50 Years Ago: Borstal Boy (2008)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Brendan Behan at the age of sixteen came from Dublin to Liverpool with an I.R.A. “do it yourself kit,” for the purpose of blowing up Cammell Lairds. He was arrested, and after a stay in Walton Detention Prison, Liverpool, was sent for three years to a Borstal Institution in East Anglia. The book (published by Hutchinson) tells of his experiences in these places. (…)

In spite of all the tumult and violence of the book, it has a monastic quality in that nothing of any significance from the outside world ever seeps in. not even the war which was going on at the time is mentioned, in fact, the author never seems to have really noticed it. There is no serious discussion, not even about Ireland. Behan indulges in rodomontade about Irish politics, religion and history, but never indicates that he has any grasp of the underlying economic and factors of Irish history. (…)

Behan at least went to Borstal wearing a slightly glamorised would-be Martyr’s crown. He came out none the worse, perhaps even a little better for it. But what of the mal-adjusted, the misfits and the unfortunates; what happened to them? That, perhaps, is the most disquieting thing of all, but Behan never mentions it.

He has nothing to say against patriotism or nationalism either of the English, Irish or any other variety. He seems to regard many Englishmen as stiff-necked and arrogant, but sees no reason why they should not be either in their native country or to people who come from other countries. But in a world of conflicting national interests, being pro Irish, English or American, means even at the best of times being negatively anti-something else. In the worst times such feelings take on an active and hostile form.

[From book review by E.W., Socialist Standard, December 1958]

Workers’ Solidarity (2000)

Book Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Unfinished Revolution: South Tyneside 1969-1976. Jack Grassby. TUPS Books, pp. 343, 1999.

The period around the mid-60s to mid-70s was seen by many then as a time of radical change. These were the days of “People Power”, of world-wide grassroots political action involving students, trade unionists, claimant groups and all manner of single-issue fanatics. The era was typified by such events as the student protests in the France of 1968, the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movement in the USA and the UK miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974.

Set against this backdrop, Jack Grassby’s book is an account of the intensity of grassroots political action from 1969 to 1976 on South Tyneside and in which the author played a key part. A cornucopia of reproduced pamphlets, documents and press reports from the region and period, the book is more a primary source for the political and social historian than any guessed-at academic account of a revolution that failed.

Chapter by chapter, the documents are carefully accompanied by a running commentary which gives a vivid detail of events and feel of the period.

Grassby makes no bold claim for his work and no remarkable political statement. As he states in the preface, the book has an “objective manner” in which the “political/social significance is left largely to the reader”.

Socialists have no objection to grassroots action—i.e. the struggles of claimant groups, students and trade unionists—so long as the struggle for socialism is not side-tracked by the campaigns for individual reforms, the futility of which this journal has been exposing for the best part of a century. And Grassby takes time out in an epilogue to remind us of the pitfall of reformism:

“Few of those involved in those events . . . would claim that their long-term objectives had been realised. Although some local campaigners can claim to have had a limited success—heating allowances for pensioners, social security benefits for students and strikers etc—their success was often transient and was overturned by subsequent government legislation. Even the miners’ success was to prove ephemeral.”

Grassby’s book presents as a fascinating testament of what workers are capable of achieving if enough are prepared to join together in common cause, whilst at the same time standing as a stark reminder of the philosophy of settling for crumbs in a world of abundance. As the title suggests, the revolution is very much “unfinished”.

The book is now on website: http://www.unfinishedrevolution.co.uk 

John Bissett

The Memoirs of a Dutiful Follower (1967)

Book Review from the May 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

This book. Post-war Years; Vol VI of Men, Years—Life (MacGibbon and Kee, 45s.), has not been an easy one to review for a special reason. It is one of those rare autobiographies written by one who has spent his life under a dictatorship—where he still remains. The reviewer, reaching for the knife, must always in fairness keep asking himself the question: “How would I myself have acted if I had had to live my life under the heel of a Stalin?” And having answered that as best he may, he must then also wonder how free the author was to tell his story even under the milder tyranny of Stalin’s successors. The fact that only recently two Russian authors, Sinyavsky and Daniel, have been condemned to harsh sentences in labour camps for writings that would have been regarded as mild criticisms and certainly permissible in any country with the slightest pretensions to freedom or democracy, tells its own tale.

Equally, one must not fall into the trap of leaning over so far backwards that one can write anything as stupidly naive as the dear old Guardian whose reviewer (quoted on the dust jacket) says we should be “grateful to find such courage and moral purpose in so readable a form.” Whatever else one can accuse Ehrenburg of, courage and moral purpose must clearly be left out of the indictment. The whole book, interesting and even fascinating though it is in parts for its insight into some of the darker chapters of Russian history, is the opposite of courage; it is the apologia of one who has succeeded in living through decades of Red Terror when his friends and colleagues were being slaughtered. His only “defence” (like that of Sieyès after the Terror in the French Revolution) amounts to nothing more than “I survived”.

There are not really any lessons to be gleamed from the book that were not, at least in substance, if not in detail, already known. But the detail can still be illuminating. For example, how often were we told in the Stalin era that one facet alone proved that Stalinism could never be as bad as Hitlerism, namely the respective attitudes to anti-semitism? Well, it is doubtless true that Hitler was unique in his “final solution” of the Jewish question—as six million corpses in the gas chambers will testify. But even apart from Stalin’s own exercises against whole peoples like the Crimean Tartars and the Volga Germans (there is no evidence in this book that Ehrenberg was at all concerned with such trivia), the sustained persecution against Jews which is given great prominence throughout the story shows that even this alleged mark of superiority of the Russian regime was spurious. All the talk about the Russian Constitutions guaranteeing freedom from persecution was, as was obvious at the time—just talk.

Ehrenburg goes out of his way to give prominence to the fate of a leading Jewish intellectual called Mikhoels who was apparently a close friend. This man was used by Stalin during the war to go on deputations of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to England and America where they raised huge sums of money from Jews and others for aid to Russia. After the war, he like so many others, was butchered in one of Stalin’s purges. The author found this all very sad. At the same time he tells us about his visit to (of all places) Sheffield for one of the endless series of so-called Peace Conferences about which he goes on at great length throughout the book. What he forgets to mention is that whilst there he was closely questioned by reporters from the English Jewish press about the fate of Mikhoels and other prominent Jews. Ehrenburg told them he knew nothing but would make enquiries when he got back to Russia and let them know. Of course he never did let them know. Nor did he make enquiries; it is clear from the book that he was lying in Sheffield; he knew quite well what was going on. Perhaps we should make excuses for him. He did not dare to say what he knew. But what about now, when Stalin has been dead for over a decade? The reticence on every page of this book makes it quite clear that he is still afraid to say what he knows. What a reflection of this alleged Socialist society, this workers’ paradise fifty years after the revolution! And why does Ehrenburg bother to write his memoirs at all if he is unable to tell the truth? Better silence than lies. But then, a regard for truth has never been a virtue of the Communists.

As mentioned above, the book is very largely taken up with accounts of the “Peace” Conference that the Communists were running in countries all over the world in the decade after the end of the war. They were of course a gigantic fraud having nothing whatever to do with peace and everything to do with acting as a propaganda front for the foreign policy of Russia in the worst days of the Cold War. It is just possible that people like Ehrenburg really imagined they were achieving something for peace in their constant travels around the globe (he seems to have visited practically every country you can think of); there is not the slightest sign that this so-called Communist intellectual ever stopped to think that perhaps the competitive jungle known as capitalism in the west, which was just as much capitalism in Russia, produced wars as surely as a hen lays eggs. So that no amount of peace conferences which left the social system unchanged could possibly have any effect.

Still, it at least enabled Ehrenburg to enjoy his globe trotting and meet “intellectuals” (ill-defined creatures, to be sure) of his own ilk. And the book is full of stories about these famous friends he made — Picasso, Matisse, Einstein, Casals, Joliot-Curie et al, ad nauseam. It was, of course, one of the “peace” movements aims to enrol these famous names whose influence in their respective countries would serve such a useful propaganda purpose for the policies of Russia. It is indeed pathetic to see how such gifted individuals would allow themselves to be used in this shameful way. The truth is, of course, that they have no more notion of the workings of capitalism and of what Socialism is really about than the mass of workers in England or Russia or anywhere else. Or than Ilya Ehrenburg, if the evidence of this book is anything to go by. But they are pretty vain creatures and were easy meat for Communist flattery and liked to be regarded as princes of peace as they sat on platforms in front of admiring audiences of thousands of working-class dupes. And of course this game goes on still and people still pay regard to the views of such as Bertrand Russell (who wanted to drop an atom bomb on Moscow in 1947) or (believe it or not) Vanessa Redgrave. And although a lot of these people are like children (Einstein, it seems, persuaded Roosevelt to make the atom bomb but never thought it would be used), some of them must (or at least should) have realised what was what. For example, we are told here that when Matisse was told that the Russian people were forbidden to see his paintings which were hidden away in cellars he just laughed. Perhaps it is funny that the regime you support, and which wants you for your works, regards those works as unfit for human consumption. It is less funny to know that artists like Matisse but, unlike him in living in the west in freedom and wealth, were hounded in Russia and even executed like Mikhoels and his friends.

But of course the real trouble with Ehrenburg, as with so many others both in Russia and the west, is that he never seems to question the basis of his creed. In 1918 the Socialist Standard made it clear that whatever else Lenin and his Bolsheviks might achieve Socialism (or Communism — they are synonymous terms) was out. A dictatorship of a so-called Communist Party was fastened on the necks of the Russian people so that the workers there have been exploited under a tyrannical system of state capitalism. Ehrenburg talks, with every appearance of sincerity, of “the Soviet people, whose concepts I cherish”. It never occurs to him to ask himself: what people? what concepts? '

All we have now is the rule of a minority group who exploit the Russian workers for their own benefit and that of their hangers-on like Ehrenburg. The time has still to come when the workers of Russia, like those of England or America or China, will show that they indeed have a concept of what the world could be like under a free system of society where the means of life will really be owned in common. The fact that the emancipation of the working class of the world is still to come is the fault of the workers themselves. But the Ehrenburgs of the world have a lot to answer for. It might be as well to conclude with a mention of a quotation from another work of this author taken from our companion paper the Western Socialist a year or two ago in which he urged the Russian soldiers to “kill, kill, kill, my brave Red Armyists” and “break the power of the German women” — a brutal incitement to slaughter of the civilian men of Berlin and the rape of their womenfolk. A not untypical contribution to international working-class solidarity from a self-styled Communist intellectual. Needless to say, none of the reviewers in the posh papers, A. J. P. Taylor and all, seem to have been aware of this side of the picture.

A. P.

Seeing Red (2022)

Book Review from the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Always Red. By Len McCluskey. OR Books. 2021.

McCluskey has always come across as the ultimate trade union bruiser and then, in later years, a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn. Originally a ‘planman’ on the Liverpool docks (drawing up plans of where cargoes from various ports would be held on ships), he rose through the ranks of the Transport and General Workers’ Union before playing a key role in the creation of Britain’s most powerful union, Unite – formed in 2007 from a merger of the T & G and Amicus. From 2010 until recently, he became its General Secretary.

The ‘red’ in the title refers not only to McCluskey’s politics – he was an early supporter of Militant, though says he was never a member – but also to his love of Liverpool FC, with which he appears to have travelled all over Europe. He also appears to have seen red many times in the more metaphorical sense during his union career and the book is full of score-settling. Former Labour Deputy Leader Tom Watson – who was McCluskey’s old flat mate – comes out of it particularly badly. And there is clearly no love lost with Keir Starmer either, who he accuses of duplicity.

One of the recurring issues in the book though is McCluskey’s belief that the working class are ready to rally behind a radical left-wing programme of nationalisation and state planning if it wasn’t for the right-wing of the Labour Party selling them out. This, of course, is the old Militant line, parroted today by their successors SPEW (he also still uses some of their terminology, banging on not just about the Labour Right but the ‘ultra-left’ too).

This perspective leads him to often make a highly selective and one-sided analysis of events, the best example being the Labour performance under his friend Corbyn in the 2017 and 2019 General Elections. 2017 is portrayed as a great victory in all but name as Labour increased its vote with a radical programme of reforms by more than in any other election since 1945. However, 2019 is portrayed as the Brexit election and that Labour’s downfall was simply a reflection of this and its pro-Remain stance.

But this won’t do. Not just because Brexit wasn’t the only factor that led to their disastrous showing in 2019 – the public perception of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s unrealistic long ‘shopping list’ of leftist demands were almost as significant. But it’s also because their relative success in 2017 (even though they didn’t actually win of course) wasn’t principally due to the fact they presented the British working class with the radical stuff they had long been waiting for. After all, they’d actually done the same in 1983 and had come a big cropper then, as they later did in 2019 with an even bigger radical promise.

The main reason for Labour’s relatively good showing in 2017 was because that election was also dominated by Brexit but that time they more successfully pitched themselves as a party that could be supported by Remainers and even some ‘soft’ Brexiters worried by a no-deal outcome. It was why Labour managed to win strongly pro-Remain Kensington and Canterbury for the first time ever, yet against the national swing, could also contrive to lose the likes of hard-Brexit Mansfield and Stoke-on-Trent South for the first time in living memory. The correlation between increases in the Tory vote in strong Brexit areas and the increase in the Labour vote in strong Remain areas was statistically significant and the biggest factor at play, but McCluskey just ignores this. By 2019 the ground had shifted and Labour was by then simply left with an unpopular leader, an incoherent campaign and an unconvincing set of leftist reforms.

But it was ever the way with the left – always wanting to convince themselves the precise cocktail of radical reforms of capitalism purveyed by one or other of their factions would one day triumph, when most of the evidence is to the contrary (and not just in the UK either).

The best chapter is actually the last one, on ‘fighting back’ trade unionism as he calls it. Here McCluskey outlines how Unite has developed the tactic of ‘leverage’ and discusses how it works. A good example was when ‘passenger transport company Go Ahead sacked a steward working on the buses in Manchester, we discovered its growth plan was to move into the Norwegian rail market by winning a contract worth £3.8 billion. We dispatched a team to speak to Norwegian politicians and the press, armed with a dossier detailing how this company dealt with rail contracts in the UK. The company was forced to weigh the benefit of getting rid of the steward against the threat to a multi-billion pound contract. Soon enough, the steward was back at work’ (p.292).

There are a variety of examples of Unite using leverage in successful ways to defend its members and their pay and conditions. This is what good unions are for (despite their imperfections) and this chapter is arguably worth more than the rest of the book put together. Indeed, McCluskey can take some genuine pride in the role he has played in developing this – and certainly far more than in what appears to be his enduring adherence to the Trotskyist tactics and programmes of the 70s and 80s.

DAP

Speaker’s Corner (2020)

Book Review from the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unspeakable. John Bercow. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 2020. £20

It was always likely that recently retired House of Commons Speaker John Bercow would produce a memoir that settled a few scores, and he hasn’t disappointed. He clearly has an issue with the British establishment and those that personify it, and ‘snobbish’ David Cameron comes in for particularly vitriolic treatment. To give you a flavour of Bercow’s style: ‘In the pantheon of great leaders, the name of David Cameron will never feature. In a list of opportunist lightweights, it will be at the top’.

Then on to Theresa May: ‘Rudderless, without imagination, and with few real friends at the highest level, she stumbled on, day to day, lacking clarity, vision and the capacity to forge a better Britain. In a contest as to who has been the worst Prime Minister since 1945, it is hard to choose between Anthony Eden and Theresa May’.

And on Boris Johnson: ‘As a debater he is undistinguished and, as a public speaker, though humorous, he is often downright poor – hesitant, unable to string sentences together fluently and about as likely ever to warrant the description “captivating orator” as Bertie Wooster… Apart from those notable limitations in a man who has since become Prime Minister, he is, at his occasional best, a passably adequate politician in an age not replete with them’.

Bercow’s own story of course is an interesting one, the son of a Jewish cab driver who gravitated from a youthful dalliance with the right-wing, anti-immigration Monday Club to a barely disguised left-ish stance. This gained him much opprobrium during the Brexit debates, with allegations that he was a biased ‘remainer’, with an influential Labour-campaigning spouse, Sally.

In fairness, as political autobiographies go, it is more entertaining than most, despite the criticism it has received from many reviewers. Bercow likes to see himself in the mode of a parliamentary ‘reformer’ and the dominant thread is about the battles he fought with traditionalists and conservatives of every stripe, including those who took an ill view of his attempts to support the rights of backbench MPs against those of the executive.

There is a surprisingly interesting (and on occasion well-argued) Epilogue where he looks at the future of parliament and of the UK as a whole over the next decade and more. He picks out the key defining features of the UK well, including the influence of its island status (with a total coastline and sea exposure greater than that of either Brazil or India), and the overwhelming dominance of London, which skews the UK population and capital distribution to something more akin to countries in the Third World.

Interestingly, whatever insight and vitriol he has to muster, little if any of it is directed at Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. Indeed, one suspects he will no doubt become Lord Bercow soon enough (even if he is not – as is usual – nominated by the Prime Minister of the day, but by the outgoing Leader of the Opposition).

Dave Perrin

Poverty and hunger (1966)

Book Review from the December 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

As I Recall by Lord Boyd Orr (Macgibbon & Kee)

This is a fascinating, but also an infuriating, book.

In the introduction, Ritchie Calder speaks of the author’s frustration and anger when, time and again, he was foiled by the profit motive in his efforts to improve the diet of the poorest. He speaks bitterly of his frustrated attempt to get free milk into schools to supplement the children’s impoverished diet, at a time when there was a glut of milk because people could not afford it and skimmed milk was being poured down the drain. He quotes from one of Lord Boyd Orr’s speeches: “half the population of the world suffers from lack of sufficient food; farmers suffer ruin if they produce ‘too much food’. Adjust our economic and political systems to let these two evils cancel each other out.’’

This is why this is an infuriating book. Lord Boyd Orr shows many times that he recognises the responsibility for malnutrition and hunger lies in the capitalist system and yet, even recognising this, throughout his long life and even now, he has sought the remedy within that system.

In the section dealing with his research work, Lord Boyd Orr speaks of the brushes he has had at various times with the Ministry of Agriculture. At one time the Ministry was creating Boards to fix prices of home produced bacon, etc., and to restrict imports. He was opposed to these “because . . . this meant dearer food for the poorer half of the population who were already unable to purchase sufficient for health . . . The Pig and Bacon Marketing Board would mean that there would be less bacon imported from Denmark, and in return we would send them less coal, with the resulting increased unemployment in both countries.” This is a point which still eludes our successive Governments, who preach the gospel that “we” must import less and export more!

In his criticisms of the Agricultural Marketing Board, Lord Boyd Orr advocated a comprehensive food and agricultural policy based on human needs. He pointed out that while the poorest people spent more than 75 per cent of their income on food, the wealthy spend less than 10 per cent. Therefore rises in prices obviously affect the poor much more than the wealthy. In reply he was informed that, as the Rowell Institute (his research institute) was maintained by government grant, the Director should not be allowed to engage in propaganda against his government.

In the chapter dealing with his dietary surveys and wartime food policy, the author speaks of an interview he had with Kingsley Wood, then Minister of Health, who asked him why he was making such a fuss about poverty when, with old age pensions and unemployment insurance, there was no poverty in the country. The extraordinary thing was that Kingsley Wood genuinely believed that if people are not actually dying of starvation, there could be no food deficiency. Naturally he had never put this theory to the test at first hand!

There are many other instances of ignorance or deliberate obstruction and manipulation of facts on the part of “our” politicians. Nevertheless, Lord Boyd Orr can speak with admiration of General Smuts and say superstitiously that “God frowned on our work in Kenya” because two of his friends died there, one through cancer and the other through a motor accident.

When speaking of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, the author mentions the interest shown by American businessmen in schemes for world distribution of food “from a financial point of view.” However, due to the frequent opposition of the British team who, obviously, could see none of these advantages in view of the preferential tariff and price arrangements of this country with its “ex Empire”, many of these schemes failed.

The Atlantic Charter of 1941 stated as its aim “freedom from want for all men in all lands.” The author speaks bitterly of the fact that, already by May, 1943, at the Hot Springs Conference in America on world food problems, this had , been forgotten. ‘The old men had crept back into power, determined to resist any economic change which threatened their financial interests.” When addressing the delegates at the Quebec Conference he felt that, although the delegates themselves were in favour of his suggestions they, “like the delegates at the Hot Springs conference had been told what to say by politicians who had little interest in alleviating poverty, even in their own countries, and even less in eliminating hunger and poverty in the world.”

In spite of his experiences with succeeding British Governments, Lord Boyd Orr can say “my attempt to persuade Mr. Attlee to become interested in this project was rather foolish. He was doing a magnificent job . . . with many inexperienced ministers to reorganise Britain after the war . . . that he could not be expected to be well informed on what must have considered a side issue of the foreign policy.” Side issue indeed!

The role taken by the British Government at least appears to have been consistent. On one occasion the FAO, having sent a group of agricultural experts to Greece, reported that a grant or loan of 200 million dollars would be sufficient to finance the development plans agreed, to bring about a rapid increase in food production. Instead of the grant. Britain sent troops to support the government and Royal Family. 

In summing up, Lord Boyd Orr chafes against the division of the world into opposing camps and sees in World Government. the promotion of which now takes up much of his time, the solution to these problems. His references to “Socialism” and “Capitalism” show why Lord Boyd Orr still places hopes in such an organisation.

Eva Goodman

The Lovely Horrible Stuff (2013)

Book Review from the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Lovely Horrible Stuff’, by Eddie Campbell (ISBN-13: 9780861661749)

This is not so much a graphic novel as a graphic essay. Using sequential art, the comic book author/artist Eddie Campbell delves into the emotional and familial effects of money. It is apparently autobiographical, showing how money has intruded on his work and into his personal life, detailing, in particular, a long-running family feud with his father in law.

It then segues into a discussion of the stone money of Yapp, and how it has come to be used (perhaps, it suggests, erroneously) in economics lectures and theory. This leads him to a sufficiently weighty image upon which to close his meditations.

Its narrative and art help to illustrate the hold that the ‘lovely horrible stuff’ has on our lives, and perhaps it has more reach than any number of detailed textbooks on economics. It doesn’t draw any conclusions.

Pik Smeet

From proletarian to prat (2013)

Book Review from the July 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood by Alan Johnson. Bantham Press, 2013.

When former Home Secretary Alan Johnson told Prime Minister Tony Blair that he was married with three children before he was twenty years old, Blair replied ‘You really are working class’. Alan Johnson is one of those rare things, a member of the proletariat who climbed the greasy pole to reach high political office.

This Boy tells of his childhood in the 1950s and 60s, growing up in North Kensington in London W10 in ‘a street whose buildings had been condemned in the 1930s’. The Johnson family were abandoned by their father, and their lives were filled with a ‘grinding poverty’ which comprised second hand clothes from ‘the Lane’ (Petticoat Lane market), debts, outside lavatories, no television or labour-saving devices, buying groceries ‘on the tick’, hiding from the ‘tally man’, and free school meals. In 1959 Macmillan said the working class had ‘never had it so good’.

1950s North Kensington was captured in the photographs of Roger Mayne who portrayed the ‘squalor and vibrancy of life there’ and also the arrival of immigrants from the West Indies who would be exploited by Rachman landlordism. Johnson recalls the ‘Teddy Boy’ riots in Notting Hill, the unsolved murder (Johnson says he knows the culprit) of West Indian Kelso Cochrane in 1959, and Oswald Mosley as Fascist candidate for North Kensington at the 1959 General Election.

Johnson’s book features a portrait of his mother who died when he was thirteen. She was a Liverpudlian who admired Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, Liberal leader Jo Grimond, disliked Churchill, and worked as a ‘charlady in the posh houses of South Kensington’. His mother and elder sister kept the family going in a period of the Welfare State when benefit entitlements were administered through the head of a family (ie. the man).

Johnson describes his passion for Queens Park Rangers who had a golden era in the 1960s which culminated in winning the football League Cup in 1967. Music was a passion from the skiffle of Lonnie Donegan to the Beatles and Stones and discovering Chicago blues. Johnson details the influential books and authors in his life which included Shane by Jack Schaefer, Mark Twain, HG Wells, Arnold Bennett and George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Johnson passed his 11-plus and went to grammar school in Chelsea but left school at 15 eventually becoming a postman. He joined the Labour Party in 1971 although he considered himself a ‘Marxist in the CPGB style’. He also joined his trade union becoming the CWU General Secretary in 1992. He was the only senior trade unionist to support the New Labour abolition of Clause IV, and a safe parliamentary seat was found for him in 1997. He held various cabinet posts under Blair and then Brown. As Education Minister he introduced differential university tuition fees, and as Home Secretary he sacked Professor David Nutt, Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs who had accused the government of ‘distorting’ and ‘devaluing’ research evidence in the debates about Ecstasy and cannabis.

Steve Clayton

Crossman: Diary of a Flop (1975)

From the July 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was Iain MacLeod, the Tory leader whose ambition was as plain and disfiguring as a broken nose, who said that the only life worth living was that of a government minister. It was probably something to do with the ever-attendant television crews, the crowds, the red despatch boxes, the big limousines. Who could resist such excitement? Especially if, like some Labour ministers, your working life had begun hewing coal or standing behind the counter of the local Co-op.

But what happens when the excitement is taken away, when the minister is sacked or his party loses an election? What remains, to console him for absent crowds and the unremarked drive home in his Morris 1100? Well, he can usually find a place on at least one board of directors. If he is a Labour man he may be able to conceal his function as a whip-lash of exploitation behind a title like Industrial Relations Consultant. Or he can write his memoirs, which can be profitable for him and illuminating for the rest of us, who have got little amusement from him while he has been in office.

The Labour government of 1964-70 yielded a crop of memoirs — with more to come, no doubt. Harold Wilson, after losing the 1970 election, applied his famous memory and capacity for hard work to producing a 790-page door-stop of a book about his first government. It took him five months. At the same time, George Brown rushed out his version of those times — thinner and lighter in every sense. But the most notable up to now — because of the controversial embers upon which they have blown — have been the diaries of the late Richard Crossman, who for years attracted both adoration and loathing as one of the most gladiatorial of Labour’s con-men.

The retirement or defeat of a prominent politician can be the time for him to make some embarrassing revelations about the way capitalism is governed — about ruthless ambition among men who preach that the rest of us should be selfless, about blunders by ministers who are assumed to be near-infallible, about the confusion among politicians whose reputations rest upon their being in confident control. There is an official rule aimed at preventing such embarrassment to people who are still alive — so that George Brown, is allowed to tell about Bevin’s accusation that he was ". . . acting as office-boy for that bastard Dalton”, but Crossman is hampered in revealing what a civil servant thought about two of the great men of the time:

   . . .  his characterization of Alf Robens: 70 per cent slyness, alertness and charm and 30 per cent a straight madman — almost as bad as George Brown.

Crossman was keen that his diaries should be published quickly — he thought they would lift the lid on “the secret operations of Government, which are concealed by the thick masses of foliage which we call the myth of democracy.” This was bound to be awkward to those politicians who still have the job of keeping the foliage as luxuriant as possible and it was over this that the battle of the diaries has been fought.

If “fought” is the right word, when the ammunition consists of missives worded as gently as “I should be grateful if you would confirm . . .” Much more combative was George Brown’s riposte in The Sun, when he slung some of the mud back by revealing the motives Crossman admitted to in Cabinet:

   Prime Minister, if you ask me not to compile these diaries I shall just resign.
I am not interested in sitting here as a Minister except in so far as it enables me to write this record.

Crossman, let it be remembered, was in the Cabinet as Minister of Housing, pledged to ease one of the most desperate aspects of working-class poverty.

George Brown never shrank from embarrassing anyone but in his memoirs the effect is often unconscious. Brown bid for his place in history with some of the more extravagant gimmicks of British capitalism in the sixties — among them the Statement of Intent on Incomes and Prices and the National Plan. At the time Brown and his colleagues were telling us they had a consistent policy to keep capitalism well under control. But his memoirs give a different story:

   We (at the Department of Economic Affairs) were trying to persuade people to restrain wage demands and to hold down prices at the very time when the rest of the Government, as a matter of deliberate policy, was forcing up prices. (In My Way.)

Yet no hint of defeat shadows the declining days of George Brown. He consoles himself (The Sun) that Wilson must be regretting now that he did not listen more attentively to his advice.

There is no more reality about Wilson’s memoirs, which offer the history of a human computer alone refusing to be impressed by the election forecasts which could turn out to be wrong; his policies being justified to confound gloomy predictions; his smooth transformation of hostile demonstrators into ecstatic supporters. Wilson’s memoirs prove him right in everything and even when wrong it was somebody else’s fault:

   On Friday 1st. July (1966) George Brown, Jim Callaghan and I met to discuss the economic situation . . . The Chancellor, with all his Treasury and Bank of England briefs before him, drew a picture of blue skies in every direction . . .
   Within a week the Chancellor’s hopes were dashed.

(The Labour Government 1964-70).

The uproar over the Crossman diaries is because they prick the bubble. Wilson may picture himself as a knight in shining armour; Crossman gives a less flattering account of those crisis days of 1966:

   Throughout (the Cabinet) Harold was his dreary, competent self, fiddling with the figures. George Brown was sulking on the other side of the table. The Chancellor was talking big about getting tough with Germany . . . Nothing had been adequately prepared. Nothing had been thought out properly. We were fixing things once again, horribly inefficiently, at the last moment.

But Crossman himself does not emerge as any more successful or attractive than the men he held in apparent contempt. He grumbles at being held prisoner by his civil servants which, if true, was something he knew before he took the job as a minister. At one time he is engaged by a wine list, at another relishes his right, as Lord President, to be the first of all the ministers to get his seal of office from the queen.

There is no suggestion, in the extracts published, that Crossman thought himself in any measure responsible for the fiasco of that government. Nothing disturbs the confidence that if he, with one or two fellow-intellectuals, had been at Number Ten we would have arrived at the Promised Land. Crossman did not seem aware of his true standing in the history of capitalist government — just another in the list of Housing Ministers who left the problem as bad when they went out of office as it was when they came in.

Capitalism schools into its workers that they are led by great, wise men who deserve their respect. Sometimes, as in the Crossman diaries, we see a different picture — of Wilson describing his fellow great men as “dangerous and conspiratorial” (Roy Jenkins) and “inert” (James Callaghan). It is one which workers should remember next time they are asked to vote for these leaders. No election address will describe a party leader as dangerous or inert; it will be up to the workers themselves to remember.

Whichever set of politicians holds office the result is the same. There is confusion because capitalism itself is anarchic. There is panic because capitalism is a society where nothing is secure. There are blunders because capitalism will not be controlled. There are deception and intrigue because capitalism is as competitive as the jungle.

One danger about any so-called startling revelations about capitalist politics is that they can be explained away, to many workers’ satisfaction, by the hope that another type of politician — more honest, more knowledgeable, more humane — would make a better job of running the system. Capitalism itself has done enough to destroy that notion as one leader after another, whatever his personality or talents, has proved impotent in the face of capitalism grinding out its inhumanities.

As Crossman died the Vietnam war was bursting out anew, starvation blanketed millions of the world’s people and western capitalism was sliding into a crisis which may yet outdo the crash of the thirties. This is the social system which is justified and perpetuated by Labour and other politicians. It is the society bolstered by the glamorous intellectual Crossman and by the demotic George Brown. It is a restrictive society in which the majority who suffer do so accepting as their lot that they are without privilege or satisfaction. It is all the more important, then, that that majority should not be so overcome by the few brief opportunities to look inside as to misinterpret what they are allowed to see.

Ivan

Crooked in every direction (1996)

Book Review from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Straight Left by Paddy Devlin (Blackstaff Press, £8.95)

The vanity that induces someone to think that the public wants to know about their life is well to the fore in this autobiography. The story of a ghetto kid who saw a future in ward healing politics — which, for some undisclosed reason he associates with socialism — is told in a tidal wave of personal pronouns.

There is usually a story in the life of every working class youngster who finds diversion in cheating the reality of poverty and privation. When that life is lived in a Belfast sectarian ghetto, an extra dimension of religious bigotry and strife is added to life’s miseries which, in turn, heightens the need for those forms of escapism which Devlin’s portrayal of his formative years illustrates so well.

But bigotry is no joke and, in Northern Ireland, it frequently carries a gun or a bomb. Here it is composed of the naked viciousness of a primitive Calvinism which, while most reflected in the crude politico-religious vapourings of Paisleyism, has to some extent infiltrated all the Protestant denominations, and that particularly virulent strain of Catholicism which is essentially Irish.

Both, after the fashion of mainstream religion elsewhere, are on the march to what is effectively their end. In Northern Ireland, however, legend, tradition and very deliberately inculcated ignorance artificially respirates these evils into an ugly tribalism that represents the politics of the province. The inadequacies of capitalism, especially in housing, employment and education, act as a convenient catalyst for these malignant forces in the hands of bigots like Paisley and Adams and their religious or political fundamentalist cohorts — who. if local politics demanded any degree of intellectual integrity, would have long since been marginalised.

It is the consequences, political and economic, of this politico-religious mishmash that has formed the background to the mayhem that has given Northern Ireland a central place among the world's trouble spots over the past twenty-five years. Devlin played a central part in the events that led to the present troubles and, while he relates faithfully the bigotry and intransigence that made the Unionists into destroyers of their own cause, he fails utterly to appreciate the part which the false analysis of the Civil Rights movement contributed to the Northern Ireland tragedy.

The leaders of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NiCRA). rightly accused the Unionist government and party of maintaining a regime that discriminated against catholics in the distribution of jobs, housing and local government votes. The inevitable assumption among working class protestants was that they were privileged in these areas — which they were not — and that the demand for a fairer distribution of these needs with catholics represented a threat to their alleged protestant privileges.

Socialists see the imposition of poverty in any of its aspects (jobs, housing, education etc.) on any grounds whatsoever — even when it is given apparent legitimacy by being called ’selection’ — as a feature of capitalism. Within the ambit of that system’s production for profit ethos, scarcity is an inevitable feature. Capitalism cannot exist without poverty, without unemployment and without penalising those who, for whatever reason, do not offer the profit system the maximum surplus value.

However Devlin may protest his ’socialism’, he was at one with those in the NICRA who identified the problems in religious terms; the problems were, they argued, caused by Unionism. Certainly, corruption and maladministration resulted in the uneven distribution of capitalism’s miseries but the miseries themselves were the political and economic consequences of capitalism. Unfortunately, the NICRA analysis led to conflict on religious lines within the working class when an essential part of the solution lay in the unity of the working class.

Like many pseudo-socialists, Devlin has a recidivistic contempt for the lessons of history. The failure of good intentions, Keynesian 'magic' and reforming zeal to remove the social ugliness of capitalism should drive him to consideration of an alternative form of social organisation, such as socialism — defined as it was before its wilful perversion by earlier groups of ward healers who thought they could make a system based on exploitation of the working class function in the interests of that class. Such consideration would, of course, be an admission of failure and acknowledged failures do not write autobiographies.

If you can stand the dreadful political ignorance of someone who suggests that the SDLP is/was associated with socialism, that the Northern Ireland power-sharing Executive of 1974 is a model for the (socialist?) future and that the Workers Party is a Marxist organisation, then the rest is interesting and factually instructive about events in Northern Ireland especially since 1968.

Richard Montague

Brownian Motion (2018)

Book Review from the May 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

'My Life, Our Times'. By Gordon Brown. (Bodley Head. 2017. £25)

The former Prime Minister’s memoirs are not quite the mammoth exercise in self-justification most commentators expected. They are arguably more moving at times than would have been thought – Brown writes well about his personal battles, including about the serious eyesight problems that dogged his career. And in some ways he is more genuinely reflective about his political actions and legacy than his predecessor.

Brown undoubtedly has both intellect and a certain, relentless focus – and at times this has served his well politically. He seems critically aware of some of the major dynamics and features of our times too. Writing of the major financial crisis that marked his Premiership, he says:

‘Bankers and boardrooms had awarded themselves bonuses they did not need for work they had not done and for risks they had taken at the expense of those who went without’. (p. 423).

He is not wrong – but then this is also the man who had, against all the evidence of history, pledged to abolish boom and bust and even now fails to understand that the financial crisis was not caused by a failure of global governance but by the ‘animal spirits’ that are integral to the capitalist economy and its inherent cycles of creative destruction.

As always, Brown appears focused and intense – but only as a micro-reformist with a moral purpose. His response to a problem in government was invariably to introduce a tax allowance there, or provide a subsidy there, tinkering to give the impression of dynamic action when there is really little substantive movement or none.

Throughout these pages Brown uses phrases such as ‘we needed to get the job done immediately’ and ‘I set about the task straightway’ and similar, just to reinforce the impression of an Action Man at work. But even at a political level, this approach only appears convincing (if at all) when the waters are relatively calm, not when there is a uncontrollable storm brewing, let alone a gale force wind howling. And it was the headwinds of the financial crisis that blew Brown’s economic record – first as Chancellor and then as Prime Minister – to pieces, with a severe recession propelling unemployment higher when he left office than when he entered, and with income inequality little changed despite the decade and more of relentless tax system tinkering. Not forgetting an electorate so embittered within a short time it had voted to leave the European Union and almost to create a separate Scottish state too (both to Brown’s mounting concern and near horror).

Despite the differences that emerged between Brown and Blair over time, this book illustrates that one thing still unites them at least – a continuing failure to understand that the type of micro-reformism they espoused within the overall movement towards globalised capital is what has in large part led to the type of knee-jerk populism that now befuddles them. If Mrs Thatcher famously said that her most enduring legacy was Tony Blair, then the enduring legacy of Blair and Brown are the comedy book-ends of Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn, and yet they still don’t appear to understand why.

DAP

An I.L.P. Evangelist (1926)

Book Review from the December 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Evangel of Unrest: The Life Story of Bonar Thompson. 1/-. From the author. (Marble Arch, W.l.)

Bonar Thompson tells his life story in his usual style, from the days of unemployment processions in Manchester to his C.O. days during the so-called Great War. He pays tribute to our Party’s unswerving attitude during the war, but makes the curious statement that the I.L.P. was as firm as a rock against the war. He avoids the gymnastics of Ramsay MacDonald on the question and the association of the I.L.P. as an integral part of the Labour Party which joined the War Government.

Bonar Thompson does not tell us of his joining and leaving the Communist Party, and his reasons for that. He simply says he belongs to the I.L.P. now. What connection the I.L.P. has with Socialism he does not say. The prominent "pacifist” users of force in the Labour Government belonging to his I.L.P. he avoids to mention.

He denounces those who harp on “the position” and “economics," to the exclusion of the more emotional life, but he does not argue his case. He leaves it to denunciation. He is very bitter about those who object to paid speakers and paid literature sellers, etc. Here again he does not argue, but becomes vitriolic in denouncing his critics. So there is nothing to answer.

In a letter accompanying the book Bonar Thompson tells us that he has been a consistent reader of the Socialist Standard since 1907, but he accounts for his “political ignorance” by his “temperament and intellectual constitution.” Parties, however, are the expression of economic interests, not temperaments, and Thompson’s excuse for his outlook simply avoids the question of the soundness of the Party’s position.

For those who are interested in Bonar Thompson’s life the book will be of interest for what it contains, as well as its omissions.

C. R. B.

Capitalism in Kenya (1968)

Book Review from the August 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not Yet Uhuru, by Oginga Odinga. Heinman Educational Books. 35s.

The people of Kenya have had the misfortune, reserved for colonial peoples, of experiencing two sorts of capitalism. One at second hand through colonial occupation, and the other, a more modern version, exploitation by capitalists of local origin and by the economic interests of the ‘advanced' countries.

Today, control of the resources of Kenya is in the hands of large international firms and of the Kenya government. The local would-be capitalists and bureaucrats have certainly derived much benefit from independence, but the vast majority of the people of Kenya, who were at one time led to expect a post-independence egalitarian Utopia, have been disappointed.

In this autobiography we learn well how the “benefits” of capitalism were first introduced to Kenya. There is an interesting survey of early land-appropriation by the British authorities and of the break-up of the tribal system through forced wage- labour. Odinga is particularly good in his account of the Mau Mau uprising and the reasons for it. Once the rebellion presented a real threat to British authority in Kenya, and thus to British economic interests, ruthless measures were taken. All civil liberties were suppressed—an African could be arrested in the street at any time. All Kikuyu (the main tribe concerned in the rebellion) were forced either to collaborate with the authorities or to join the Mau Mau bands as a result of persecution. British capitalism wanted to hold on to Kenya so as to have an assured and cheap supply of raw materials and a market monopoly.

Today, some four-and-a-half years after independence, things have not changed much. The people of Kenya are now exploited not only by businessmen with white skins, but also by civil servants and politicians who have somehow succeeded in securing company directorships and land. Little free expression of opposition to the government is allowed. The only consolation that the people may draw is perhaps in seeing men with skin the same colour as theirs replacing white colonists at the wheels of large motor-cars manufactured in West Germany.

Odinga is allowed, probably by virtue of his popularity (he was at one time Vice-President of the republic and Kenyatta's right-hand man) to lead a tiny opposition of nine in parliament. His party is, however, allowed few extra-parliamentary ‘privileges’ such as the holding of public meetings or recruiting campaigns.

This autobiography, as well as being a good document of British colonial history, is worthwhile reading because part at least of Odinga's conclusion is acceptable. Odinga himself left high state office for the political wilderness because he saw that national independence does not in itself end servitude for the mass of the people. He also recognises the oligarchic character of the present Kenyan government. To solve these problems, however, he presents a creed which he calls “African Socialism". The use of the word “Socialism" in independent Africa is very common but worth little. It is used, for instance, by both government and opposition in Kenya. The general purpose of this is clear: to give obviously oligarchic governments a facade of popular support and concern for justice and equality.

Odinga’s “African Socialism" would take the form of “a Kenya government backed by popular enthusiasm and national mobilisation". We suggest to the people of Kenya, and indeed to the people of the world, that the only way they will solve their problems will be by overthrowing capitalism which deprives and degrades them. This can only be done, not on a national scale, but by an internationally united working class who reject all leaders and governments.

Not Yet Uhuru (freedom) is the personal and political testament of a sincere, but unfortunately misguided, political figure. It is well worth reading for the insights which it offers into the lot of the people of Kenya.

Amit Pandya

Grim Warning (1969)

Book Review from the May 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

My Life by Sir Oswald Mosley Nelson 70s.

For a few years during the '30s the Blackshirts were familiar figures on the streets of London and other big cities. In their all-black uniforms with high necked shirts and broad, heavy-buckled belts, they were a new and disturbing feature of the British political scene—the nearest, in fact, that modern Britain had ever got to a private army.

The membership of the British Union of Fascists was never all that large, but they cast a long shadow. In their early days they had the support of powerful sections of the Right, with a vast amount of newspaper coverage exceeding that of any other group.

In one respect the early '30s resembled today, in the amount of half-baked violence that came from so-called revolutionaries. Meetings were broken up and speakers shouted down, in the name of democracy, but as in the '60s with a footling ineptitude. The hecklers struck menacing attitudes and made bellicose noises, threatening action they had no power to carry out, in the pathetic belief that capitalism was on the point of collapse, and that the working class was behind them.

This gave the Fascists an excellent excuse for forming strong-arm squads. Fascist propagandists always claimed, when taxed with brutality, that they were only defending themselves. As a semi-military organisation, well trained and disciplined, the Blackshirts were able to make short work, both of their violent assailants and of perfectly peaceful and orderly opponents.

The founder and leader of the BUF was Sir Oswald Mosley. Flamboyant, good-looking, athletic, and a war hero. Mosley resembled the 'ideal man.' as portrayed in Edwardian boys' magazines—a tradition that survived well into the '20s and ’30s. This fact, combined with political ability and an outstanding platform manner, appealed to the type of mind that sought by quick dramatic means to cut the Gordian knot of unemployment, poverty, and disillusionment.

In this autobiography—a rather pompous but informative book—Mosley describes the twists and turns, of his political life. Born into the aristocracy at the turn of the century, he did all the expected things: went to Winchester and Sandhurst, served in the Royal Flying Corps during the first world war. was wounded and invalided out in 1916, and entered parliament in 1918 as a Tory MP. His marriage to a daughter of Lord Curzon, a former Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary, was attended by royalty.

It was after entering parliament that Mosley began to emerge as a controversial figure. Bitterly opposing British action in Ireland, he left the Conservative party to become an independent. Later he joined the I.LP. and the Labour Party. Here he once again became controversial, embracing Keynesian theories that were unpopular at the time. He was regarded by many as the Labour Party's great white hope. He became a member of the 1929 Labour government, [only] to resign over its handling of unemployment. This marked the end of Mosley's career as an orthodox politician.

It was during the next decade that Mosley rose to prominence, hitting the headlines more than any other politician out of office. In the confusion that followed the collapse of the Labour government, and the crushing defeat suffered by the Labour party, new leftist organisations sprang up like mushrooms. One of these, the New Party, had Mosley as one of its founders. It was this party that slowly emerged as the British Union of Fascists.

The fascist movement in Britain reached its peak in the late '30s Just what would have happened to fascism in Britain, had it been left alone by events, is difficult to say. But like fascist parties elsewhere it slowly became overshadowed by Nazi Germany, and the drift into war. From about 1937 on, as the line-up became clearer, the B.U.F. found itself more and more unpopular.

The great irony of the second world war was that nationalists like Mosley found themselves in opposition to the war, while the Communist Party became its most ardent supporter. The war led to the suppression of the B.U.F, and the detention without trial of Mosley and other prominent fascists. After the war Mosley was to emerge into politics again as leader of the Union Movement, but never again to be prominent

Fascism was a product of its age. Slumps and unemployment, memories of the hideous losses of the first world war, and an exaggerated fear of Russia produced the climate in which it flourished. Fascism is for all time a grim warning to workers of the perils of short-cuts to salvation.

Les Dale

“Hyde Park Orator” (1934)

Book Review from the April 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his “Hyde Park Orator" (Jarrolds, 287 pages, 10s. 6d.), Mr. Bonar Thompson has written a somewhat irritating but entertaining book. He tells us about his early life in Northern Ireland, his introduction to working-class life in English industrial areas, his contacts with trade unions and labour organisations, and his strenuous and not always very successful efforts to earn his living as cheap-jack in the market-place, and as platform speaker and entertainer.

He has done and seen many things, and has learned how to describe them vividly enough—this, in spite of Sean O'Casey's criticism in the Preface —and many of the things he says are worth saying. He cuts through a great deal of humbug and pretentiousness, and shows up many of the weaknesses of working-class organisations. While his criticisms of men and movements are often one-sided and malicious (he has a savage paragraph on the S.P.G.B.), it does no organisation any harm to hear what it looks like to a keen, even if prejudiced, onlooker.

Nevertheless, the whole book is made needlessly irritating by Mr. Thompson's efforts to pose as the hard-bitten, work-shy cynic, who was never himself a believer in the principles to which he professed adherence. In adopting this pose he has been preceded by Mr. Walton Newbold, and in neither case is the claim true. Mr. Thompson’s pose ought to deceive nobody. He himself remarks on a sensitiveness to ridicule which he says he finds highly developed in the working-class movement. It is no doubt partly this sensitiveness in him which makes him so anxious to disclaim ever having shared the illusions of those around him. At an early age he acquired a dislike for the kind of work and working conditions which alone were open to him. This was only natural, but his pretence that he has spent a lifetime dodging work is ludicrous. In spite of his claim he has had to work very hard indeed to maintain a precarious existence. Workers cannot escape the evils of working-class life by adopting poses or practising self-deception.

Needless to say, Mr. Thompson often forgets his pose. He boasts of having lived by deception of the workers, but gets very indignant regarding Labour Leaders who, according to his account, are working a “racket" no worse than his. He sneers at the workers for being so credulous and sheep-like, but turns and calls them ungrateful when they do not give him generous collections. After all, according to Mr. Thompson’s philosophy, why should the workers pay him for his strenuous orations if they can hear them for nothing? If for reasons of inexperience, necessity, or sentiment, Mr. Thompson offers the wrong wares for sale, or offers them in the wrong place, he should be the last to complain. And although he chides the workers for their credulousness, he is furiously angry with the S.P.G.B., which at least never shared his and the Labour Party's illusions about leadership, the value of emotional appeals, the impending collapse of capitalism, etc.

It is a pity that a man with Mr. Thompson’s experience, who has unlearned many false lessons, should have allowed bitterness to stand in the way of recognising that the failure of so many reformist activities does not in the least touch the solid basis on which the case for Socialism really rests.

Edgar Hardcastle

Dissatisfied Customer (1973)

Book Review from the March 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chronicles of Wasted Time, Part I, by Malcolm Muggeridge, Collins, £3.00.

Fourteen years ago Walter Allen's novel All in a Lifetime created a stir by depicting the formative years and ripeness of the Labour Party, and then conveying that a misjudgment of society had been made and it had turned out irrelevant. This first volume of Muggeridge's autobiography covers the same ground, but is different in that the recollections are real not fictional and the result is not perplexity but animated sourness.

Muggeridge's father was a Fabian who became an early Labour Councillor and, eventually, an MP, and the book gives an account of home life in that atmosphere—parlour discussions, meetings with MacDonald, Dalton, etc., and a Tolstoyan "colony" at Stroud. Muggeridge recalls it all subjectively and, to a large extent, derisively. "It was a kind of revivalism without tears; sinful men were to be washed, but not in the blood of the Lamb; in, as it were, municipal water, with carbolic soap purveyed by the co-op." Later, visits to Five-Year-Plan Russia are described as if it were a crude but fortunately transparent attempt at personal fraud on the writer.

These reactions are common. One can meet anywhere men of Muggeridge's generation who shared the faith that beneficent reform would conquer all society's ills. The hopes of an "intellectual, moral and aesthetic transformation" through universal State education, and slums "transformed into garden cities" by Planning Acts; what has been produced is not so much disappointment as a sense of having been swindled. Recalling pacifist talk in his youth, Muggeridge writes of their conviction that the arms manufacturers were the cause of all the trouble: "how surprised we should have been," he says, to know that trading in arms by Labour governments would far exceed the evils of private enterprise.

Yet the illusions were self-created by those who believed all this. The choice between reform and revolution was put before the social-democrats at the beginning of this century, and the majority elected for reform. No notice was taken of Socialists pointing out the all-too-obvious fallacy of—to use one of Muggeridge's own metaphors—"building a housing estate on the slopes of Etna". Despite everything a century's experience should teach, reformists go on being hopeful like bingo-players that the next try will be lucky, afterwards to sit chewing peevishly on "a civilisation dropping to pieces" and "credulous armies of the just".

What is notable also is Muggeridge's lack of contact with workaday life and people. He acknowledges this in speaking of some earthy-proletarian relatives in the North, tries to dismiss it by calling the working class a fantasy invented by Marx, Engels, Morris and D. H. Lawrence, but without showing comprehension of what it really means. Thus, he writes of the start of married life: "We had very little money . . . certainly not more than £100" . . . in the early 'twenties when £100 was a year's pay to many working men! The remark echoes one made in a TV programme a year or so ago when, denouncing birth control and answering a woman who supposed he had always been comfortably-off, Muggeridge said indignantly: "It's quite untrue. It was 1939 before I earned even £1,000 a year"—and appeared oblivious to the thrill of half-amused astonishment in the audience.

And one other curiousity, considering Muggeridge's prominence in crusades against what they call the permissive society. He relates weightily the sexual preoccupation of his marriage in its early days: "Rolling about, now one on top, now another; grunting, coaxing, sweating, murmuring, yelling  . . . We looked to our bodies for gratification, which we felt they owed us." But that was fifty years ago, before pornography and the pill and Oh, Calcutta! had come to make satyrs of us all. Doesn't that give away the whole present case for Muggeridge!

Robert Barltrop

Too right-wing (2001)

Book Review from the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reasons To Be Cheerful. By Mark Steel, Scribner, 2000.

"Shame he's a trot", was the recurring thought permeating through my mind as I read Mark Steel's otherwise pleasurable Reasons To Be Cheerful. Packed full of anecdotes and witticisms about his twenty years as a political activist, it's something any long standing Socialist Party member can relate to.

Throughout the book, Steel clearly comes across as someone who is genuinely moved by the horrors of global capitalism but unfortunately this potential socialist joined the anti-working class Socialist Workers Party which is an integral part of capitalism's left-wing.

After rejecting the Communist Party for being "too right wing", the main attraction of the SWP was that one did not have to suffer the indignation of defending the USSR as it was "state capitalist" - a theory pioneered in this country by the Socialist Party. Of course, it would be asking too much for any recognition but it is a shame that Steel's political development ended so prematurely.

From here we are taken on an amusing tour of some of the most significant political events of the last two decades of which Steel played "an extremely minor role". Highlights include getting caught up in the Brixton riot - returning to his boring office job to tell his politically uninitiated colleagues that he had got up to "nothing much" at the weekend and his recent Socialist Alliance candidature for the Greater London Assembly where he feared he would hear the words "Mark Steel - 103".

Such jollities notwithstanding, Steel continually spouts leftist poison such as equating socialism with full employment and referring to "old" labour's "socialist clause four". Not surprisingly, he does not even mention the SWP's non-existent internal democracy nor the fact that they intend to preside over a one party state. Even so, if you fancy some light political reading which gives the occasional belly laugh. you will not be disappointed.

Dave Flynn

Telling it like it wasn't (1995)

Book Review from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Strike Back by Ernie Roberts (Published by the author 1994)

The only thing of interest in this autobiography of a long-standing supporter of state-capitalist Russia who was an Assistant General Secretary of the AEU for twenty years and Labour MP for Hackney North from 1979 to 1987 is the following lying attack on the Socialist Party. It refers to an incident that allegedly took place in a Coventry factory about 1940:

"Armstrong-Whitworth had always been a well-organised factory, and as a result, wages and conditions there were among the best in the city. A small group of men - about ten in all - steadfastly refused to join the union. Not because they were anti-Socialist, but because they were members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which was firmly anti-union. They claimed that trade union leaders were the lieutenants of capitalism - saddling the workers so that the boss could ride them better. Finally, the other workers decided to take some action against the SPGB members for breaking the closed shop, and they approached their shop stewards with the problem. The solution was a fairly amicable one: the non-union men agreed that they would pay a contribution equivalent to their union subscription to a charity of their choice, so that there could be no question of their opting out of membership for financial reasons, and the rest of the shop then let them hold on to their anti-union principles in peace" (pp. 32-33).

Anyone who knows anything about the SPGB knows this can't be true. The SPGB was founded by workers who were active members of their unions, particularly in the building trade. When the issue of the Party's attitude to the existing pure-and-simple, "reformist" trade unions came up soon after the Party was founded in 1904, the policy of opposing them by trying to set up rival "revolutionary" unions were rejected in favour of working within them to defend the workers' day-to-day interests at work within capitalism. Ever since Socialist Party members have been active in various trade unions, including the AEU.

It is possible that Roberts is referring to an incident, involving members of the old SLP, but the fact that he associates it with the SPGB reflects the influence of the now defunct Communist Party (of which he was first a member and then a fellow traveller) which always used to spread the lie that we were "anti-union".

Adam Buick

Memories are made of this (2014)

Book Review from the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Notes From the End of History: A Memoir of the Left in Wales'. Philip Bounds. Merlin Press.

Philip Bounds is an historian and journalist and this is his memoir about being attracted towards – and involved in – radical politics and organizations in Wales. It focuses mainly on the 1980s and 90s when he was growing up in a dynamic political environment punctuated by seminal events like the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5. In particular, he tries to answer the questions ‘Why has Marxism survived in spite of enduring so many defeats?’ and ‘What was it like to belong to the radical left at a time when Marxism was at its lowest ebb?’.

In some ways, he gives a more coherent answer to the latter than the former question though it is interesting that his political journey started out attending meetings of the SPGB as a teenager. His accounts are at times funny and nearly always insightful, a flavour being his vivid description of his first ever political meeting, addressed by late comrade Ron Cook:

‘I suppose he was the sort of socialist Orwell might have been too narrow-minded to appreciate. Grey haired, bespectacled and genial he came across like a university lecturer who had thrown it all up for a career in market gardening . . . I understood about a third of it but in my heart I embraced it all.’ (p.62-3)

Bounds says that despite his admiration for the SPGB’s vision of a peaceful, democratic socialist revolution (which has clearly stayed with him since) he moved on to associate with various of the more conventional organizations of the political left, saying of the SPGB that he was ‘thrilled by its internal culture but dismayed by its lack of activism’. He ended up – perhaps bizarrely – in the Communist Party of Great Britain and then one of its successor organizations after its demise, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), the group still associated with the Morning Star newspaper. The political journey he took, via meetings of the SPGB, an interest in the punk band Crass and the anarchist group Class War is a fascinating one, though despite all his self-reflection in this book, it remains something of a puzzle that he chose to end up in the CPB. Indeed, it is very clear that he retains an affection not only for the style of politics of the SPGB but for the Party’s insistence on majority democratic revolution and hostility to the totalitarian dictatorships of the former Soviet Union, China and North Korea, etc. These are dictatorships for which members of the CPB are normally want to retain something of a political affection.

At times there is a sense that Bounds wishes to challenge his readers to move beyond the stock-in-trade reformism and sloganeering of the far left. For instance, towards the end of the book there is a moving and insightful piece about the occasion he accompanied a poverty-stricken member of the CPB around Swansea late one night, as she rooted through leftovers behind a luxury hotel in search of free food to be distributed amongst those on her estate:

‘With her gift for locating  sources of free food in a hostile city and her uncompromising insistence that the booty be shared out equally among her kinsfolk, she gestured towards a past in which no one thought of themselves as better than anyone else and everyone said ‘this is ours’ but never ‘this is mine’. In reminding us that communism had once been the natural order of things, she incarnated the hope that one day – at a much higher level of technology and culture and at a much lower level of superstition – we could do it all again.’ (p.186)

There is another way in which this book challenges the reader and pushes them further than they might otherwise have gone in their thinking. It is exceptionally well written and the prose flows beautifully. However, it is best to realise that amongst all this are often some very unfamiliar phrases and words. It is almost as if Bounds like to lull the reader into a false sense of security through the fluidity of his writing style before including something more challenging that will have readers running for the dictionary: ‘aetiology’, ‘exegetically gifted’, ‘subfusc’, ‘manichean intuitions’, ‘marmoreal’ and the wondrous ‘gallimaufry of soporific guests’ are but a random selection.

A highly entertaining and enjoyable memoir that deserves a wide audience, in Wales and beyond.

DAP