically implemented and involved a wage increase. The contracts over working conditions had to be negotiated with an elected government and implemented in law.

This second point is immensely important, showing that people’s economic and political lives are not two separate things. More generally, particular groups of workers can marginally improve their conditions of life within capitalism by both political and nonpolitical means. Reformist parties use that as a reason for supporting all sorts of stopgap measures which leave capitalism untouched, on the grounds that they must be with the workers in their day-to-day struggles. The Party needs to continue keeping its distance from that approach. If it ever goes soft on reformism it will lose its reason for existing and therefore will probably cease to exist. But it can’t keep its distance by making an untenable distinction between wage struggles and political action.

Keith Graham (by e-mail)

Reply:

Your desire to ensure that the socialist movement remains free of reformist influences is entirely laudable.

The socialist position is indeed that all reformism needs to be opposed and that socialists do not seek to attract support by advocating reforms, as no series of reforms can ever solve the problems inherent to capitalism. In addition, advocating a reform programme would attract the support of non-socialists and because a voluntary, co-operative society like socialism can only ever be created by a majority of convinced, conscious socialists, this would be counter-productive.

Any socialists elected to parliament would consistently expose reformism for its inability to solve the problems of capitalism but may be prepared to consider on their merits particular, individual reforms (however rare in occurrence or few in number) that clearly benefited the working class or socialist movement, but always under democratic direction from the wider movement and without ever giving support to reformist organisations.

We define reforms as political measures brought forward to amend the operation of capitalism in some way. We say this because in a class divided system like capitalism, it is the state, controlled by the political apparatus, that is the institution operating this entire process. By extension, ‘reformism’ is the attempt to seek support so that political power and influence over the state can be obtained to enact reforms (originally, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformism meant seeking support for reforms that could specifically lead to socialism). While political and economic measures are often intertwined as you say, without their political character they can’t be reformist.

So the key issue for socialists is not to advocate (or seek political support for) reform programmes, as this is reformism and leads to disastrous Labour governments and to the other things you have alluded to in your letters. But we don’t do this and never have done, as you presumably know.

Nevertheless, you raise some issues about this we cannot agree with and, while they are in most respects a matter of tactics, they seem to serve little practical purpose. In your previous letter, you said that the Party’s ‘opposition to reformism is well grounded because reforms are by their nature divisive and therefore work against the vital condition of working class unity’. When we pointed out in response that while reformism is a disastrous way forward individual reforms aren’t always intrinsically divisive to the working class, you say you don’t really hold this view anyway, with the sophistry that because something naturally tends towards a condition, it doesn’t mean it always exhibits that condition in practice. In which case we can only presume you now concede that some reforms are not by their nature divisive after all and that the practical examples we gave (e.g. securing freedom of speech, extending the franchise, stopping a war, etc) do not serve to intrinsically divide the working class in any meaningful way but are individual reforms which could conceivably benefit the entire working class and socialist movement.

So, out of all this, what are we left with? The view that democratically-controlled socialist MPs (acting as delegates) should never in any circumstances vote for reforms brought forward in parliament that are in the interests of the working class or the socialist movement more generally – as this would somehow be reformist. Also, the insinuation that trade union action is also reformist.

But both views misunderstand the nature of reformism and confuse it with a blanket opposition to everything that does and can happen in capitalism. And to put it bluntly, in the guise of being supportive of working class interests and being true to socialist principles, they would involve actions (or sometimes, inaction) that was expressly contrary to the interests of the working class. This would be ridiculous and taken to its ultimate, logical conclusion would lead to the situation whereby socialists in parliament determinedly resolved to oppose all reform measures as a matter of course, even those of clear benefit to workers or the socialist movement (and by doing so inadvertently allying themselves with the forces of reaction to keep wars going, or oppose factory legislation and anything else that might benefit workers). The men and women who founded our Party realised the absurdity of this tactic a long time ago, and we rather hope you do too. Certainly, very few have seriously countenanced it since –Editors.

Greasy Pole: Like father like son (2007)

The Greasy Pole column from the September 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is no reason to believe that he was asked what he thought about it but Tony Benn has been transmogrified from an unbending leftwing critic, protester and campaigner into a National Treasure. Manacled in this identity he will find that participation in any future marches, petitions or demonstrations will provoke only the kind of fond indulgence normally given to senile dogs. In addition Benn may be disturbed by the fact that no offspring has followed in his stumbling political footsteps, for his son Hilary made his attitude clear from the very beginning of his time as an MP: “I am a Benn but not a Bennite” – which may be translated as “please forget all that daring but embarrassing stuff I once raved on about – my career is more important to me than any principles you may have attributed to me”.

We may ask why there are so few examples of admiring offspring following a parent into a successful career in politics – which is, after all, supposed to be an honourable profession with rewards both material and in public esteem. Is it just a matter of rebellious youth defying parental assumptions? Or is there something about the work and the esteem which discourages?

The Greenwoods

Arthur Greenwood was a leading Labour figure, an MP from 1922 until his death in 1954, who held a number of Cabinet posts. In the chaotic 1929/31 Labour government he was Minister of Health and in 1935 he became Clement Attlee’s deputy leader. In the wartime coalition Churchill made him Minister Without Portfolio and then in 1941 Chairman of the Reconstruction Committee – a grandly titled body with the even grander job of organising post-war reconstruction. This committee was expected to produce practical proposals covering a wide range of spheres of action and to this end Greenwood recruited a number of economists and others who thought highly enough of themselves to believe that, at that time of extreme peril for British capitalism, their opinions would have any effect on governmental policy.

In any case the very fact of Greenwood’s appointment was evidence of the low priority given to post-war “reconstruction” for his serious drink problem made him quite incapable of keeping up with the demands of the job. Mercifully, in 1942 he was sacked (the Committee had met only four times) and the government could get on with the serious business of organising the slaughter.

His dismissal from the Cabinet left Greenwood free to take on the (unpaid) unofficial leadership of the opposition. The style of his “opposition” may be judged by his contribution to a debate, in February 1943, on the Beveridge Report, heartily welcomed by so many war-weary people under the impression that the type of reforms Beveridge was proposing would be the reward for all their suffering during the war. The coalition, however, was not to be rushed into any such extravagance and Greenwood, by pre-arrangement with the government, introduced an analgesic motion greeting the Report with the meaningless hope that it would – sometime, somehow, somewhere – be implemented.

Anthony Greenwood

In the post war Labour government Greenwood held a couple of minor jobs but his health steadily declined; in 1950, virtually immobile, he was brought to the Commons in a wheelchair by his son Anthony. “He looked dying” recorded Tory MP Henry Channon, “…Anthony, also a Member, has a Surbiton accent but a pleasant, well-soaped appearance”. That was alright then, everything well set for another, eminently acceptable, Greenwood to take his place in the most exclusive club in the world where they do the business of managing British capitalism.

Greenwood Junior was among those who conform to whatever the priorities of capitalism demand while protesting that their principles as left wingers would prevent them behaving in that way. A member of the anti-nuclear movement from its early days as the Hydrogen Bomb National Campaign Committee, he stood for the party leadership against Hugh “Fight And Fight Again” Gaitskell, who won with almost three quarters of the votes cast. Gaitskell’s death in 1963 brought Wilson into the leadership and Greenwood was plucked from the back benches to become Secretary of State for the Colonies. This was either a mistake by Wilson or an example of labyrinthine subtlety for he had grumbled to Barbara Castle that “Tony has no brains. I soon realised that all he is good at is public relations” – a breathtaking sneer from one who was himself a keen student of the shadowy art of public relations.

Anthony Greenwood had responsibility for a number of decisions which would have outraged any self-respecting left winger. In 1964 there was concern, in London and Washington, that a general election in British Guiana would bring into power a government led by Cheddi Jagan, who was likely to pursue policies unfavourable to American interests in the area. Stifling his earlier reservations for such subversive, undemocratic activity, Greenwood co-operated with the Americans in an intelligence campaign successfully aimed at undermining Jagan’s chances in the election. In 1965 the Americans had designs on building a nuclear base on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. The problem was that the islanders did not want to leave so they were removed forcibly, through deportation or attrition; for example Britain bought the only employer on the island and then closed it down. By 1975 the job was finished and the base was there, where once the islanders fished, farmed and harvested the copra.

Hilary Benn

There is nothing in the family antecedents for any existent Greenwood to take pride in. But the tradition, or whatever it is, lives on; the grandson of Anthony Greenwood, Leo Murray, is a co-founder of Plane Stupid, an organisation which in its own way tries to defy the realities of capitalism by campaigning against airport expansion. Watch out for Leo Murray; there is time for him also to get into Parliament, become a minister and forget the days when he was devoted to trying to make capitalism behave out of character.

Such has been the story of so many politicians, among them Hilary Benn, a fourth generation MP who began as a local councillor at Ealing in London. That was in 1979, when Ealing surprised itself by electing a council which, with policies which were presented as eradicating discrimination but which on balance probably had the opposite effect, made them contenders with others such as Camden and Hackney for the title of loony lefties. At the same time Ealing council significantly upped the local rate which, to voters who are under the delusion that such things are important to them, was little short of electoral suicide. In 1983 and 1987 it almost certainly helped to increase the majority for the sitting Tory MP for Ealing North, where Benn was making his first attempt to get into Parliament. Avoiding another failure at that constituency, in 1999 Benn was returned at a by-election for Leeds Central. He has been the most compliant of Labour MPs, voting for ID cards, university top-up fees, the war in Iraq, replacing Trident…and he has moved smoothly up the greasy pole, to his present Cabinet job in charge of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Enough has been said and written about Hilary Benn’s father Tony Benn, left wing irritant turned National Treasure. It is however useful to remember that he was a minister in as succession of Labour governments during the 1960s and1970s, beginning with Postmaster General for Harold Wilson in 1964 and including the misery and chaos of the infamous Winter of Discontent. Among his notable achievements was his very own carbon footprinting when he oversaw development of the Concorde airliner which, apart from what it did to the ozone layer, was the rich person’s exclusive mode of air travel.

If the history of family politicians tells us that successive generations learn little or nothing from experience – well the same, even more so, must be said about the people who, in obdurate masochism, vote to keep them in power.

Ivan