Alice in Labourland (1995)

From the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earlier this year, curious about how many Labour MPs agreed with the wording they carried around on their membership cards, and what they actually understood their Clause Four to mean (what for example, is common ownership of the “means of exchange” all about?), our Media Dept sent each of them a copy of our Object, written incidentally before the Labour Party was even formed:

“The establishment of a system of society based upon the
 common ownership and democratic control of the means 
and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by
and in the interest of the whole community.”

We asked them three questions:

1. Do you regard the above object as being a desirable political goal?
2. Do you regard “common ownership ” as a socialist objective?
3. On what basis do you see your political position as differing from the above Object?

We also challenged each of them to debate the issue of common ownership and democratic control. Not surprisingly, perhaps, not a single one was prepared to take us on. Common ownership has never been on Labour's agenda after all, in spite of Clause Four. In fact we began to wonder how many of them, before the current “modernisation” of the Labour Party, even knew they had a Clause Four, never mind what it meant. 

As for how they now thought Clause Four stood up against our Object, we didn't really expect too many replies demonstrating a clear understanding of socialist ideas from a party which is gearing itself up to run British capitalism, and if we expected muddy thinking and evasive answers, we were not disappointed. Few of the replies received dealt directly with the questions asked, and from those that did, it is clear that “common ownership” in the Labour Party is a wonderfully flexible and adaptable term.

It can mean literally common ownership (as long as it’s expressed as an ideal only, and not intended to be put into practice); or it can mean state ownership and control by a small elite. It can mean a democratic system where goods are produced to satisfy human need (as long as it’s expressed as an ideal only, and not intended to be put into practice) or; it can mean—State ownership and control by a small elite. It can mean a noble ideal which Labour has steadfastly and unflinchingly advocated (but it doesn’t), or it can mean, er, state ownership and control by a small elite.

As Lewis Carroll put it: “When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."

A few of our would-be political leaders demonstrated a similar talent for childlike fantasy. As John Marek MP so eloquently put it: "common ownership to me can mean many different things”. John Gunnell agreed: "common ownership can take different forms and it is not practicable for all the means and instruments of production to be in common ownership.”

Keith Hill thought that “democratic control, but not exclusively common ownership, is a desirable political goal". And Max Madden's response was a two-page speech, the climax of which was “we need imagination and innovation to devise new ways of administering public control. . .”.

Austin Mitchell considered that "Democratic control is desirable, common ownership is another matter”, he felt the need however to add- “I wouldn’t have wanted to change Clause Four and regard the whole business as a waste of time, but if the Leader decides to throw himself off a cliff, the Party has no alternative but to catch him”. Catch him? Most of them in their eagerness to get their hands on the spoils of governmental control are lining up like obedient, well-trained lemmings just waiting for the order to jump.

Chris Mullin suffered from a different delusion. Just like your average Daily Mail reader, he was under the impression that common ownership has already been tried somewhere: “I agree that a society based upon common ownership is a wonderful ideal. The only difficulty is that it has proved catastrophic in all the countries where an attempt has been made to introduce such a system”. Where on earth could he be thinking of? Surely not the corrupt state dictatorships of Russia, China, etc?

Mike Gapes found our letter “rather irritating” and wouldn’t answer the questions. John Cummings also seemed rather irritated. He preferred not to tell us what he thought because: “I feel that the Labour Party’s constitution is a matter for Labour Party members alone to decide”. Now there’s a novel idea, ordinary Labour members being given a say on decisions regarding their Party’s constitution! Whatever next?

Bryan Davies was honest enough to admit that “the establishment of a system of society based on common ownership is not a realistic objective for a Party seeking to obtain power” (and presumably not once they’ve got “power” over us either), but isn’t this precisely what Labour have been telling us they stood for all these years? Bob Ainsworth certainly knew what he wanted if he got into power: “a strong market economy helped, encouraged and regulated to operate in the public interest”. (Isn't that what they promised last time?)

Poor old Tony Benn, daft as ever, missed the whole point of the three questions. His response was: “'Thanks for your letter. I don’t want to see Clause 4 changed either.” Perhaps in a moment of wild optimism he thought our object was Clause Four.

Labour supporters intending to put their trust in this lot. should consider another piece of Lewis Carroll advice: '“Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?” ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat’.”

Labour, by the admissions of their own MPs don't even understand what "common ownership” means, never mind stand for it, and have nothing to offer but empty rhetoric, promises and a meaningless replacement for the meaningless Clause Four. The rules at both the Mad Hatter Tea Party and the Labour Party are the same: “jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today”, or to spell it out even more clearly: "Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.' I don’t see any wine,' she remarked. 'There isn't any,’ said the March Hare.”

Is it just a coincidence that Labour’s policy and promises come straight from Alice in Wonderland. Finally, before we leave the subject of Alice, this is how Alice Mahon MP replied to the above questions:

1. Yes, it's an admirable goal and one 1 share.
2. Yes, common ownership is an obvious socialist objective and one I hold very dear.
3. None.

So, what on earth is she doing in the Labour Party? We would strongly advise this particular Alice, and anyone else holding up the Labour bottle marked "drink me” to check out the contents a bit more carefully.

Nick White

Greasy Pole: Disturbance? In Westminster? (2013)

The Greasy Pole column from the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Before we go over to our outside broadcasting team,’ says the TV news presenter, ‘a warning: their report includes scenes which some viewers may find disturbing’. Cut to a film of a ditch in some famished village overflowing with massacred corpses, to a motorway fast lane with oozing victims of mangled vehicles, to some dazed and famished animals waiting to be transported to the abattoir. But the news can also be disturbing in a rather different way and with its own style of injury and anger. On 13 January an inquest into the death of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse at the King Edward VII Hospital in London who had taken the hoax telephone call from Australia about the admission of pregnant Kate Middleton for morning sickness, ruled that she had committed suicide. A few days before, on a visit to the Houses of Parliament, the family’s bewildered grief was all too apparent to need the intervention before the cameras of Labour MP Keith Vaz, gripping his arms around them after ensuring that it was all being recorded for the TV news. Was the sight of Vaz so determinedly exploiting the family’s grief ‘disturbing’? Well not on the same scale as those other incidents but it certainly aroused some strong reactions. ‘What the hell has this got to do with Keith Vaz?’ demanded Richard Littlejohn (himself not unaccustomed to attention-seeking). ‘A creepy, oily politician who makes my skin crawl whenever I listen to him,’ was one posted comment: ‘A lawyer with a big mouth and a crooked MP with crooked mates’ was another.

Survivor

It is possible that a clutch of viewers assumed Vaz is the family’s MP and was simply doing his duty towards them. But this is not so: he sits for Leicester East and the family live in Bristol, which means they are represented by the Tory, Charlotte Leslie – who, compared to Vaz, was markedly invisible in the matter. Then there is the fact that Vaz has some experience of inserting himself into prominent positions; for example at a royal reception in Buckingham Palace in December 1988, when he was just a year into his time in the Commons, his fellow Labour MP Chris Mullin observed that he ‘managed , in a crowded field, to inveigle himself into The Presence. HM, radiant in lime green, worked the crowd…for an hour and a half’. More recently, a big party to mark his 25 years as an MP was attended by Tony Blair, Ed Miliband, Theresa May. For he is very much a survivor – the longest-serving Asian MP, which should give him some influence where it is likely to count. Except that there have been episodes in his parliamentary record which have needed all his skills to avoid involving him in some terminal scandal.

Solicitor

Vaz came to England when he was nine; he went on to Cambridge and qualified as a solicitor, working mainly for local authorities. After becoming an MP he held a succession of minor jobs, including PPS for the Attorney General and Minister for Europe and the Commonwealth. His career has had an unusually high incidence of allegations about his conduct in office, such as ballot-rigging and receiving money in return for favours, some of which have been upheld and others which have been successfully obscured in clouds of verbiage and self-justification. In February 2000 Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Elizabeth Filkin, whose job was as gruesome as its title, investigated a number of allegations that Vaz had failed to declare, as he should have done, the receipt of several thousands of pounds from another solicitor, Sarosh Zaiwalla, whose former partner had made the original complaint. In the end Vaz was censured for just one matter, of receiving two payments of £4,500 although Filkin complained that the Honourable Member had improperly obstructed the full scope of her enquiries.

Hinduja

Perhaps the most serious of these matters, as it involved a senior minister, was in January 2001 when the Commons were informed that Vaz and others had intervened in the application for British citizenship of the Hinduja brothers. From a tangle of misinformation and collusion it emerged that the Hindujas had paid Vaz’s wife for ‘legal advice on immigration issues.’ Although Vaz was not required to declare these payments, Filkin was moved to comment that ‘It is clear to me there has been deliberate collusion over many months between Mr Vaz and his wife to conceal this fact and to prevent me from obtaining accurate information about his possible financial relationship with the Hinduja family.’ As a result, in June 2001 he was ousted as Minister for Europe. One rumour had it that he was called to see Tony Blair, who told him he was doing a brilliant job but as he happily went to leave he was informed by a member of the Downing Street office that he had in fact been sacked. In 2002 he was suspended from the House of Commons for one month after the Committee of Standards and Privileges ruled that he had ‘committed serious breaches of the Code of Conduct and showed contempt for the House.’ Last October the Tory MP Andrew Bridgen (who is himself what is called ‘known to the police’) complained to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner after a Scotland Yard enquiry found evidence that some money paid into Vaz’s bank accounts was ‘of a suspicious nature.’

Vaz was rated by Chris Mullin as ‘a sleek wheeler-dealer. He has the attention span of a gnat and a tendency to fantasise.’ More widely among the legislators of Westminster, he is known as ‘Keith Vazeline.’ It is clear that he will continue to need all his talents for survival. But if he were to go under again, what reason is there to believe that any replacement will be noticeably different? These people – Vaz, Bridgen and the like – are typical of those who from the green benches fashion the laws and regulations which impel us to behave in accordance with the demands of this society of class repression. There is, overwhelmingly, reason for us to be ‘disturbed’ by this, to the effect that we organise to bring it to an end.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Goodbye (?) to All These (2015)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are close now to that minute or two at the ballot boxes when we have an opportunity to state what we think of the capitalist social system and its wars, famine, and diseases amidst its class privileges. Nationally the voting papers will be missing some famous names. Like Sir Peter (‘my biggest mistake in politics was to listen to Mrs Thatcher’) Tapsell, the Father Of The House. And like Austin (‘… even if we selected a raving alcoholic sex paedophile we wouldn’t lose Grimsby’) Mitchell. So where, among this confusion, can we find Aidan Burley the MP (for a short while yet) for Cannock Chase where in 2010 he clocked up the country’s biggest swing –– of 14 percent – to the Tories and who is such good pals with David Cameron that they are compelled to greet each other with a High Five whenever they meet to discuss how they are straightening out the kinks in British capitalism. Burley is 36 and since arrival in the Commons he has been a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee and Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Ministry of Transport. But it has not been all easy going for him.

Nazi Chants

During his time as a student at Oxford he managed to fit in his studies of theology with involvement in an ‘incident’ on a dance floor which led to his being ejected from his St. John’s College accommodation. Another event contributed to his decision – or perhaps his surrender to pressure from outside – to stand down from Parliament. In December 2011 he organised a stag party for a friend – Old Etonian Mark Fournier – at a crowded posh restaurant in a French ski resort. The slim chances that this would be a happy, peaceable celebration were not realized when Fournier arrived in a black Nazi SS uniform – arranged by Burley – which he flaunted full face to the camera. The guests enlivened the evening with Nazi salutes and chants of ‘Mein Fuhrer, Himmler, Eichmann’. When it was time for toasts Burley was among those raising a glass to ‘… and if we’re perfectly honest, to the ideology and thought process of the Third Reich’. Unluckily for him and his gruesome mates their behaviour was reported in The Mail On Sunday. There was an internal enquiry by the Tory Party at which Burley denied his active participation but the evidence proved otherwise. Cameron had to face the inevitable and remove his incautious friend from the job as a PPS. A French Court fined Fournier the equivalent of £1250.

St. Helens

Aidan Burley’s fragmented political career is not typical of the MPs who are leaving the Commons this May. Shaun Woodward was first elected in 1997, at first as a Conservative in the safest of seats at Witney (now represented by none other than David Cameron) and then, after being sacked from the Front Bench for voting against instructions on Clause 28, as a Labour MP. It might have been expected that he would do what in the Commons is regarded as the decent thing and resign to fight a by-election under his new colours (like the two recent defectors to UKIP) but he chose to ignore the pressures from his former colleagues and was rewarded by Labour’s leadership with the candidature for St. Helens South in the 2001 election. This was rather different from Witney, for St. Helens was still suffering from the closure of its coal mines and regularly ran up Labour majorities of well over 20,000. For Woodward in 2001 it fell to under 9,000. But Tony Blair was delighted, regarding this recruit as evidence of New Labour’s appeal, a kind of paragon ‘…clever, articulate…economically and socially liberal…genuine’ (he did not mention that he was also very rich). The lower benches were less exuberant; Chris Mullin, representing a Sunderland seat, was pretty blunt: ‘…one of New Labour’s vilest stitch-ups … made my flesh creep’ and on another occasion ‘The awful Shaun Woodward, his every word a sneer’ while on the opposite benches Michael Heseltine forecast that Woodward would ‘… soon become a dot on the horizon’. Among this passion of outrage and mockery in 2007 Gordon Brown elevated Woodward to Northern Ireland Secretary.

Sainsbury

Now that Woodward is leaving the Commons, he will probably have to sell his modest house in St Helens, leaving him with the choice of six other homes in places such as the Hamptons and Mustique, which vary in price up to about £7 million. He is married to Camilla Davan Sainsbury from the family who have made their fortune through flogging supermarket food to the wage class in society. Sainsburys are unlikely to be supplying refreshments to the monthly meetings of the Sybil Club of which Woodward is a founder member. The club was set up with the objective of its members gorging themselves on food and drink in honour of ‘interesting’ MPs. As an example of a particularly ‘interesting’ meeting, one member described an evening at one of Woodward’s London houses closing with them all ‘completely stupefied’ but relieved that Woodward had a butler who would feed the parking meter in the morning.

Not all of the MPs leave the Commons willingly, congratulating themselves on a job well done. Two of them – Ann MacIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) and Tim Yeo (South Suffolk) have been deselected – a polite word for kicked out – by the popular vote of their constituency members. Eric Joyce (Falkirk) transformed himself from Labour to Independent after initiating some drunken punch-ups in the House of Commons bar. Then there are those whose motives we may speculate about because they are The Disappointed Ones, who once nursed an ambition to be their Party Leader. Like Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire) and Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles). In this company William Hague is best left unremarked. All of them endured by virtue of the delusion that they represented a remedy for the chaos and vanity of capitalist politics. Like all those who by some means remain as our Parliamentary rulers. None of them will be missed.

Ivan

Letter: 'Opportunity . . . for rich pickings' (1997)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Adam Buick states Militant Labour's position has been for civil war to achieve socialism. This has never been the case.

We have always stated socialism will be carried out through democratic means and that it would be those who do not accept the democratic wishes of the majority of the people who would try to overthrow a socialist government.

If Adam Buick had ever taken the trouble to read our material he would know this. When Harold Wilson was Labour Prime Minister, certain leading figures in the armed forces and the business community discussed a possible military coup if Wilson carried out socialism.

Militant Labour has always argued for an extension of democracy. whereby MPs are accountable at all times through the right of recall, and only receive the average wage of a worker, ensuring they live in the same conditions and represent the interests of the people whom they represent.

The present system allows MPs to ignore the wishes of the electorate and vote themselves massive pay rises.

Many of them also have second or third jobs, and are open to corruption. You have to question in whose interest they act.

We have also always called for proper democratic control of the police and the judiciary so they serve the vast majority of people in this country, instead of the top wealthy 10 percent.

Brian Blake, 

Hillingdon, West London

Reply:
We don’t know which is more absurd. That Harold Wilson really could have “carried out socialism”, or that certain “leading figures" in the armed forces and business community really did discuss a military coup to overthrow him.

Wilson wouldn't even have dreamed of carrying out socialism (he didn’t even know what it was—he once confessed that he couldn't even get beyond page one of Marx's Capital). But even if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to, since no government can introduce socialism for people any more than a vanguard party can.

As a system of common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit demanding popular consent and participation, socialism can only be established when a majority want and understand it and show this by, among other things, voting for it. The fact that people had voted for a Labour government showed that what they wanted was Labour administration of capitalism not socialism.

Wilson was a capitalist politician elected to run British capitalism. Which he did in the only way possible: as a profit-making system in the interests of those who live off profits. To this end, he froze wages, denounced strikes and planned to bring in anti-union laws. All this earned him the gratitude, not the opposition. of the business community. Many of them took jobs on the quangos he set up while others accepted the knighthoods and peerages he was notorious for handing out to them.

Towards the end there was some discontent over his inability to hamstring the unions in the way Thatcher was later to do. but no "military coup” was discussed. The most that might have happened was some idle talk of this amongst disgruntled junior members of the intelligence service, at least if what one of them, Peter Wright, wrote in his book Spycatcher is to be believed.

You seem to be confusing this with the book and TV play A Very British Coup by Labour MP Chris Mullins. But this was a work of fiction and. in any event, more realistically than in your scenario, has the coup fail because people back the elected government and its prime minister.

But this is not the only place where you have mistaken fiction for reality. It's the same with your claim that Militant does not envisage a civil war to achieve its aim. Militant is a Trotskyist organisation, i.e. a sect within the Leninist tradition. and Trotskyists have always argued that it is not possible for them to capture power peacefully and democratically through the ballot box.

If you doubt this, read Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism and Lenin's State and Revolution and his The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky—we are sure Militant's book service will gladly supply them for you—in which the doctrine that the vanguard party can only come to power by means of a violent insurrection is set out in quite unambiguous terms.

This does not rule out Trotskyists contesting elections but only as a tactic to win influence and build up support for the vanguard party. Militant's current electoralist “turn", and accompanying change of name to a party, is to be seen in this light. It is merely a manoeuvre to better position itself viz its rivals, the SLP and the SWP, to take advantage of working-class discontent under a future Blair government.

This is made abundantly clear in an internal document published last November entitled "The Name Debate (4)". Here Militant's Executive Committee states that "the issue of the name of our organisation is a tactical or presentational issue, not a matter of principle" (p. 4) while a member of the National Centre writes that "politics is the art of timing and there is a serious danger that if we don't come to a decision, we will miss the opportunity of rich pickings in the next period" (p. 44). How cynical can you get?

Editors

Not so honourable members (2009)

From the June 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Amid the uproar over the MPs' expense claims, we should not lose sight of an important fact. Unlike applying to be reimbursed for the cost of dog food or a swimming pool, much of what our representatives in Parliament do is a waste of time. Claiming to make us all more secure by controlling the economy they endlessly debate their Budgets, financial statements and regulations but when there bursts onto the scene something like a credit crunch – a recession, a slump – they are revealed as powerless to do more than mouth baseless analyses or predictions while capitalism grinds on its barbarous way.

It is much the same about crime as one government after another, on a promise to reduce the problem almost to elimination, churns out a legislative flood providing for more stringent penalties and to re-define some behaviour from legal to criminal. For example the Fraud Act of 2006 was designed to make it easier for the prosecution to get convictions for offences of fraud and increased the maximum sentence from seven to ten years. There is a certain irony about this reform, as it would have an effect on those Honourable Members who passed it into law but may find themselves in court for so profitably exploiting the loopholes in Parliament's system of allowances to claim for a non-existent mortgage or for making false declarations to the Customs and Revenue. Meanwhile crime continues to be a disfiguring problem, of an intensity which shows no significant evidence of being influenced by Parliament's professed attempts to control it; its origins lie outside the scope of such delusions.

System
But of course the MPs have to believe that what they do is vitally important; otherwise their self-esteem would suffer such serious damage as to make it very difficult for them to discuss their own wages, extra allowances and working conditions – or rather their improvement. When, during the recent storm of protests over their finances they were being questioned by nosey journalists, a common response was to blame the whole problem onto something they called “the system” which everyone knows to be sadly defective and in need of immediate re-ordering. This breathtakingly implausible argument ignored the fact that “the system” was itself the creation of MPs who, while often denouncing workers as irresponsible wreckers when they try to improve, or even defend, their living standards are allowed to better their own wages and the like. It also took no account that the discredited claims for the extra allowances breached the requirement – which was intended to give the impression of adequate safeguards – to be for “additional costs wholly, exclusively and necessarily “ incurred in their work – which did not mean cleaning a moat or installing a home cinema.

Mullin
In July 2001 Chris Mullin, the Labour MP for Sunderland, made himself unpopular by opposing a Commons motion to increase MP's wages by £4000, tabling an amendment to align rises with those for nurses, teachers and the like. Mullin thought the opposition to his amendment was meant to approve the original motion on the nod, avoiding any debate and implicating all the MPs. Unsurprisingly he lost his amendment, the MPs awarded themselves the rise and an increase in the accrual rate of their pension from 50ths to 40ths – which Mullin furiously described as “shameless”. It is not known whether he felt some grisly justification when, in the following year, the Tory MP for Windsor, Michael Trend, was suspended for two weeks after the Mail On Sunday revealed that he had claimed almost £90,000 in accommodation allowances although he lived in his constituency. Trend did not stand in the 2005 election and his successor in the seat, Adam Afriyie, is reported in the Daily Telegraph as not making any claim.

McNulty
Another example of what might be moderately called double standards is Tony McNulty, Labour MP for Harrow. McNulty is known as a bruiser, someone to be relied on in the TV studios to dismiss any critic of the New Labour method of running capitalism as mad or malicious or both, hardly worth any attention from a Minister in the Department of Work and Pensions, with responsibility to crack down on anyone caught making false claims for state benefit. He recently declared that such people are “benefit thieves” who will be ruthlessly hunted down by use of developed technology and “face imprisonment, fines and other penalties. We will also make sure they pay back the money they have stolen...and seek to ensure any proceeds from their crime are confiscated too”. However McNulty has also been caught out – not through any technological device but by simple journalistic trawling through Parliamentary records – in behaviour which some of his constituents might regard as a kind of theft, claiming almost £60,000 allowance for a house in Harrow which he owns but which he should not claim on because it is where his parents live. His home, which he shares with his wife, is in Hammersmith. All of this was in spite of the rule that all claims for the Additional Costs Allowances must be “above reproach” and not encourage any speculation that the object is “...benefiting from public funds”.

McNulty conceded that his claim may be “a bit odd” but justified it on the grounds that “everyone does it” – by which he presumably meant every MP, but not every benefit claimant. He was at first resistant to even paying back the money – although if he ever comes into court in the matter, as many people outside his constituency as well as inside it hope – to try to buy his way out of trouble in that way is unlikely to significantly affect the outcome. In any case he would surely be the last to suggest that he should be treated any more leniently than the benefit fraudsters he so zealously persecutes. That the scandal of parliamentary allowances has revealed so many MPs as devoted, persistent practitioners of the art of double standards should surprise nobody. For the reality is that the capitalist system which governments profess to be able to control is itself a massive, universal fraud on the majority of its people.

Ivan