Wasting time at the seaside (1966)

From the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is very considerate of the Labour, Liberal and Conservative Parties to hold their annual conferences in the autumn.

At any rate, the seaside hotel keepers must think so, because the conferences bring them some welcome business just as the season is dying; and so must all those seaside landladies, who can keep the secret machines which put lumps into the porridge and burn the toast in profitable operation for another week or so. There is even the sea, which everyone expects to be cold in the autumn, allowing politicians to prove what lovable eccentrics they are by having themselves photographed taking a dip.

It is all good fun, although since the object of it is to win the game of power politics it can hardly be described as clean. But more than other any other reason for feeling grateful for the autumn conferences is that they provide us with something to chuckle over in the long, dark evenings ahead.

There are two types of annual conferences. One sort is run by the parties which are out of power; a certain amount of freedom is allowed here. In most cases—although there have been some famous exceptions, of which more later critics can be treated indulgently, as living proof of ruthless self-criticism, a restless drive for new ideas and a young, zestful heart.

When, for example, Edward Heath was asked on television what he thought about the prospects of receiving a lot of criticism of his leadership at this year’s Tory conference he replied, with a huge grin, that he enjoyed conferences and would be there all the time. Jo Grimond, far from being upset at the noisy activities of the Young Liberals at their conference, went out of his way to praise them and was photographed having an amiable drink with some of them.

There is no such carefree goodwill towards the rebels in a party which is in power. At their conferences the leaders on the platform, are trying to justify broken promises, to explain away diametrical changes in policy and, above all, to convince everyone that, although the present times are hard, with patience and support and unity all will be well. In this situation, critics are not welcomed as a stimulus; they are condemned—sometimes outlawed—as traitors to their party and to what politicians like to call the country.

There are many weary hours to be spent in the conference hall, and it is common for the newspaper men to try to brighten these up a little by fastening their attention upon some so-called personality of the conference. This usually means a lot of publicity for someone who, although he does no more than repeat the same weary platitudes and misconceptions which have been heard so many times before, wakes everybody up by sounding as if he actually believed what he says.

So it was this year with the Young Liberals, who came storming down to Brighton to demand all sorts of reckless things like “workers control” in industry (the inverted commas are intended, and necessary). These young people laid about them and one of them went so far as to shatter the peace of the conference by swearing—or at any rate he said “bloody” and “damn”, which in this age of Kenneth Tynan probably no longer rate as swear words.

The newspapers loved it and decided that no title would be appropriate for the Young Liberals short of Jo Grimond’s Red Guards. It is interesting to wonder what the fanatical young hooligans in Peking would think about being compared with a few hysterical students daring to say “bloody” to an assembly of Liberals on an autumn afternoon at an English seaside resort.

Such, however, are the ways of the press, which also has a liking for putting the finger on what they consider to be political stars of the future who enter the limelight at a conference. This is what the papers did some years back to Ray Gunter, who has now risen so far and so fast that he has the important job of implementing the very policy on wages which his party once scorned. This year, at the TUC, some reporters decided that Leslie Cannon, President of the Electrical Trade Union, showed by his speech that he is a future MP, perhaps even a Minister.

It is hardly necessary to point out that to win this nomination for future stardom a man has to agree with official policy. No member of the Labour Party has ever been selected as a rising leader after making an attack, no matter how capable, on his party’s line on wages or nuclear armaments; Frank Cousins, the most prominent of the critics on those issues, has always been regarded as something of a joke. Still less would a person be noticed for attacking the fundamentals of the Labour Party—its capitalist policies, its obsession with leadership, its unavoidable failure. The newspapers have their own standards of success and they are sticking by them.

Behind all the ballyhoo and the alleged drama and excitement what are conferences for? Every man in the street knows that they are supposed to lay down their party's policy and to take decisions based on that policy. A simple man in a backward street may even think that, because the capitalist parties profess to be democratic, the decisions taken by their conference delegates are binding.

The first thing to say about this is that some of the delegates’ votes are cast in ways which are anything but an expression of their members’ opinions. At this year’s Labour conference the voting policy of the Amalgamated Engineering Union changed suddenly from support of the government to opposition. This was not because the AEU delegates had received different instructions from their members. It simply happened that their leader, Bank of England director Sir William Carron, who is an unmovable supporter of the government, left Brighton for a meeting of the board of the Fairfield shipyard.

This apparently left the AEU delegation floundering, until a series of other absences gave the leadership to Hugh Scanlon, who is generally critical of the government. The result of this was that the AEU, voting as whoever was their leader at the time wished, was one day for the government and another against it.

Yet even without this sort of maneouvering, the votes of a conference are anything but decisive. Labour this year declared several times in favour of the government—on wage freezing, Rhodesia, foreign policy. But when the conference went the other way on other issues—redundancy, Germany and support for America over Vietnam—Ministers made it plain that they would take no notice. It was all summed up by Harold Wilson himself, in one word, when he asked what he intended to do about the famous Cousins victory over work sharing—“Govern”.

This has of course happened before. In 1959, when Labour was licking its wounds after Macmillan had thrashed them at the polls, they decided at one of their rowdiest conferences not to follow Hugh Gaitskell’s advice to delete Clause Four from their constitution. So in theory, and by conference decision, the Labour. Party stands for the sort of capitalism where all the means of production, distribution and exchange are nationalised. But of course they have not the slightest intention of doing anything about it.

Poor Gaitskell had a knack of infuriating his party’s conferences. Another example of a refusal to accept inconvenient decisions was when, after the 1960 vote in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, he declared his intention to “fight, fight and fight again” and, because on that occasion some of the big unions had voted against him, questioned the morality of the block vote which had always been accepted as long as it docilely accepted the policy of the platform:

I sometimes think, firmly, that the system we have by which great unions decide their policy before even their conference can consider their executive's recommendation is not really a wise one or a good one.

It is clear that when a conference agrees with its leaders it is the authentic voice of democracy, rich in wisdom. When it disagrees it is irresponsible and treacherous. The peculiar thing is that, although the members of the capitalist parties must know this very well, they are still prepared to be delegates to their conferences, they still work for their party, they still welcome its taking power.

The plain fact is that whatever a conference may decide, a party’s policy is already fixed. No matter how bloodthirstily the Tory hangers and floggers pursued their prey at conference, Conservative Home Secretaries stuck out for penal reform. No matter what support the Rhodesia lobby gathers, the Conservative leadership must agree that the Smith regime should be brought to an end.

Similarly, even if the 1960 vote on nuclear weapons had not been reversed, no Labour government would have surrendered the British Bomb simply because their conference had told them to. Whichever way the vote went on this year’s battle over incomes, the government's mind was made up and the more coercive Part IV of the Prices and Incomes Bill was ready to be brought into operation.

And while we are on the subject, there is something which we should notice about the Prices and Incomes Bill. It is the first openly anti-trade union legislation for something like 40 years—and it is the work of a party which came into existence as a result of a conference decision of February, 1900, to establish

a distinct labour group in Parliament . . . which must embrace a readiness to co-operate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour and . . . with any party in opposing measures having an opposite tendency.

What, we asked, are conferences for? Even if their decisions can be, and are, ignored they are often an opportunity for a party to pronounce on its policy. Perhaps some people may prefer to describe this as warning the working class what to expect, or as making the promises the breaking of which later conferences will have to explain away. In 1963, for example, Labour was hypnotised by the Wilson vision of a technological Britain, with a wise government guiding massive investment into the “science based” industries, with technicians enthusiastically at work in their laboratories and at their drawing boards and with everyone’s wages going up in a nice, steady, organised curve. It was all very good for the headlines, for the electoral image and all the other political public relations man's obsessions.

It usually happens that at such times there is so much concern with a party’s public image that nobody notices the policies which are being expounded from the platform do not amount to much. Consider George Brown’s unoriginal idea of settling the Vietnam war by recalling the Geneva conference—the very conference which first set up the division of the country and so played its part in bringing about the present war there.

At other times the publicity a conference receives can be disastrous for the party, like the 1960 Labour uproar over CND and the public spectacle of Tory leaders savaging each other as they clawed for the place left vacant by Macmillan’s retirement during the 1963 Blackpool conference.

Or a conference can be an outlet for a party's donkey workers. It can give them a break from the hard slog of committee work, canvassing, addressing. They can come to express their doubts and disappointments, to wonder what happened to the visions they once had, Then they can stifle their doubts, admire their leaders and finally submerge themselves in what they call loyalty, but for which there is an unkinder if more accurate name, at a mass rally. Then they can go back to the donkey work with renewed energy.

No conference ever probes, or even discusses the facts. No resolution ever says that the parties of capitalism exist to run the social system which oppresses and degrades millions of human beings, that this system can only be run in the interests of a minority and to the detriment of the majority. Labour’s “left wing” come to their conferences convinced that they are looking for the lost soul of their party—none of them points out, perhaps none of them realises, that a capitalist party is bound to deceive, to override its members’ wishes and to disappoint its followers by pushing through unpleasant and inhuman measures.

Conferences make a lot of noise, exhale a lot of hot air, attract a lot of publicity. But when it is all over, when the delegates have gone home and the hall has been cleared and the seaside has sunk back into its out-of-season doze, one thing is abundantly clear.

It was all a waste of time.

Ivan

The Leader and the Labour Party (1960)

From the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

At Scarborough it was outwardly politics that were being discussed, but the Leader and his supporters were also on trial. The questions were what should be the policy and who should be the leader.

On the main resolutions decisions were reached which will hold unless and until they are reversed, but the question of leadership was not decided, though various groups which think it was are looking round for Gaitskell's successor.

On different aspects of the dominating issue of nuclear weapons there were four resolutions, and Mr. Gaitskell and the Labour Party executive were defeated on all of them, though not by large majorities. It was a severe but perhaps not yet fatal blow for Mr. Gaitskell and the Labour M.Ps, the majority of whom stood for the official policy.

A resolution was carried that “Labour policy is decided by the Party conference which is the final authority,” but the executive gave it an interpretation which seems to rob it of much of its meaning. Mr. Len Williams, the Party's National Agent, told the Conference that “the Parliamentary Labour Party” (that is, the Labour M.Ps.) is under no direction from conference or any other body. Mr. Williams said the National Executive did not wish to oppose the composite resolution if it was understood that it involved no change in the long-established principle governing relationships between conferences, National Executive and Parliamentary Party. And it had to be understood that nobody had the power to instruct the Parliamentary Party on the way it carried out its responsibilities." (Daily Herald, 5/10/60.)

And the day after the Conference Mr. Gaitskell made it clear that he has no present intention of resigning and on the contrary is preparing to overturn the Scarborough votes. Speaking in a TV interview he declared: “I regard it as absolutely vital that we should reverse this decision at next year's conference and I shall do everything I can to get that done.” (Daily Mail, 9/10/60.)

He also gave it as his opinion that the Parliamentary Labour Party will by a majority support the policy defeated by the delegates at Scarborough, the implication of which is that they will also confirm him in the Leadership, which incidentally carries with it the leadership of the Opposition at a government- provided salary of £3,000 a year.

Many Tory and Liberal newspapers, while criticising and regretting Mr. Gaitskell’s unsuccessful tactics, lavished praise on him and openly hoped that he may survive his defeat by Conference.

But whether he goes or stays the prospect for the Labour Party is bleak indeed. In the constituencies and in Parliament there will be rival groups each determined to put their point of view, and laying the Party wide open to attack from Tories and Liberals. This may, as the Liberal leaders proclaim, give them an opportunity to win back former supporters who joined the Labour Party. One political commentator, Mr. Robert McKenzie, thinks that even if Mr. Gaitskell survives for the moment it will solve nothing for the Party. His opponents will regard it as a cynical trick that Mr. Gaitskell only claims the right to defy the Trade Union block vole when it ceased to support his policy.

It is almost inevitable that the victims of this “trick” will fight on, either until they are expelled from the parliamentary party, or until Gaitskell himself is destroyed. And as the next election looms ahead, even some of those who admire Mr. Gaitskell's courage may decide that he must make way for someone who has at least a chance of reuniting the party.

(Observer, 9/10/60)

His own opinion, and hope, is that a new anti-H-Bomb Labour Party will be formed and that the Gaitskell faction will then come to terms with the Liberals.

Another danger for the Labour Party is that the conflict will lead to loss of some trade union support and may influence relationships between the Party and the TUC. Sir Thomas Williamson. Secretary of the General and Municipal Workers Union told conference that some of the branches would withdraw support from the Labour Party if the anti-nuclear resolutions were carried. (Daily Telegraph. 6/10/60.) The correspondent of The Times (7/10/60) reported that events at the conference had strengthened the already existing movement to reduce or sever the TUC’s connection with the Party.

It is an accepted convention of professional politics that the politician always claims to speak “for the people or, as he sometimes qualifies it—“for all intelligent people.” It is not so easy to decide what a Labour Party conference vote represents. Mr. Cousins claimed that he speaks “for Britain ,” a claim that Tory newspapers angrily rejected. Out of more than 22 million workers in this country, of whom 9,600,000 are in trade unions, the TUC has in its affiliated unions about 8 million, and the Labour Party 5,600,000. If Labour Party conference votes represented the views of its affiliated trade unionists and the additional 875,000 individual members who belong to local parties, cooperative societies, etc., they could be taken as representing directly the considered wishes of the majority among 6 million workers. (A large, but unknown number of the individual members also count as part of the affiliated trade union membership). But Labour Party spokesmen are well aware that their voting methods, including the trade union block vote, can produce distorted results. Even so, the claim of the Daily Herald (which now supports the H-bomb) that the great majority of Labour supporters are with them on that issue is, to say the least, somewhat surprising. According to a poll undertaken by Odhams Press Research Division “an overwhelming majority of Labour supporters and trade unionists are against the West giving up H-bombs and nuclear weapons so long as Russia keeps hers . . . . more than four out of five Labour supporters think that Britain and America should keep the bomb.” (Daily Herald, 4/10/60.)

There are, of course, sceptics who think that public opinion polls may be no more accurate than block votes.

The Guardian shares the Herald's view of the vote and roundly declared that the Conference is not democratic “while it is governed by trade union block votes. . . . There is no democracy in giving Mr. Cousins one million votes. As the world will probably see today, one or two men can turn Labour's policy upside down.” (Guardian, 5/10/60.)

Mr. Gaitskell, defeated on the H-bomb, gained the day on a policy statement which in effect discards old aims of wholesale nationalisation, and puts in their place the possibility of nationalising a few selected industries, together with the plan for a Labour Government to buy shares in companies without taking them over. It recognises that “both public and private ownership have a place in society.” Delegates speaking in opposition called it “underwriting capitalism” and the abandonment of “Socialism.” Mr. Gaitskell retorted that the proposals were just as much “Socialist” as is Nationalisation, a fact on which Socialists can heartily agree, since nationalisation is state capitalism and has never been advocated by the S.P.G.B.

While the delegates were maintaining, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, that they still believe in nationalisation as the answer to the workers’ problems, strikes were going on in the nationalised coal industry (they break out at the rate of over 30 a week year after year), the Railwaymen were preparing for a strike over pay and Postal workers were discussing a strike resolution over hours of work. And it would seem from the rent strikes and the riots that followed forcible eviction of council tenants by a local council that nationalisation's little sister municipal ownership is no less unpopular.

The day that the Daily Herald reported the vote on the policy of the government buying company shares it reported developments in the direction of a little private enterprise by the local Labour parties themselves. They are planning to form a Unit Trust to invest their funds in company shares and thus cash in on the rise in the profits and prices of ordinary shares that has accompanied inflation. A trade union Unit Trust is already being organised.

Edgar Hardcastle

News in Review: Collapse at The Summit (1960)

The News in Review column from the July 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Collapse at The Summit

The assembling of the Big Four for the Summit meeting in Paris contained all the essentials for great tragi-comedy, except the happy ending. Summit meetings may yet replace the circus as “the greatest show on earth.” Publicity arrangements on a world scale preceded the actual meeting for some years. The “ Summit ” has dominated the headlines of the world’s press. Millions of words have poured out from lengthy articles under banner headlines, speculating on the date and interpreting the significance of statements made by politicians and Government officials. And so at last three thousand journalists congregated in Paris to report the discussions of four individuals who, it is said, between them can and will adjust the barometer of world tension. With the stage set and the audience breathless, the principal actors took the stage. The so-called “main problems” of disarmament, Berlin and the continued division of Germany were now, it was said, to be seriously tackled. But unfortunately the final curtain came down on the overture. By the old. process of mutual abuse, charge and counter-charge, the meeting quickly degenerated. Suddenly nothing had happened.

There will never be anything so futile in the tackling of social problems as the holding of summit meetings. Such meetings only serve to increase the personal prestige of the politicians who attend them and persuade ordinary working people that honest attempts are being made to stem the threat of war. From any government's point of view, there is nothing that a summit meeting could accomplish that the regularised channels of diplomacy could not accomplish equally as well. All such conferences, even where politicians do succeed in getting together, entirely by-pass the everyday problems of working people. Their whole scope and function is irrelevant to the real and pressing issues of modern society, issues that the working class itself must come to grips with.

Turkey

When Menderes, the Turkish Prime Minister, survived the air disaster at Gatwick, he was acclaimed by the faithful as a saint and a prophet. From the recent events in Turkey, it would appear that the legend is taking some hard knocks. For more than ten years this dictator has used every known method to maintain power. He is himself a big landowner in the west of Turkey — an area in which indescribable poverty is the lot of the Anatolian peasants. We can wonder how is it that the dictatorial regime has survived for ten years. Part of the answer is that the majority of Turks, who are still attached to the Muslim faith worshipped Menderes because of his religious fervour. One interpretation of the cause of the crisis was that it was the work of a small clique inflamed by grudges and ambition. Menderes himself blamed “a handful of youths exploited by certain groups for their selfish political aims.”

Crises are not caused by the evil machinations of individuals; they have their root cause in the way a society is organised. The importance of Turkey in world politics rests partly on the control of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. Astronomical amounts of American dollars have been spent in building up Turkey as another “Western bastion of democracy”! Half the Turkish budget is devoted to defence. These measures, coupled with large agricultural credits, have produced the inevitable economic crises which are part and parcel of the capitalist system everywhere. The new Head of State, General Gursel, is described as a Turkish Neguib in search of a Nasser. He has announced that it would be for the next Government to decide whether to put Menderes and his Cabinet on trial. Whatever the outcome, the Turkish working class can look forward to another round of capitalist intrigue and unfulfilled promises.

Eichmann

The news that Adolf Eichmann, a former Gestapo chief, has been captured by Israeli agents, was splashed across the front pages with all the gusto of editors recognizing the sales power of cheap sensationalism. A man-hunt successfully concluded after 15 years, with the quarry a miserable survivor of the Nazi regime, is the sort of titbit that the profit-seeking press can dress up to satisfy the appetites of those who seek cheap thrills in their reading.

To Socialists, the capture of Eichmann in itself is of no importance. The inhumanities which man indicts upon man are not the actions of people who were born monsters, but rather the consequence of inhuman policies and doctrines which a monstrous system conditions human beings into accepting as answers to its economic and political problems. Eichmann was a product of German capitalism which made a scapegoat of the Jews for the failure of Germany to win the 1914-18 war and for the mass unemployment which followed. The massacre of the six million attributed to him was not the work of one “evil genius.” History cannot be so simply explained. But there is significance in the fact that Eichmann is to be given a mockery of a “trial.” What a perversion of the name justice it is which allows the victors in the 1939-45 bloodbath, in which mass murder was committed by both sides, to condemn the leaders of the conquered for the same crimes they perpetrated themselves.

Red Blood

The South African Government has recently published regulations to come into force on 1st September under which “white” and “non-white” blood will be segregated to ensure that as far as possible whites and non-whites will receive blood from white and non-white donors respectively. This segregation of blood has in fact been in practice in South Africa for some years, although blood plasma imported from America was not segregated. The exponents of apartheid claim that the Africans are biologically different to the whites in being “ inherently backward ” and it seems that they think Africans’ blood is different too. Blood from human beings cannot, of course, be identified as to the colour of skin of its donor, but only by its various groupings, A, O, Rhesus, etc. Some biologists have even stated that the blood of some types of gorilla and human beings is interchangeable. This new regulation is another example of the blind prejudice of the South African Government in its policy of apartheid.

Misdirected Energy

On May 21st, sixteen cannibals were sentenced to death in Wewak, New Guinea, for killing, cooking and eating three men, and kidnapping eight women. After lecturing the men, who spent most of the time dozing on the courtroom floor, the judge said that because the raid was a “social and economic one with the dual purpose of providing wives and flesh,” he would make strong recommendations for mercy, and suggested a training programme for the convicted men. In prison they will no doubt be put through a rigorous rehabilitation programme. They will be lectured on the error of their ways and taught how to conform to the moral standards of modern civilisation. Perhaps they might even become so civilised they may be allowed to join the army and do the capitalists’ dirty work for them. Queens Regulations will not, of course, permit them to consume their victims, but they will be able to kill with the approval of the law, the blessing of the church, and if they do really well, they may even become national heroes.

Wyatt Sees the Light

Everything happens finally, if only one can wait long enough for it. This is one reflection that springs to mind after the attack made by Mr. Woodrow Wyatt, right-wing Labour M.P., on the big unions’ block vote as undemocratic. This has been obvious for years, of course — to all except Mr. Wyatt and his right- wing Labour friends. No complaint was ever heard from them about the block vote, so long as the big unions with doglike devotion regularly swung all their millions of votes behind the Labour leadership. But now that the man who wields the block vote of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Mr. Frank Cousins, has clashed with Mr. Gaitskell over defence policy, a great light has broken in on Mr. Wyatt’s mind. With cries of astonishment, he announces as a new discovery what everyone else had been pointing out for years. Still, one must be grateful that Mr. Wyatt has seen the obvious, even at this late stage.

But Mr. Wyatt's revelations only extend so far as Mr. Cousins. Not a word has come from him about the second largest of the giant unions, whose leader, Sir Thomas Williamson, is a supporter of Mr. Gaitskell, and who recalled the annual conference of his union because they had voted the wrong way the first time. But we must wait. If Sir Thomas is replaced by a leader who disagrees with Mr. Gaitskell, Mr. Wyatt may discover another “arrogant bully with a block vote” (which is the way he now describes Mr. Cousins).

As for the left-wing of the Labour Party, who have been denouncing the block vote of the unions throughout the time it was automatically used against them, they have become strangely silent. The block vote used against them, and the block vote used by Mr. Cousins in their favour, are apparently two quite different things. How circumstances alter cases, even to the extent of turning democracy into bullying, or bullying into democracy!

What is Benn up to? (1981)

From the March 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

How strange that the Labour Party devoted only one day to their special conference at Wembley in January, because we were told that what happened there was little short of a fundamental change in the history of the human race, not to say the entire solar system.

What they actually did, amid scenes of confusion and error such as only an organisation like the Labour Party could stage manage, was to change the method of electing their leader. Let us be clear; they did nothing about really fundamental matters such as the abolition of the principle of leadership or about changing their nature as an alternative administration for British capitalism. But this did not lessen the gloom of the losers nor the joy of the winners of the vote. Tony Benn, customarily out of touch, predicted that the result of the conference would actually strengthen Labour unity.

No one could be blamed if, amid all this uproar, they overlooked what had actually happened. Unless (or perhaps until would be a more accurate word) they reverse the Wembley decision at a future conference, the Labour Party leader will now be elected by a college in which the largest vote will be allocated to the affiliated trade unions. It is difficult to understand how this can be construed by any reasonable person as making Labour a more democratic party. The unions are hardly famous for being effectively democratic: “It is true that the block vote is suspect”, said Railwaymen's leader Syd Weighell, “I know because I’ve got one in my hand”.

It is even more difficult to understand why the followers of Benn were so pleased at the vote or his opponents so upset. It is very possible that neither has got what they expect. In the past (remember the great days of Arthur Deakin, Tom Williamson, Bill Carron, the very mention of whose names was likely to send desperate lefties into a paroxysm of rage?) the unions habitually applied their block votes to crush the “left wing” at Labour conferences. In those days, we were often told by earnest lefties that the road to greater democracy for Labour was the restriction of trade union power in the party.

None of this history seems to have affected Benn, who was still busy, amid the wreckage of Wembley, thinking up more loony ideas. In his time he has dreamed up few loonier notions than his demand that members of the Labour Party National Executive Committee should be required to swear loyalty to the decisions of their Annual Conference. Fortunately for Benn, the Labour Party and their NEC, he was persuaded to drop the plan; fortunately not just for Benn’s future but in the same way as the poacher is fortunate to miss putting his foot into the open jaws of the mantrap.

For what did Benn think he was about? To begin with, it was cleared up a long time ago that the Labour Party aims to get power to run British capitalism and it will not be deflected in this by conference resolutions cooked up by hysterical lefties and passed by punch drunk members at the seaside. Harold Wilson, to give only one example, was certainly clear on the matter:

At an all-day meeting of the NEC during the Whitsun recess of 1973, the opportunity was taken late in the evening, when many members had left, to force a snap vote on an outlandish proposal to commit the party to nationalise 25 of the biggest 100 companies. It was carried by 7 votes to 6. The following morning I issued a statement indicating that the decision was inoperative. It would meet a “veto”. In saying this I was relying on the constitution of the party as drafted by Sidney Webb in 1918, and still in force. In the event little more was heard of the proposal. (Final Term: The Labour Government 1974- 1974-6)

Of course Wilson was quite correct; if the interests of British capitalism demand something a Labour government will try to do it. If those interests demand a declaration of war, or the killing of workers in some other country, or an all-out attack on working class living standards (as always seems to happen with especial force whenever there is a Labour government in this country); then Labour will try to do all those things whatever the membership may want.

Then there is the embarrassing matter of a member of the Labour Party declaring their loyalty to anything. What next? Will ordinary members of the party be required to affirm their allegiance to Labour policy? Anyone who has spent any time arguing the case for socialism with them is impressed with the fact that very few members of the Labour Party know what their party stands for. And quite a few of those who try to guess about Labour “principles” find that in fact they are declaring loyalty to Tory Policies.

This is perfectly appropriate, since there is no basic difference between these two parties of capitalism. Benn’s loyalty oath was not the first of his loony ideas to backfire upon him. But if we can get back for a moment to that reasonable person who should be judging Labour policies against their experience. Why, we must ask, should anyone bother to try to make Labour a more democratic party (always supposing that that was what happened at Wembley?)

Democracy, although it is an essential for useful working class organisation to carry on the class struggle, and in particular for the propagation of socialist ideas, should not be taken as an end in itself. Many capitalist states are run on lines of parliamentary democracy, which does not prevent the workers there suffering the full brunt of the everyday problems of capitalism nor that same “democratic” state sometimes imposing undemocratic measures.

And every so often the workers in those states use their democratic freedom to vote themselves another dose of capitalism. In other words they vote for their own enslavement to wage labour; in freedom they vote against their own freedom.

For in fact capitalism cannot be democratic. When its interests so demand, a ruling class will move to crush organisations like trade unions or even political parties—and they can be thwarted in this only by a consciously democratic working class. Capitalism could not function through an open administration, where all information is freely available and no socially effective decisions are taken in secret.

All the parties of capitalism mirror these facts. They all have their leaders (which is what Labour’s current row is all about) and leaders are not there to be democratic. Their job is to receive and to process in secret a lot of information, to lead in the formulation of policy which is then handed down to the rank and file to implement. Often, this process does not reach the rank and file; it becomes the policy of a capitalist government which is not seen as being any concern of the grass roots members. Labour is deeply imbued with this nature and it will need changes far beyond their Wembley agenda—fundamental changes—before they can lay claim to being a democratic party.

And that brings us to the most important question of all. As their exposure in the media begins to rival that of Prince Charles, where does the Labour Party go from here? The Gang of Three have proved how highly principled they are by staying on in the party until they could be sure that a centre party offered them something better. And who will lead this party, if and when it is formed? (There are some formidable obstacles in the way of any new party aiming to take power over a capitalist state—to begin with money. One estimate is that it would cost at least £2 million just to set the thing up let alone to start campaigning.) Both Owen and Williams are said to fancy their chances as leader and already the public relations men are on the scene, talking about images and presentation and voter appeal. It is certain that any new party will be no freer of internal feuding, back stabbing and manoeuvring than any other.

This situation will be made more complicated if the centre party is flavoured by the threatened leavening of a few unusually confused Tories. What with Jenkins and Owen the so-called social democrats have their share of genteel drawing room class without a lot of public school Tories muscling in on their act. Marooned among these troublous waters there may be a few members of the Labour Party who survive by clinging wistfully to their conviction that sometime, somewhere, their party once stood for socialism. Their notion of what this means is at best hazy, compounded of state capitalism, charity and nostalgia. If such people exist they need to stop wallowing in those cold and prospectless seas. Now is the time for some clear, consistent mental navigation. There is much historical evidence by which they can set their course and all of it points the way out of the sordid, opportunist mess which is the politics of capitalism.

Ivan

The Passing Show: ’Ardies’ ’At (1958)

The Passing Show Column from the November 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

’Ardies’ ’At

At the Labour Party conference the executive only narrowly escaped defeat on a motion which advocated the integration of the public schools in the state system. This would mean the end of public schools as we know them, and the speakers who called for this won the applause of the conference. The executive finally succeeded in getting the motion rejected only because the majority of those old props of the platform, the union block votes, was behind them.

But what difference would it make to our society, which rests on the exploitation of the many by the few, if every public school was closed down tomorrow? Some Labourites seem to come near to believing in this connection that if we all dropped our H's and spoke with provincial accents we should have taken a stride forward towards Socialism. It reminds one of the people who, when asked why the Labour Party claims to be Socialist, recall that Keir Hardie turned up at the House of Commons in a cloth cap, and seem to think that it clinches the argument. But the important thing is not how you dress, but what you do; not how you speak, but what you say.



Miss Bacon’s Dislikes

Even the speakers from the platform had to join in the general denunciation. Alice Bacon, M.P., who replied to the debate for the executive, said, “we all detest and dislike the public schools.” If by “all” she meant all the people in the Labour Party, the statement is not true. Many leading Labourites not only went to public schools themselves, but send their children there as well. The reason is simple and obvious—they think that children get a better education at public schools than they do at state schools. The equipment and accommodation at the average public school is much better than it is at the average state school, teachers at public schools get more social prestige and higher pay, so teachers with the highest academic qualifications tend to go to them, and most important of all, a teacher at a state secondary or grammar school often has to take a class of thirty-five or forty, while his public school colleague can concentrate on a much smaller number. Naturally those Labour leaders who can afford it send their children to public schools.

Under new management
But the question goes much deeper than this. Even supposing that we had absolute equality of opportunity—which is impossible in a Capitalist society—even supposing that no member of the ruling class could give money or shares or a better education to his children, and that while the Smiths and Browns provided the Capitalists of this generation, the Joneses and the Robinsons provided the Capitalists of the next (again, impossible, but let it pass) even supposing all this, we should have exactly the same society that we have now. So long as we have a Capitalist society—part private and part state, like the Conservatives want, or a little-less-private and a little-more-state like the Labourites want—we will have the exploitation of the mass of people, the working class, by a small minority, the ruling class. To support Capitalism while demanding equality of opportunity is like supporting burglary, provided everyone has an equal chance to become a burglar. Equality of opportunity in our present society simply means that each generation of Capitalists would have different names from the last lot. But who in the world cares what they are called? To alter a familiar line, a sewer by any other name would smell as foul.


The Socialist Answer

Of course, there would be no public schools in a Socialist society. It would be impossible for one child to be huddled with forty others in a badly-ventilated room opposite a soap factory, with the teacher wondering how he can keep up the instalments, while another is in a class of ten or twelve, in an airy room in pleasant surroundings. In a Socialist society, the members of it would determine what education would best fit children for living, and the children would have equal opportunities to benefit by it. But those Labourites who call for the abolition of public schools in our present society are confusing, as they so often do. the effects with the cause.


The Methods of Colonel Grivas

There are some facts about Cyprus which seem to have been forgotten.

Colonel Grivas, who is the head of Eoka, has a long history of extreme right wing activity, and of willingness to resort to violence to achieve his ends. It would not strain an over-used word to call him a Fascist.

Grivas took the opportunity of the feeling aroused by the announcement by a member of the British Government in the House of Commons that Cyprus could “never” be given its independence to begin a campaign of terrorism in the island, which still continues. This campaign is directed not only against the British, but also against Grivas's political opponents among the Greeks, who make up more than eighty per cent, of the island's population. Grivas has killed more Greeks than he has Britons. This fact has been repeatedly stressed by the British authorities. Some of the Greeks have been killed by shooting, others by being beaten or hacked to death in circumstances of revolting brutality: both men and women have been murdered.

A Death in Famagusta

In early October a British woman, the wife of a soldier, was shot dead in the streets of Famagusta. At the time of writing it is not known who did it. Eoka have issued leaflets denying responsibly, and the authorities say that if it was an Eoka gunman, this is the first British woman killed by Eoka. However, it seems more likely to have been done by Eoka than by anyone else.

This was a most deplorable crime. The woman had five children, the youngest being still in arms. What happens to the children now? Inevitably the crime must have a terrible effect on them. There is a saying that if you educate a woman, you educate a family: and there is a grim sense in which it is true to say, if you kill a woman, you kill a family.

More Deaths in Famagusta

As soon as the crime was known, a body of British troops descended on the district of the town where the murder, as it happened, had taken place. Famagusta is not a large town, and in it numbers of Greeks have been killed by Eoka because Grivas did not like their politics. No doubt in this district there were many Greeks who have had friends or relatives shot or otherwise brutally done to death by Eoka.

The British troops cordoned off the district, and proceeded to arrest every young man they could find. Within hours a thirty-year-old Greek was dead from suffocation, having been thrust into an army lorry with many others who had the misfortune to live in the area; an eighteen-year-old Greek was also dead, in circumstances which have not yet been revealed; a British soldier had been accidentally shot dead by one of his own comrades; ambulances were running shuttle services carrying injured Greeks from the temporary compounds where they were being “questioned" by British troops; no less than two hundred and fifty Greeks had been treated for injuries (“only" sixteen had been retained in hospital, said an official spokesman—"only" is an interesting word to use in this connection); and a twelve-year-old girl, having seen the “questioning” in progress, ran away in terror and died of shock. Apart from this the material damage, such as car-windows and shop-windows smashed in, was considerable.

These figures of casualties are those given by British official sources: unofficial sources put the numbers of dead and injured higher. (At first even an official spokesman said five Greeks had died during the operations, according to The Observer. October 5th, 1958, but subsequently he admitted less.)

Revenge—on whom?

If the dead and wounded Greeks, down to the twelve-year-old girl, had all been proved members or supporters of Eoka, then the British ruling class could claim that their soldiers were taking revenge—assuming that revenge, rather than the usual claim of “justice,” is to be the British aim in Cyprus. But the victims of this military brutality were simply those Greeks who happened to live in the area—people who, the British authorities admit, are terrorised by Grivas and have suffered more in the way of Eoka killings than the British themselves.

Broken heads, but no violence

Sir Hugh Foot, the Governor of Cyprus, one of whose duties theoretically is to look after the welfare of the citizens under him, issued a statement after these events saying “Our first obligation is to stand against violence,” but made not even the most perfunctory expression of regret for the activities of the British troops. Presumably death and injury do not come within his definition of violence when the sufferers are only Greek Cypriots. The War Minister, Mr. Soames, has denied that the troops concerned were out of control; for which one can only conclude that the things they did were not objected to by their officers and commanders. Mr. Soames said that he was very satisfied with the conduct of our troops in Cyprus (Manchester Guardian, October 7th, 1958). According to a BBC broadcast, Mr. Duncan Sandys, the Defence Minister, claimed that he was proud of the way the British troops had behaved.

Pride—and prejudice

Couldn't you have said, Mr. Soames, that you would have been even more satisfied if the British troops had injured only two hundred, say, of the local inhabitants, instead of two hundred and fifty? Couldn't you have said, Mr. Sandys, that you would have been even more proud if the soldiers during these operations had caused the deaths of only three people, say, instead of four?

How satisfied, how proud, can you get?

Alwyn Edgar

This Year's T.U.C. (1961)

From the October 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Common criticisms of the T.UC. are that it spends time on political and foreign policy questions that ought not to concern trade unions; that the block vote can result in decisions being taken that represent little more than the balance of opinion on the executive committees of a few large Unions; and that the General Council can secure the acceptance of policies that do not harmonise with the view of rank and file trade unionists.

The Guardian took up the first criticism after the 1960 Congress, which it said, spent its time mainly on issues “almost irrelevant to all the real problems of the Unions," and which would not even discuss a Resolution put down by a small Union urging more time for industrial affairs. Some civil service representatives share that view, and it has been argued that Unions of “white collar workers" in particular are reluctant to join the T.U.C. because their members are not predominantly supporters of the Labour Party. It may well be that it is largely this factor that keeps outside two large Unions, the National Union of Teachers and the Local Government Workers Union (NALGO), as well as some others of the four hundred and seventy Unions that are not affiliated, though for the smaller Unions finance is probably a considerable factor. As half of the 184 Unions affiliated to the T.U.C. are not affiliated to the Labour Party, it might be thought that a majority of T.U.C delegates might be prepared to consider altering Congress procedure to make it less like a second Labour Party conference, but Congress votes are dominated by the big Unions and nearly all of these are affiliated to the Labour Party and are apparently opposed to any change of procedure.

The second criticism, concerning the block vote, was heard often in the years when most of the ten largest Unions habitually voted the same way and between them could outvote the remaining 174 Unions. It has been heard less in recent years because the big Unions have been divided, with the largest Union of all, the Transport and General Workers, voting against the the General Council's recommendations on such issues as armaments. No doubt if votes at Congress were cast by each Union in proportion to majority and minority opinion on Union executives and among their members some decisions would go the other way, though in the main it would show itself only in the form of closer votes and smaller majorities.

The third criticism, that the General Council can disregard the views of rank and file trade unionists, is by far the most fundamental. What does it amount to? Obviously the General Council cannot singly do what it likes. It has to get the endorsement of delegates and at times is defeated, as happened this year on the presence of German troops in Wales and last year on nuclear weapons (a decision which Congress this year reversed). Perhaps the explanation of the advantage possessed by the General Council is that they confront Congress with a formulated policy which they recommend for acceptance, whereas the delegates, like the members who send them there, either have no policy and are willing to follow the lead from the platform or are divided over the several different and contradictory alternative policies: which raises the question what ought to be the broad aim of the trade unions.

Looking at the trade unions in the world today it is astounding to recall that in their infancy they were regarded by the employers and governments with real fear, as revolutionary organizations that threatened property and the social system itself. Now the danger has been largely contained, partly by concessions and legislation, but also through the aims that the Unions set themselves. Instead of thinking of themselves as part of the world working class struggling against the employers and the capitalist system, the aim of the trade union leaders in each country is to be consulted by the employers in the running of the industry, and by the government in the determination of national economic policy. While the rank and file trade unionists cannot be said to be positively opposed to this policy of their leaders they are much more concerned with fighting their own employers over wages and conditions, hence the periodical clashes between what the members feel and what their leaders, including the T.U.C., think ought to be done.

There is, of course, a sort of fatal logic about the direction in which the Unions are going. If it is once accepted that world-wide working class action for Socialism is impossible then it can seem to be “realistic" for the Unions to try to help British capitalism against its foreign competitors, by trying to gain markets for exports, by keeping down costs and avoiding strikes, by giving support to armaments, and in the last resort, to wars. All through Congress debates this readiness to think in terms of "British" interests instead of world working class interests comes out, as it did for example in the decision about wage restraint.

Rank and file trade unionists and many of their delegates may think that Congress unconditionally repudiated the idea of a "wage pause" or a restraint on wage claims, and will have paid little heed to the fact that the spokesmen for the General Council put the matter differently. What they did was to offer—on terms—to collaborate with the government in the planning of economic policy: and planning, whether its supporters all realise it or not, necessarily includes the planning of wages and wage increases.

The T.U.C. never has unconditionally excluded wage restraint. In the years 1948 to 1950, in response to the appeal of the Labour government, the majority of the delegates accepted it. Even in 1950, when it was turned down on an E.T.U. resolution, the door was still left open. The E.T.U. resolution rejected wage restraint but only until such time as profits were "reasonably limited," prices controlled and "a positive planning of our British economy" is introduced. This idea has continued as the speeches at this year’s Congress show.

Mr. H. Douglas, speaking for the General Council, said: —

  If the Chancellor was worried why had he not called in the General Council before and put his facts on the table? It had never failed to respond to an appeal for action. Why had not the Chancellor consulted them instead of slapping them in the face? (D. Telegraph 7.9.61).

The new General Secretary, Mr. Woodcock, spoke similarly: —

  We say it is not right for a government of this country to make a decision on a wages pause without any consultation with the trade union movement. That is exactly what the Chancellor did.

The speakers went on to say that they are still willing, on terms, to have a hand, with the employers and the government in working out economic plans. A Daily Herald editorial (9/9/61) puts its linger on the double-edged nature of planning. Though chiding critics of the T.U.C. “who believe that the function of trade union leaders is to help the government to hold down wages,” the article went on to admit that planning is “a practical exercise in which all sides have to make painful concessions in the long-term interest.”

And Mr. Charles Timaeus, writing in Reynolds News (10/9/61), interpreted the speeches referred to above as implying “that a wages pause might be acceptable in certain circumstances and in certain conditions"

Whether the government will make concessions in order to secure trade union collaboration remains to be seen, but one thing is made very clear by the anxious comments in various Liberal, Tory and financial journals, that is that they attach a great deal of importance to avoiding a head-on clash with the trade unions in the coming months. They know the losses the employers can suffer in widespread strikes and are not at all happy that the present government should have behaved as if it wanted a show-down at all costs.

It only remains to emphasise again the truism that the trade unions will not usefully change their direction until the members themselves think out their class position in capitalism and see that what is needed is world-wide working class action to establish Socialism. The alternative, collaboration in each country with the government, may end by bringing the unions nearer to being what the so-called trade unions are in Russia, part of the governmental machine of capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: What Ails The Trade Unions? (1960)

Editorial from the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

THE leader-writers had a field day when the TUC tied itself in knots by deciding both to have and not to have the H bomb. “Shabby farce,” “Congress in agony.” “greater fiasco than had been expected,” “muddling and miscalculating to the end.” It all happened because, though the other delegations regarded the two resolutions as being completely incompatible with each other, the AEU voted for both. That meant 900,000 votes each way. It was just enough to carry the official resolution, though the opposing motion (Mr. Cousins, for Britain to give up nuclear weapons) would have been carried without it.

Now the leaders are busy trying to work out a compromise which, they hope, will be adopted at the Labour Party conference and will have enough meaning in it not to look like an obvious contradiction. Of course it is regrettable that a trade union conference should be so confused, or so much at the mercy of block votes, but the real tragedy is that workers should be divided on such an issue as whether to support both "conventional” and nuclear weapons, or only the former. Both sides accept that there is danger of massive war, both hold that there must be armaments because defence can be secured by them, both argue for efforts to secure an all-round reduction of armaments, nuclear and conventional, but while one side thinks that perhaps a British government example of renouncing nuclear weapons might be followed, the other side (like the late Aneurin Bevan) thinks that the better prospect of securing the same end is by negotiating along with the other powers that have nuclear weapons. Neither side claims to have more than a slight hope that it will really work out that way.

Nobody at the TUC got up to speak for the world working class; to declare in their name against all the governments of the capitalist national groups; British, Russian, American, African, Indian, etc.; against all exploitation, competitive profit-seeking, armament building and war making. And to those who tell us that making such declarations, is useless because the workers will not respond—and how long and how often we have been told this—let us point out with all emphasis that both these TUC factions are themselves basing their whole case for getting capitalism to disarm, on making appeals; but not making them to the workers whose interest, if not yet their wish, is to get rid of capitalism, but to the governments which are to defend capitalism!

Of course there isn't an easy cure for what ails the TUC and trade unions; the lack of interest of many members which causes them to stay away from branch meetings and leave the running of the union to an active minority. If members can’t be bothered to form definite views on union policy and go along to branches to voice them, they have not much ground of complaint if other people secure the adoption of other policies. The really deep-lying troubles of the unions and the TUC stem from the wrong outlook of the workers themselves. Right through the Unions there is a belief, based on nothing but self-deception, that there is no need to listen to the Socialist case, no need to act urgently to get rid of capitalism and war, because it is always possible, while leaving capitalism in being to remove its evils and escape its war horrors.

And the curious thing is that this belief is more widely held and complacently accepted by the rank and file than by some of the leaders. It is the latter who have growing doubts about British capitalism being able to go on holding all the foreign markets it needs, and more doubts still about the possibility of Britain being able to escape war in a world of armament competition.

And the truth, though most workers still refuse to accept it, is that "you can’t contract out of world capitalism.”

For all the workers everywhere it is a question of either enduring the evils and miseries of capitalism and its wars or of ending that social system.