Greasy Pole: Straw man at Howard's end? (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who is concerned about the human condition must be getting worried about Jack Straw. As he goes about the business of being the man who hopes to be Labour’s next Home Secretary, Straw is finding life more and more stressful and threatening. In this situation, what do politicians do? They make a speech—or perhaps, depending on how strongly they feel, several speeches. And so it has come about that Straw, who obviously feels strongly about his chances of getting to sit on the govemment Front Bench in the near future, has spoken out.

Among the first to feel the lash of Straw's tongue were beggars and alcoholics. Or rather aggressive beggars and alcoholics; so it could be that addicts and vagrants, who accept their position cheerfully, will avoid the worst consequences of any laws designed to sweep them away which a future Labour government may introduce. Until then, the streets will continue to be littered with the open, human evidence of the fate which awaits anyone who does not fit into capitalism’s presumptive pattern of wage-slavery. The rich will still have to avert their eyes to this spectacle, as they make their way from the opera to an expensive supper, or to their club, or to the discreet shops of Knightsbridge.

Intimidation

Then there are the squeegee merchants—the people who wait, with bucket and sponge, at busy traffic lights and insist on cleaning car windscreens, with an implied promise that provided the driver pays them for this service, they won’t hold on the aerial as the car is driven way. Now this can be intimidating, especially to drivers who take a pride in keeping their own windscreen sparkling clean and their aerial stiff and straight. Not nearly so intimidating, though, as the pressure a lot of the motorists are likely to be under from their employers, who now wield all the power associated with widespread unemployment. Of the adult population, 60 percent are now either unemployed or in jobs which can be defined as insecure. Three-quarters of full time jobs are on short-term contracts. Sitting in the petrol fumes at the lights, the motorists are harassed all right—but not only by the squeegee merchants.

Perhaps encouraged by the response to his campaign to clear the streets and the busy junctions of all offenders against good order and wage-slaves' discipline, Straw then turned his attention to children. Not just any children; at the moment he is concerned only with those who are out on the streets at a time when Straw thinks they should be at home, watching party political broadcasts on television or tucked up in bed with a copy of the Labour Party’s latest policy document. Driving home from the Commons, says Straw, he sees children who he judges to be under ten years old and he wonders where their parents are. He didn’t actually say that these children are a threat to anyone, or had committed any crime but he clearly feels they are another threat to Labour's ideal society and something must be done about them.

Straw’s proposal of a curfew for all ten-year-old children was, he said, a “sensible" way of dealing with a problem. In fact the police already have the power to pick up any child who seems to be at any kind of risk and take them home, or to hospital, or to a social worker. Where Straw’s curfew would break fresh ground is in the fact that it would not be necessary for the children to be at risk; merely being out of doors after a certain hour would be enough for the police to act.

There was a predictably mixed response, on the one hand from people who are concerned at the apparent increase in violence and offences by young children and on the other from people who are worried about civil liberties and the presumption of innocence and why kids should be out by themselves at night and how the curfew would fall heaviest on families who are already the most disadvantaged among the working class.

Straw was unperturbed, probably convinced that his ideas would strike a sympathetic chord with enough people to be a vote winner. He did not seem to be concerned to ask why the adults who are supposed to be caring for children are apparently so careless. He did not refer to the fact that, however it is measured, poverty in this country gets worse and more distressing year-by-year. According [to] the Child Poverty Action Group, about a quarter of the population live at or below the poverty line; in 1979 about ten percent were at that level. Straw did not dwell on the fact that as poverty deepens all sorts of human factors go with it, like self-esteem, like confidence in the future, like care for the family . . . 

Backlash

There was a time when it was hardly necessary to argue this case, as one White Paper after another promoted the policies which eventually sprouted the great social work boom of the Sixties and Seventies. Many members of the Labour Party could delude themselves that they were in the forefront of this movement in ideas, that in future problems like crime, homelessness, addiction would be treated in their social context instead of being explained away as the poisonous fruit of evil personalities.

Well that was along time ago and now we live, as socialists said we would, in a period of reaction—of backlash. The present Home Secretary, Michael Howard, has single-mindedly exploited this, presumably on the assumption that in this way he advances his political career. He has not bothered to respond to Straw’s odious attempts to outbid him in the contest for the get-tough-on-crime vote. Perhaps he agrees with the Labour voter who said Straw is “. . . the only man on earth who can make Michael Howard look left-wing’’.

From the politicians' point-of-view the advantage with the policies of Straw and Howard is that they blank out the need to properly investigate social problems and come up with a considered response to them. They suffocate debate under panic and hysteria. They perpetuate the social system which impoverishes, brutalises and represses us—mortgages and homeless, addicts and athletes, adults and children.

Ivan

Voice From The Back: Knowledge is power (1999)

The Voice From The Back Column from the March 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Knowledge is power

“Evolution,” says the message from the Alabama State board of education, “is a controversial theory some scientists present as scientific explanation for the origin of living things such as plants, animals and humans . . .” New York Times, 24 November.

The promise—

Mr Raynsford, MP for Greenwich, said that begging was the most disgraceful indictment of the present [Conservative] government’s policies. “Our task has got to be to eliminate begging in London and create a memory of how bad life was in the late 80s and early 90s.” Camden New Journal, 7 July 1994.

—The reality

Beggars who exploit youngsters to raise money face having their children taken into care, the [Labour] Government is warning. Ministers [including Nick Raynsford, Minister for London] are worried about the huge upsurge in street beggars using their offspring in an effort to extract cash from passers-by. Police and local social services departments are being told to intervene in such cases. Sunday Telegraph, 3 January 1999.

Strategic class war

Midland-based engineering giants Rolls-Royce today warned it could move production to America if Britain introduces costly new labour laws . . . Speaking at a business lunch in Sydney, Australia, Sir Ralph [Robins] said that social costs made it 30 percent more expensive to manufacture in Europe. “The last thing we want is the on-costs associated with the social costs of Europe,” he said. “But I don’t see any signs of it happening and the current government is not going down that path. But we will progressively move work to the United States if we find ourselves disadvantaged by those sort of social costs,” he said. Birmingham Evening Mail, 25 November.

How wealth divides the world

Here are some pretty amazing facts from the United Nations Human Development Report of 1998: The world consumed more than $24 trillion in goods and services last year, six times the figure for 1975. Of the world’s 6.8 billion people, 4.4 billion live in developing countries, the rest in rich industrial or transition countries. The three richest people in the world own assets that exceed the combined gross products of the world’s poorest 48 countries. Among the 4.4 billion people who live in developing countries, three-fifths have no access to basic sanitation; almost one-third are without safe drinking water; one-quarter lack adequate housing; one-fifth live beyond reach of modern health services; one fifth of the children do not get as far as grade five in school and one fifth are undernourished. Basic education for all would cost $6 billion a year—$8 billion is spent annually for cosmetics in the United States alone. Installation of water and sanitation for all would cost $9 billion plus some annual costs–$11 billion is spent annually on ice cream in Europe. Reproductive health services for women would cost $12 billion a year—$12 billion a year is spent on perfumes in Europe and the United States. Basic health care and nutrition would cost $13 billion—$17 billion a year is spent on pet food in Europe and the United States. $35 billion is spent on business entertainment in Japan; $50 billion on cigarettes in Europe; $400 billion on narcotic drugs around the world; and $780 billion on the world’s militaries. Washington Post, 2 December.

New Labour, old capitalism

On Monday, the new president of the Confederation of British Industry told his members that the greatest threat to British business was red tape. “Excessive regulation,” he said, would “suffocate the golden goose.” He singled out trade union recognition, the minimum wage and the Working Time Directive as measures which would “darken the business horizon” . . . but one speaker went further than most. We need, he told the conference, to hooting applause, “greater labour market flexibility” and “increasing capital market liberalisation”. The government must create “the most business friendly environment in the world”. Even bankruptcy should cease to be stigmatised. The speaker was the [then] Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Peter Mandelson, Guardian, 5 November.

Pollution and profits

British Steel last night urged the Chancellor to exempt it from the proposed carbon energy tax designed to meet the Kyoto target of reducing greenhouse gases by 12.5 percent by 2012. It said the tax would undermine its competitiveness, putting plants and jobs at risk. Guardian, 28 January.

How could they!

Companies will be warned this week that they could be subjected to devastating computer hacking attacks from disgruntled employees who face the sack as part of cost-cutting programmes. Experts say that employees with only limited knowledge of computers are now able to download hacking programmes from thousands of illicit Internet sites around the world and use them to wreak havoc on their employers’ computer networks. In one recent case, an employee who feared he would lose his job used a hacking program to wipe his employer’s central computer database after his name was erased from the payroll list. Times, 26 October.

The case against kicking beggars (1994)

From the July 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The popular media wisdom that John Major is a nice fellow, but an incompetent idiot is wrong in one respect. Nice fellows do not kick you when you’re down in the gutter. Major, who as Minister of Social Security under Thatcher, passed the legislation which has forced so many young, unemployed workers to be homeless and sleeping in shop doorways, has now told a Bristol newspaper that beggars are "offensive" and an "eyesore".

But does it really matter that John Major’s alleged niceness is about as solid as his political future? According to the media, for whom John Smith as a living political leader was generally portrayed as something of a dull mediocrity whose main talent lay in drawing a standing ovation from the thieves of the CBI, the same politician once dead embodied almost every virtue required for canonisation. This depiction may well be deserved: the Labour leader may well have shared the compassion of Mother Theresa (he certainly seems to have shared her religious stupidity) and the desire for social change which would have made the unemployed employed, the impoverished well off and maybe even the blind to see and the lame to walk. Virtuous intent and sincerity are not the issues.

The fact is that when you support capitalism you find yourself having to do some very nasty things. Governing the capitalist system means accepting the position where a very small minority of millionaires and billionaires own and control the resources of society while the vast majority own nothing more than the ability to work. It means accepting and enforcing wage-slavery whereby the majority who produce must labour to make rich the minority who possess. It means accepting production for sale and profit rather than production solely for use. So that if profits are threatened food must be destroyed while the hungry starve and homes must be taken away from workers who cannot afford the rent or mortgage payments and work must be denied to those who cannot be milked for profit. Accepting capitalism means sending young workers to die pointlessly so that their masters’ profits, trade routes and resources can be protected or expanded. The moment you commit yourself to play any part whatsoever in the maintenance of the capitalist system you mast accept its priorities and, regardless of moral aspirations, will be dragged into the depravity of excusing its callous indifference to human needs.

And so back to Major and the beggars. We do not suppose that John Major, the lad with two O-levels who ran away from the circus for the bright lights of the bank, has ever sat down and decided to regard his fellow human beings with the callous contempt that he has exhibited. But as an errand boy for the profit system, which is all that any Prime Minister ever is, what else can he do but blame those who are the most obvious victims of capitalism? The only alternative would be to hold capitalism to account.

In 1945 the great hope of the welfare state was presented as a way out of the Dickensian darkness of early capitalism. We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of many of those reformers who promoted such hopes. They believed that a capitalist Labour government could achieve the impossible task of putting profits first whilst providing care for those in need as well. In the years of economic expansion following the destruction of the world war this seemed to be possible. Most workers had jobs and the state schemes to build cheap homes and basic hospitals and elementary social services seemed affordable.

Half a century later the futility of such reformism as an overall solution to the problem of capitalism is obvious to nearly everyone. John Prescott, in a pathetic attempt to cast himself as a fiery radical by calling for a return to 1945, is now in a minority even in the Labour Party. From the heir apparent, Tony Blair — a man with the mind of a Kinnock and the sincerity of a Clinton — there will be no talk of reforming capitalism out of existence. The capitalist parties do not even pretend any more that they are something else.

The welfare state promised an end to beggars on the streets. And for a time they were not there. For most of the present writer’s life it was rare to ever see a person begging on the streets of London. It was the sort of awful feature of capitalism that we knew went on in Delhi or Bangkok, but not here. Now it is impossible not to see beggars: in the cold wind and rain we see kids and the elderly shivering in blankets in doorways and cardboard boxes.

Some of them have been thrown out of psychiatric hospitals to save the government money. Some of them only ended up in these hospitals because of wretched home conditions which forced them to turn to the streets. Most have no hope for a future. A surprisingly large number are workers who used to have jobs, used to have homes, used to be across that thin line which separates wage-slaves like us from wage-slaves like them.

And in a nasty bid to boost his support amongst the mean-spirited and the vicious John Major kicks them when they're down. That it has backfired on him is proof that workers are not wholly gullible. Just like when government Ministers carved careers out of being insulting about the promiscuity of single mothers while they were creating single mothers as fast as they were closing down coal mines, most workers have taken the measure of their integrity. That is why politicians are more unpopular now than ever they were.

Politicians should not be allowed to get away with it. Beggars should not have to beg. Both curses call for one solution. Abolish capitalism. In a society of common ownership and democratic control of resources, where all will have access to the store of social wealth, who will need to lie to gain votes or beg to gain money?

Steve Coleman

Greasy Pole: Beggars are not choosers (1997)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let us not be too hard on David Maclean, the Home Office minister who seems to be haunted by beggars demanding money in Scottish accents. Maclean never gives money but he does give them a piece of his mind—which is supposed to be worth having because he has a reputation as one of the brighter young Tory MPs. Speaking out is what he is used to; some time ago he had to be restrained from advocating that "vermin" be driven from the streets and praising the vigilantes—whose activities are, after all, outside the law. But Maclean is obviously under emotional stress as he is among an endangered species—Tory MPs who could be wiped out at the general election. So perhaps he can be excused for his attempt, albeit clumsy, to clamber aboard a bandwagon which is being propelled by the big political parties as what they hope will be a vote winner among those people who find beggars frightening or distasteful whatever accent they speak in.

Lower standards
It is not so long ago that we were subjected to an implicit instruction that homeless people and beggars might have been expected in Britain in an earlier, less enlightened age but are now confined to countries with lower standards of humanity and tolerance. Of course there were a few in places like the West End (Tory MP Sir George Young describes them as people you stepped over as you left the Opera) but these were eccentric, incorrigible. It is different now. All over the centre of cities such as London people sleep in shop doorways or under cardboard boxes and begging has spread out into suburban shopping centres.

The anger of people like Maclean is aroused because the beggars are an embarrassment. How much of an embarrassment can be gauged by the reaction of another Tory MP, Terry Dicks who came up to what are now the expectations of him by describing beggars as "scum" who should be “hosed out" of the doorways where they shelter. The embarrassment springs from the fact that the beggars are a massive, unavoidable, distressing testimony to the failure of Tory government. There was no hint, in their election campaign in 1979, that after almost 20 years of the Conservatives being in power, vagrancy would be the kind of problem to raise the ire of their MPs. But of course they can’t admit that it is evidence of their failure. So it has to be explained away as the result of personal shortcomings of the people concerned.

Maclean does not go as far as to call the beggars "scum"but he does say they are on the streets ". . .  out of choice because they find it more pleasant". This is the standard response to any group of people—the unemployed, single mothers—who have the greater difficulty in surviving under capitalism in the 1990s. These people, we are told, actually prefer to scrape by on Income Support in a sky-high tower block or living rough in the city. There is no explanation as to why so many people suddenly suffer this same kind of personality problem all at the same time and just when an economic recession is in progress, only to recover somewhat when the recession recedes to give way to a boom. It is easier—and. the politicians hope, more fertile for votes—to lambaste the beggars and call for a policy of "zero tolerance".

Blair
There was a time when the Labour Party might have been expected to respond to "zero tolerance" with some deceptive clap-trap about civil liberties and human concerns, leaving some voters under the delusion that things would be different under a Labour government. They should know better now, as Tony Blair leads the way in denouncing the beggars with heartrending stories about what he sees at Kings Cross where he drops his children in the morning, on his way to a hard day’s planning of how he will run the social system which is responsible for such ugliness and for the human wreckage which gravitates to it. No doubt Blair is concerned for his children; he is also not unaware that policies like “zero tolerance” may have a vote-winning potential.

None of this is reassuring to people who assumed society had moved on from the days when rogues, vagabonds, sturdy beggars and vagrants could be whipped in every county they passed through or when someone could be imprisoned for inducing people to give them money by displaying wounds or deformities. If Blair and Tories like Maclean have got it right, it is no longer politically inadvisable to advocate punishing people for what capitalism does to them. A safer policy now, for the vote-hungry politician, is "zero tolerance".

A recent survey by Centrepoint, which offers shelter to homeless people, gave some idea of what their clients are like—and it does not fit in with the version offered by Blair and Dicks. Almost a third were aged between 16 and 17; a third had no income; almost a half had a GCE.CSE or GCSE; almost a third had slept rough; a quarter had been in local authority care. It says a great deal about capitalism and its political parties that the response to the "embarrassment" such people provoke in tourists, tradespeople and politicians on their way out of the Opera is to repress and damage them more than they have already experienced.

Zero Tolerance
Aggressive and persistent demands for money are not monopolised by street beggars. A developing trend—probably a response to the decline in employment in the recession—is the business of young people going door-to-door in the evenings offering low quality cleaning material for sale. Another is the expansion of telephone canvassing—people who are employed to work their way through the telephone directory asking if you want to borrow money or have new windows fitted or whatever. These activities can be as intrusive as any beggar—while any profits which result from them will go to the employer.

So far no political leader has said that "zero tolerance" should extend to those kinds of activities. Nor have they suggested that it should be applied to the social system which saw profits to be made from the misery of a place like Kings Cross and which now wants it cleared up to accommodate a smarter, more profitable tourist centre. But zero tolerance is what we should have of capitalism—of its poverty, its famine, its diseases, of the misery and death it deals out to millions of people all the time. And zero tolerance of the politicians who deceive with their false remedies which either fail or even leave the system worse then before.

Ivan

Between the Lines: Next Fraud (1989)

The Between the Lines Column from the April 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Next Fraud

Next Left (C4, 8 pm, Fridays) offered four programmes packed to the edge of the screen with undiluted nonsense. Purporting to be about the failure of socialism in years past and the need for socialists to adapt to the new age, the series offered the most facile account of current world politics and not even an attempt at explaining what socialism actually means. It seems to be the case that when documentary-makers produce films about socialism they feel quite free to accept the fallacy that anyone who calls himself a socialist is one. Neil Kinnock, Bryan Gould, François Mitterrand, Brandt, Rocard  . . . all of them advocates of state-run capitalism, and all of them called upon to discuss why the failure of their state-capitalist policies means that socialism has been tried and failed. The working class, we are told, is disappearing; the market is becoming more accountable to people's needs; planning has failed and "freedom" is the new buzz word. "Socialists" must adapt to these new conditions or become irrelevant. Instead of talking about social transformation socialists should be attending to more modest changes, we are informed, such as establishing workers' co-operatives and providing welfare services through the trade unions. The new "socialist" model is Sweden; "socialism" works there — even though Sweden is a capitalist country. No contradiction. No need to explain anything. The frauds who make these programmes are like the character in Alice in Wonderland who insists that words shall mean what they want them to mean. Channel Four's attempt to advise socialists to throw away our revolutionary principles and attend to making capitalism work was intellectually shallow, dishonest drivel.

Laughing all the way to the bank

Another bloody charity telethon. It is hard to switch on the telly these days without seeing either Kylie Minogue or a begging bowl. This time it was Comic Relief (BBC1, all evening, Friday, 10 March). No doubt there was plenty of sincerity there. So what? Since when has plenty of sincerity made the profit system run in our interest? This time we were treated to comedians making jokes to encourage workers to send in a few quid. In one night's nationwide collecting Comic Relief brought in about £10 million. About enough to buy a cheapish military fighter plane. The same night's Newsnight (BBC2, 10.30 pm) had a very brief report on the annual profit made by the clothing company, Viyella: £135 million — down on last year's figure. That's a year's profit for one medium-sized capitalist company. So, who is giving more to charity — the workers who collected ten million quid after a day of wearing silly plastic noses and bathing in custard for sponsorship, or the wage slaves at Viyella who donated all that profit to the capitalists in the biggest charity of all: The Wages System? The capitalist class are kept in the luxury to which they are accustomed because a majority of workers acquiesce to a system which puts the profits of the rich before the unmet needs of those crying out for help.

Free to beg

World In Action (ITV, 8 pm, Monday, 6 March) was a documentary depicting the miserable lives of kids who, having left home and come to London in search of work, find themselves in cardboard boxes on the Embankment by the River Thames. These youngsters — many of them under eighteen — are compelled to beg in order to live. Young girls are under great financial pressure to find a pimp and work for him. The programmes showed that the young beggars of London are a fast-growing population, products of a system geared not to encouraging the creativity of people, but to making them exploitable workers. If they are too young to be put to work and too poor to find shelter, then they are ignored as if they did not exist. This is the living reality of the great revival of Victorian values: the sight of homeless kids forced to beg for the price of some food — and probably for drugs once the culture of street frustration has finished with them. And these well-paid TV tricksters on Channel Four tells us that the socialist revolution from production for profit to production for human need is no longer relevant.

Steve Coleman