The Common Market Special Survey: 1. The Background (1962)

From the January 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

A shiver of apprehension is running through the national press as cabinet ministers and captains of industry set about the task of preparing the public for what to expect if Britain’s application to join the Common Market should be accepted. Mr. Macmillan calls it “a bracing cold shower we shall enter, not a relaxing Turkish bath” and one of the industrial bosses thinks it will rather be “an icicled channel swim at nought degrees Centigrade.” Prophecy is dangerous, but the chances are that within 15 months from now this country will be part of the European Economic Community.

What reasons do the British ruling class put forward for having to join the Common Market? Why should Britain shift the traditional centre of gravity of her economy from the Commonwealth to Europe? Why should she wish to wind up the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) she had only recently been instrumental in creating? And what effects will this have upon the British working class?

Weakened and impoverished by the ravages of World War II, the rump of continental Europe lay prostrate in front of the Iron Curtain, useless to the bloc of Western powers dominated by the United States of America as a profitable market, useless in the game of power politics as a defence against the rival bloc grouped around the Soviet Union. Only an economically healthy Europe would offer reasonable guarantees of safety to the American world of finance and industry. And so from the dust and ashes there arose new life, frantic activity, a giant mesh of scaffolding throughout Western Europe, factories, banks, stores, communications shot up at breakneck speed—financed by a massive programme of American aid and investment. The Marshall Plan "of which the sole condition was that the countries of Europe must band together and agree upon a joint recovery programme.”

British industrialists watched with consternation ultramodern plant swinging into action across the channel. But with both the home market and the Commonwealth, with its established system of preferential duties, crying out for manufactured goods after the shortage and wastage of the war years, profits were still secure in spite of outdated plant and methods.

Powerful vested interests were haunted by the fear of a resurgent Germany, the spectre of Krupp and Thyssen—the giants of the Ruhr and the power behind the expansionist militarism both of Prussia and Nazi Germany. German industry was not to be permitted to swallow all the plums in the new Europe. Markets, capital, labour and raw materials were to be divided fairly between the power groups. By 1953 the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was a going concern comprising the coal and steel industries of Federal Germany, France, Italy and Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg). The Origins of the Common Market.

There was one weak link; Belgian coal was too expensive. Throughout the mining belt across the south of Belgium mines were shut down and miners were out of work in their thousands. But the Belgian mine owners had been helped over the critical period with massive subsidies from the international High Authority administering ECSC. Capitalism had pulled a new card from its sleeve. For coal and steel, ECSC meant larger markets, bigger production, better exploitation of capital and labour, fewer irksome administrative barriers, discriminations and quotas. Why not extend the idea to the economy as a whole?

By March, 1957, there was signed the Treaty of Rome which launched the six participants in ECSC on the road towards the Common Market. Its object was:

“To permit goods to travel freely without Customs Duties or quota restrictions, throughout the area of the Six and thus to permit manufacturers to invest on the scale that modern technology makes possible and necessary.”

Customs duties between the Six were to be whittled down progressively in three successive phases of four years each. At the same time a uniform external tariff wall was to be erected around the Six. Allowance was made for differences between the Six in terms of industrial development and efficiency or productivity, for differences in wage levels between member countries. It was obvious that the impact of a progressive crumbling of Customs duties would have serious effects on certain industries and even countries. To soften the impact the Six adopted a device successfully tried out by the Benelux countries from the start of their Customs Union almost immediately after the last war—a Compensation Tax. Being flexible, this tax can be used to ensure, in the interest of the ruling class of the Six as a whole, that individual national groups of an industry do not cause too much of a disturbance in any specific field.

Big industry and banking seized the opportunity with both hands; American capital poured into the Six. Displaced Persons, human flotsam, waiting to be employed as cheap labour, were overflowing in German refugee camps. Italy, where starving millions were considered a potential communist threat, had been given a major blood transfusion of U.S. dollars and was starting a massive programme of industrialisation with huge reserves of agricultural labour waiting to be drawn off the land in Southern Italy and fed onto the new industrial treadmill.

Developments were rapid. Before the end of the first four-year period the programme of whittling down of Customs Duties had been exceeded by 18 months. Inter-Common Market tariffs are now 30 per cent. below their 1957 level and may be 50 per cent. down by the end of this year. The process may be completed by 1965 if not before.

In the meantime the British ruling class was taking only a modest interest in the Common Market. How modest will be seen from the fact that that even as late as 1960 British private direct investment within the Six (excluding oil and insurance) amounted to no more than £21 million as compared with £208 million invested in the Sterling Area outside the United Kingdom during the same period. In a good many fields British industry was not even interested in exports of any kind. These were the people who could sell all they could manufacture in the home market behind the cover of a high protective tariff wall and in the expectation that the halcyon days were here to stay. Their plant was being amortized at a comfortable rate and foreign competition could not touch them. To break into the fiercely competitive outside world meant hard work, expense, lower profit margins. Why bother?

But in the Commonwealth things had been happening. Preferential treatment of British goods had disappeared under a great many headings in the Customs Tariffs of Commonwealth countries which are fast building up a market for their products in Europe.

Nonetheless certain Commonwealth countries, notably New Zealand, still depended largely on the British market for their livelihood and raised vociferous objections to any thought of a British commitment with the Six unless their special interests were safeguarded.

Powerful British interests also disliked intensely the possibility of a political entanglement with the Six.

It was all too complicated. Couldn’t the remaining uncommitted countries of Europe (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal) be brought into some form of association more to the liking of the British ruling class, without the embarrassment of. political implications and interference with existing Commonwealth trade? Their 97 million people (including the United Kingdom) would not compare with the home market of 170 millions of the Six, but it was better than nothing. And it would strengthen Britain’s hand in any later approaches to the Six. Thus was born the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) or “The Seven.” Finland has since joined making EFTA “The Eight.” Its purpose was to be strictly limited to the progressive reduction of Inter-EFTA Customs Duties and quantitive restrictions.

Now the prospect of an enlarged Common Market of 250 million people or more discriminating against U.S. goods is beginning to alarm the American capitalists. Already pressure groups are at work promoting a direct U.S. participation in the Common Market. This, to quote, the Herter report, “with its highly developed industrial and technological complex and its disciplined workers, would comprise the most efficient workshop in the world” where since 1958 trade among the Six had risen by about 50 per cent. . . .

What is involved in the British application to join the Six, for industry and finance, and what does it mean to the British working class?

If agreement should not be forthcoming, British industry could well find itself faced across the Channel with a fast-expanding, highly efficient and ultramodern competitor of great striking power. Many British manufactured products may disappear from the markets of the world which would entail a major re-alignment of industry. The usual flow of capital from the weak to the strong will be accelerated. The harder it became to export finished goods, the more British capital might have to seek investment abroad for overseas manufacture, albeit in return for smaller profits.

Designed to fit the present requirements of Western capitalist society, the Common Market has, like any other capitalist institution, no permanence. It will be discarded when it ceases to be profitable. To the British worker it reinforces the constant threat for the worker under capitalism of insecurity and unemployment,

Tisserand.

The Common Market Special Survey: 2. The Industrial Power (1962)

From the January 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

An investment of £2,000 million was the figure recently suggested as necessary for the setting up of an international scientific research centre in Berlin. In the same newspaper the British Electricity Council announced its intention to spend £947 million on generating stations in the next four years. The British Motor Corporation spent £10 million in launching one model—the Austin 7/Miniminor.

In themselves, these three examples have no direct connection with the emergence of the “Common Market.” They are, however, pointers to the scale of modern capitalism. Huge investment and massive production plants are the order of the day. A small sheet steel mill would be economically and technically ridiculous in 1962. Modern plastics, too, such as polythene or nylon, must be produced in vast automatic plants. It is the same story with petrol refining, aircraft production, coal mining, chemicals, shipbuilding, rocket research, and so on; and this matter of size is the real force that has brought the European Economic Community into existence.

E.E.C. is a perfect demonstration of Marx’s statement that capitalism is neither a stable nor a permanent social system. It is driven to expand under the compulsion of inexorable economic laws, gearing up science and engineering to the ever-increasing demands of capital, and forcing human and social relationships into new and arbitrary patterns.

In Europe, particularly, the pressure on national boundaries and sovereignties has been intensifying since the first World War, when Europe started to fall behind America in the race for industrial production and exports. The retention of national units seriously weakened the European capitalists in their struggle for a share of the world’s trade; and since the second World War, which can be seen from one point of view as a German attempt to unite Europe under its rule, it has become obvious that, individually, the European nations are puny and backward by comparison with the American and Russian federations.

E.E.C. is, in fact, very far from being a “good idea ” formulated by European politicians; it is a belated and reluctant acknowledgment of the expanding scale of investment, production and trade.

Steel

Significantly, the first step in the industrial unification of Europe was the setting up of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952. Coal is still by far the most important industrial fuel, and steel the overwhelmingly dominant metal. Furthermore, the holdings in both industries were already concentrated in a few large blocks, making negotiations relatively simple.

The occupying Allies had limited German steel output to 11m. tons a year. When the restriction was lifted, W. German production rose rapidly to reach 34m. tons in 1960, bringing the total for the Community to 73m. tons. Their exports are co-ordinated in a cartel known as the Brussels Entente handling two-thirds of the world’s steel exports— formidable competition for the British Steel Federation!

Nevertheless, in these boom years for steel, British exports have doubled in the past ten years, and the industry has gone ahead with large development plans at Corby and Margam and Llanwern. A large fraction of this increased capacity is for sheet steel in anticipation of a continued increase in demand from the motor industry. These “strip” mills are barely an economic proposition at under a capacity of a million tons a year. Building a new one is therefore a big step, but unless it strides at this rate the British industry must fall out of the race. The real testing time will come when the boom is over. Then the weight of the Brussels Entente will be decisive.

Unless the British Iron and Steel Federation can break into the European group it can be out-produced and out-priced. Even if it does, the proposed merger between Phoenix and Thyssen in Germany would dominate the group. Indeed, the British steel industry might even be prepared to submit to re-nationalisation in order to wield sufficient power.

Coal

It is a starker version of the same picture with regard to the older and less efficient coal industry. Already a number of Belgian coal mines have been closed down as being uneconomic in competition with German coal. In this country the average rate of profit from coal mining was so low that there was never any real alternative to nationalisation. The National Coal Board, like the true capitalist concern that it is, is to close 15 Scottish pits, involving 5,000 men, next year as part of the attempt to wipe out its £21 million deficit for 1960. It has closed a large number of pits which are unprofitable by modern standards, and the total deficit for Scottish mines is now estimated to have reached £100 million. Contrary to popular belief, the Coal Board does not exist to produce coal, but to produce profits; and so it must cut its losses.

It must do more than this: until now it has been protected from serious foreign competition (even the Steel Company of Wales was prevented from importing cheap American coal); it must reverse the steady shrinkage of exports if it is to survive. They dropped from £61 million in 1950 to £28 million in 1960, largely through uncompetitive prices. By cutting the labour force (by 20,000 in 1961) and by a costly programme of capital investment (£97 million in 1961-2) productivity has been raised from 3-2 tons per manshift in 1950 to over 4-1 tons last year. The National Coal Board claims that it is introducing automatic machinery faster than is being done anywhere else in the world, and that real automation, in the form of robot coal-cutting machinery which seeks out the coal for itself, will be operating in a British mine before the end of 1962. In a Commons debate on the coal industry on October 24th, 1961, the Minister of Power, Mr. Wood, said that: “It was too early for him to forecast the precise effect of membership of the Iron and Steel Community, but it was felt that it would benefit both the NCB and the consumer. This would automatically confer benefit to those working in the industry.” (The Guardian, 25/10/61.)

The attitude of British coal miners towards this statement is not easily available; but, since their numbers have dropped from over 1,000,000 in the 1920’s to 560,000 in 1961, it is doubtful whether they feel so optimistic about Britain’s entry into the “Common Market,” because, whatever else it involves, it certainly means more ruthless exploitation of every man.

Gas

On November 7th, 1961, the Financial Times published a four-page supplement on the Gas Industry, showing that like the National Coal Board its production and sales had risen while its labour force had been cut by 20,000 in ten years. The Chairman of the Gas Council, Sir Henry Jones, wrote of “gas established again as a growth industry” in spite of the fact that the number of gasworks has been cut from 1,050 in 1949 to 378. During this period gas production has remained fairly constant at about 2,200 million therms per annum, which means that the whole industry has been made considerably more profitable under nationalisation.

The fact is that many new possibilities have opened up for the gas industry in recent years. It has maintained its strong links with the coal industry, especially with the introduction of the Lurgi process of complete gasification of coal without leaving coke. In addition, however, it is becoming more and more tightly wedded to the oil companies. Apart from the gasification of heavy fuel oil, such as is being carried out by the South Eastern Gas Board at the Isle of Grain works, American oil companies are offering shipments of cheap liquified petroleum gas and of naptha. The British Gas industry, however, has at present concentrated on its decision to import shipments of natural methane from the Sahara. This touches the question of E.E.C. very closely because the French are reported to be undertaking the construction of a pipeline from Algeria across the Mediterranean to provide gas for a grid-system throughout the E.E.C.

For the British industry one of the main advantages of being linked to such a system would be the ironing out of fluctuations in demand during the day and, to some extent, during the year. France and Germany already have large underground storage facilities for manufactured gas so that summer production may be saved for heavy winter consumption. In one way or another it looks as though the capital invested in the British gas industry could show considerably greater profit and expansion by being linked with Europe.

Electricity

The British Electricity Authority is the most profitable of all the nationalised industries, having made a gross profit of £18 million in 1960-61; but there is further profit to be made by linking itself with the continent to meet future increased demand.

Apart from its own considerable expansion and storage schemes, the Annual Report of the Electricity Council mentioned the fact that “. . . the cross-channel link with Electricité de France would be coming into commission soon. Because of the difference in the incidence of peak demand in the two countries, 160MW of load could be transferred in either direction with savings to both parties.” This is an arrangement which has been carried through independently of negotiations among politicians about E.E.C. and demonstrates that, however British hearts may feel about loss of national sovereignty and all that, the industrial ties with Europe are strengthening every day.

Ample proof of this last point is given in a report from Turin by Gordon Wilkins in The Observer, November 5th, 1961:

“More British cars may have Italian built bodies as a result of discussions held here this week. One leading British body designer told me it may even prove economical to import Italian-made bodyshells into England, especially if Britain joins the Common Market . . . Pininfarina are making the convertible bodies for the new French Peugeot 404. Bertone are sending coupe bodies to Germany for N.S.U. and B.M.W. Vignale, who have been building a Triumph TR3 body for the Italian market, are planning a TR4 coupe for export. The agreement between Rootes and Carrozzeria Touring for assembly of their cars in Italy may be the forerunner of others. . . . Ghia are doing bodies for the Austin-Healey Sprite, and the latest registration figures show how much the British Motor Corporation have gained by having the A40 built under licence by Innocenti.”

In the same way, Alfa Romeo build the Renault Dauphine under licence, while “Italy’s enormous Fiat interests have car-assembly plants in Belgium and Germany, and expansion plans amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds will put them in all six nations” (Readers’ Digest, July, 1961).

In the metal-using industries motor car manufacture today makes by far the greatest use of mass production and costly automation. It is true that a few small specialist firms still persist among the giants; but million-pound firms like Standard have been shown to be too small to remain independent in the mass market amongst the large federations. Their average rate of profit is too low. Only ruthless standardisation and wider and wider markets can make profitable the immense outlay of constant capital. Now, in Europe national tariffs are preventing the giants from coming properly to grips with one another, as they must, for the dividing up of the market; and so they add their weight to the breaking down of these barriers.

A Crisis

Commentators on the emergence of E.E.C. have said repeatedly that industrial companies will have to “think big” to meet the new situation. Like most of the talk in the press and broadcasting, this masks the real picture. They imply that E.E.C. offers new opportunities for expansion. The truth is much more sombre. Certainly, the Common Market began while Europe was still booming; but if there had been unlimited markets for all there would have been no need for a Common Market.

The truth is that the average rate of profit has been steadily falling, owing to the enormous rate of capital accumulation (these huge investments in production plants that have been mentioned); and the European Common Market is not a fraternal gathering but a battle ground. The survivors in this new phase of European capitalism, therefore, will be the ones who are already big.

In the fields dealt with, however—coal, steel, gas, electricity and motor cars— the majority of small competitors have already been ousted in each European country: they are not available to be sacrificed when the competition becomes merciless. As early as October, 1961, the Daily Express, which has always put out propaganda for Empire and against Britain’s overtures to E.E.C., began to make great play of the fact that the current boom in Europe was falling off, insisting that therefore Britain should not join.

But these are precisely the conditions under which Britain will be forced to join, in order to give its giant capitalist undertakings chance to survive by overpowering weaker giants in Europe. Of course, there is no certainty that British capital will come out of it less bruised than its competitors, and this is the reason for all the uncertainty and haggling. The greatest giants of all, the major oil companies and the largest of the steel and chemical firms, can only gain in the long run. But, of course, they are already international organisations. The emergence of the European Economic Community is the political admission of the economic fact that a sufficiently great change in quantity has become a change in quality.

The icy winds of competition occasionally referred to are spoken of lustily as though they are to be a tonic for our health. Members of the working class hearing such windy talk on television ”reports” may even be persuaded that it will be a ”good thing” if some of the industrial “inefficiency” is to be “weeded out.” They can only be thus tempted into forgetting their own position as workers as long as they persist in believing that all this production is carried on in capitalism for the purpose of supplying people’s needs.

The Socialist knows that it is not so. He also knows that whichever capitalists turn out to be the winners in the growing struggle, workers can only expect to suffer in the upheaval and to be more thoroughly exploited in the future, whether they call themselves Britons or “Europeans.”

S. Stafford

The Common Market Special Survey: 3. The Workers’ Position (1962)

From the January 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Writing in December we still do not know whether the British Government will enter the European Common Market, or whether their conditions for entry will prove inacceptable to the six countries already in. And if the outcome is that Britain becomes a member, no-one yet knew what special arrangement may be made for the Commonwealth and Colonial territories, nor what the Scandinavian and other European countries may decide to do in this new situation.

All of these uncertain factors have a bearing on the effect that joining the Common Market will have on particular industries and firms and on workers’ jobs.

Some British workers will find their occupations gone through redundancy and will have to seek a job in another industry or in another place, perhaps across the Channel.

Unions in printing, entertainment and tailoring are among those that have expressed fears about jobs, or wages, or the incursion of workers from other Common Market countries looking for work here.

But in some industries the expectation is that prospects would improve for the firms centred in Britain, and the workers whose jobs may in consequence be made more precarious will be those now working in one of the Common Market countries. Among the industries in which this may happen are engineering, motor car manufacture and chemicals. Mine-workers have also been encouraged by the Coal Board to believe that more British coal would be sold and that employment prospects in the coal industry here would improve.

Sometimes the forecasters who tell workers what they think will happen are not trade union leaders but employers. The British Employers’ Confederation issued a statement that entry to the Market would make wage increases out of the question unless preceded by increases in productivity. (Financial Times, 8/8/61); and Lord Chandos, chief of Associated Electrical Industries, who spoke in favour of Britain’s entry, told his fellow members of the House of Lords (3/8/61) that the consequent sharper competition and other changes

”will impinge upon the workers . . . very much more than on the employers, This kind of thing will make the ‘ wild-cat’ strike, the demarcation dispute, and shorter hours with less work at lower productivity an impossible luxury.” He instanced Coventry as a place where the motor workers would not be exhilarated to see a flood of Italian and French cars, or Italian workers coming here for jobs.

As would be expected, when manufacturers and traders ponder the case for joining, it is not the workers’ comfort they have in mind except in the sense that the ” European cold wind of change” may help them to discipline British workers, or so they think.” (Financial Times 24.7.61).

Workers worrying about these chilling prophecies are mostly upsetting themselves to no purpose. Of course, they may find themselves out of a job or faced with an employer’s refusal to give a wage increase, or see their employer unable lo stand up to competition. But these are things that will happen anyway; they happen all the time and all over the place, not just in the Common Market.

The end of 1961 gave us news of redundancy and short time in the motor car industry; notice that 15 Scottish coal mines will be closed in 1962, affecting 5,000 workers; the forthcoming closure of the De Havilland aircraft factory at Christchurch, Hants, with 2,000 men looking for jobs in an area which depended heavily for employment on the firm; and Courtaulds closing down one of the British Enka plants which it recently bought, so that nearly 4,000 people at Aintree, Liverpool, are expected to lose their jobs.

Unemployment

And those who think that the Common Market will end the workers’ troubles are equally in error. Their argument is on the lines that a great home market of 170 million people is a guarantee of efficient production, steady marketing, high wages and secure employment. But the U.S.A. also has 170 million people and recently had over five million unemployed and in the depression years of the nineteen ‘thirties had unemployment ranging at times up to 10 million and even 15 million.

Within the past few years America has seen its motor car industry and steel at times in the doldrums, with tens of thousands unemployed. And there is no reason to suppose that the Common Market will escape the kind of regional or local bad trade that can exist in all countries, the United States included.

Though at present Germany has very little unemployment, Italy, one of the partners in the Common Market, has about 1,350,000 unemployed or nearly 7 per cent., and it has never averaged less than that figure in the past 10 years.

Immigration

The Common Market aims at unfettered movement of workers throughout the area, but in practice it will probably be long before it becomes effective, and various hindrances of movement will exist even then. There are no legal barriers in the way of the movement of workers within Great Britain, but that does not prevent unemployment being persistently heavy in one district and light in another, one per cent, in the London and South Eastern Region and 7½ times as heavy in Northern Ireland. Housing is a big factor in this. And as was recently pointed out by the Times, even if the movement of workers in the Common Market were completely free already (which it is not), “differences in wages and conditions are not sufficient to induce many workers to seek employment in a strange country. The only likely movement of any size would be from countries where there is a substantial unemployment, which at present means Southern Italy.”

Figures published in July, 1961, showed that there were 200,000 Italians working in Germany along with much smaller numbers from many other countries, making a total of 470,000 immigrant workers.

We hear much about the workers’ reactions to the incursions of immigrants, but the employers have a problem too. When workers leave their home town it enables those who stay behind to put more pressure into their struggle for higher wages. German employers welcome Italian immigrants, but it looks different to the Italian factory owners.

“Some factory owners complain about the fact that agents of German or Swiss employers stand outside their factory gates offering contracts to workers as they finish their shifts.”

Trade Unions

No particular difficulty should arise in the trade union field. Though British rank and file trade unionists have mostly not been as much aware of international organisation and its problems as Continental workers, the union officials and executives have often had long and fairly close contact with Continental unions, particularly through their own Internationals (Miners, Transport workers, Post office workers, Agricultural workers, Printers, etc., etc.).

This is not to say that unions will easily forget their nationalist prejudices, but at least they will get used to working together in day to day matters on a European basis. Still less does it mean as claimed by Ludwig Rosenberg, Deputy Chairman of the German Trade Union Federation, that formation of the European Common Market is an expression of the fact that “international co-operation and solidarity beyond national frontiers are among the basic aims of the Labour movement throughout the world.”

The grouping of small units into a larger one, with one of its objects to stand up industrially, commercially (and militarily) against other world blocs no more depends on an “international” outlook than did the forging of unity in the 19th century in Italy or the German customs union which lead to German unity, though it does achieve the breakdown of the narrower isolations and prejudices. Certainly it should be easier for workers in all of the Common Market countries to avoid being played-off against each other in the name of the “national interest.”

Wages

Opinions differ about the complex question of comparing wages in this country with those on the Continent. What is true of one industry or country may not be true of another, but, for what it is worth the Times recently gave the following summary of comparative pay and conditions in the Common Market countries:

“Their wages are still probably lower, but not very much so except in Italy and to a lesser extent the Netherlands, but they are rising more rapidly. Their hours worked are shorter, though the working week in some cases is still longer. They get more paid holidays. They devote a higher proportion of their national income to social security. Their occupational training schemes are probably mostly better. At the present rate of progress, Britain looks like becoming a backward country by European standards, before many years have gone.”

For many years, ever since German industry got on its feet again after the war, British politicians and business men have told the British workers that they should model themselves on the hard-working, thrifty, non-striking German workers, who from the German employers’ point of view were exemplary. This idea has helped a little to colour the views of many employers in favour of getting inside: but perhaps they were wrong after all.

Last November it was being discovered by German business men and economists that the German worker was up to the same tricks as British workers, taking advantage of low employment to push up wages. The Financial Times diagram published on November 22nd, showing wages forging ahead of output per hour and of employers’ sales receipts referred to German workers, but it might easily have been taken for an article about British workers any time in the post-war years.

This should not surprise anyone. The European Common Market is not a different kind of capitalist entity—only a larger one. Whether the British Government goes in or not, British workers should be looking to promote their own Socialist working class unity with workers everywhere, not just in Western Europe.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Common Market Special Survey: 4. Agriculture (1962)

From the January 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Agriculture may not be the most important problem for Britain in its negotiations over the Common Market but it is certainly going to be one of the trickiest.

Nor should it be forgotten that agriculture has been causing a great deal of trouble within the Common Market itself. Only recently, France declared that she would veto any fresh moves on the industrial front until West Germany showed more enthusiasm for removing the barriers on the agricultural side. The motive, of course, was the usual one—France is keen to get a larger slice of the German market for her agricultural exports.

The fact that Denmark, another large exporter of foodstuffs, has also applied for membership of the Community will cause further complications. It will be interesting to see how all these conflicting interests are finally sorted out, if in fact they ever are.

Britain

But there can be no doubt that British agriculture has plenty to worry over. Home farmers are overwhelmingly opposed to Britain going into the Common Market and have done their utmost to prevent it. There is equally no doubt that it is fear for their agriculture that has caused many Commonwealth countries to make such an outcry about Britain’s application to join. But in this modern world of capitalism it is the interests of industry that call the tune and the Macmillan Government has gone on regardless of both farmers and Commonwealth.

British agriculture has good reasons to be wary of the Six. In the first place, in spite of all the efforts during and since the war to step up home production, the U.K. has still to import more than half its food. Most of these imports come from the Commonwealth—meat and dairy produce from New Zealand and Australia, wheat and coarse grains from Australia and Canada, and such things as fruit from all three. Much of this comes in at preferential tariff rates, though this benefit is not so important as it once was.

On the other hand, the Common Market is virtually self-sufficient in foodstuffs. Indeed, certain countries like France and the Netherlands are now actually piling up surpluses. France in particular, as a result of improved methods since the war, is rapidly coming to the point of crisis in the production of some items, for which she is becoming desperate to find markets. Nor is the position going to improve since she has vast capacity to expand. By far the largest country in area (second only to Russia in Europe), and larger still in actually usable agricultural land, it has been estimated that with fully improved methods she could supply the whole of the Six with some products, notably wheat and beef. It is the fear that France may insist on supplying Britain with wheat that is causing Canada particular concern.

Both France and the Netherlands, and Denmark if she also joins, see Britain’s entry into the Common Market as providing a welcome outlet for their agricultural exports. The British farmer takes a much less rosy view of the prospect.

His pessimism is made worse when he considers a further important difference between the way his products are sold compared with the Six. This is strange on the face of it because food prices are generally higher within the Six than they are in this country and this should apparently be to his advantage.

But the reality is not so re-assuring. The reason why food prices are generally lower in Britain is because it has long been the policy of British governments to keep them down artificially. Their method of doing this has been to allow food to come into the country almost free of restriction and let prices find their own level irrespective of the fact that these prices are below those at which the home farmer can produce economically.

This policy if left unchecked would, of course, soon bring most British farmers to bankruptcy. To avoid this, the Government has regularly made up the difference between the farmers general price and the imported price by means of subsidies. This difference is certainly not chicken-feed—it amounts to about £250 million a year, plus many more millions in the way of other payments to assist and improve their farming.

The Six

This procedure is in marked contrast to the system in most countries of the Six, whose governments have been more inclined towards policies of keeping out foreign imports by means of tariffs and quotas. They have been able to do this mainly because they are largely self-sufficient in food and the result has been that though prices are higher they are at the same lime more closely related to the farmers’ actual costs.

In practical terms, of course, the two systems boil down to essentially the same thing. All that happens is that the subsidies needed to help out the British farmer are found from extra taxation so that overall the amount actually received is near enough the same. But it has been an exceedingly useful method for the British capitalist class in keeping food prices stable and thus of helping to keep wages under better control. It was, of course, used to its greatest effect during wartime and in the critical period immediately afterwards.

The Six have already made it clear, however, that they will expect Britain to fall in with their system. It is also pretty obvious that the British Government will not in fact be unduly upset about this since whatever merits the subsidy system has had in the past it has been causing them a lot of headaches recently. They are particularly restive about the financial burden: assistance to be paid out to farmers is even higher than usual this year, enough to make them wonder whether the time hasn’t come to have done with it altogether.

Prices

If therefore Britain does join the Six a rise in food prices seems highly likely. Estimates about this vary from a shilling or two per head per week to something very much more, but the truth is that nobody really knows. One thing is certain, however, and that is that it would provide the Government with a wonderful opportunity to whittle down the effective buying power of wages at a time when the wind of competition within the Common Market was already making the British worker feel chilly.

Agriculture is notoriously a difficult subject to make forecasts about. Governments play about with it and it has always provided a voting lobby sufficiently powerful to make political parties commit themselves to all sorts of peculiar things to win farmers’ support at election times. In addition, until the atomic bomb came along to make the question academic, capitalist governments everywhere have always had some regard for its importance in times of war. The fear of blockade has always been a bogey for them. One can never be certain, then, of what will happen when governments start talking about agriculture and even less certain when a group of their spokesmen get round a conference table to bargain and horsetrade.

A few things can be said, however. It seems fairly certain, for example, that if Britain does go into the Common Market ii will do so at the considerable expense of Commonwealth countries. Present indications are that whilst the Six may how some special consideration for New Zealand, whose economy is almost completely independent upon Britain taking all her meat products and butter, they will have little time for the claims of Australia and Canada who will have to start looking elsewhere for markets for their products. Australia has in fact already begun to do this and is now selling to China and Japan.

Bigger Units

Agricultural interests in France and the Netherlands would gain from this, though Denmark will provide extra competition if she also joins. Italian horticulture will also be given a fillip since the hitherto heavily protected U.K. market seems almost certain to be made more accessible. It is hard to see anything other than a catastrophic effect upon British horticulture, in fact, unless the negotiators bring something remarkable out of the bag. Expensively-heated glasshouses are no match economically for free sunshine and fast transport and can only have their existence in (he mad world of capitalism.

But even more clearly than with industry, the future of European agriculture is going to reflect the inexorable drive of capitalism towards bigger units, mechanisation, and more economic production.

In Italy, 44 per cent. of the population are still dependant upon the land for their living. In France the proportion is 25 per cent. and even in Germany it is 15 per cent. The figure in Britain is 5 per cent.

All these countries are taking deliberate measures to get their peasants off the land and into the towns and factories, though economic forces themselves are probably doing the work more effectively on their behalf. Hundreds of thousands of small farmers are fated to leave their farms in the not far-off future and their land will be merged into larger holdings, revert to its natural state, or be transformed into state forests.

Even in this country the process is still going on. Many small farmers are only able to keep going because of their subsidies from the State. Each year still shows a drop in the number of people getting their living from the land.

The Common Market, therefore, only throws into prominence a process which has been part and parcel of capitalism since its existence. In fact, the Common Market is itself a reflection of this process on the international field. The same impetus which forces firms to amalgamate within a country’s boundaries now forces the countries themselves to look outside their boundaries.

Surplus

But whilst the implications for industry of this process are great, for agriculture they are enormous. That is why all the negotiators at Brussels, whether they belong to Britain, the Six, Denmark, Ireland, or any other country with agricultural interests to protect, are going to talk tough and bargain hard.

And, very much in their minds and hanging darkly over all, is the shadow of surplus. Surplus in a world where half the population live near to starvation and another quarter not very much better.

And that for us is the real dark shadow over all this business of agriculture and the Common Market.

Stan Hampson

The Common Market Special Survey: 5. The Commonwealth (1962)

From the January 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is going to be a trying time for our politicians. British capitalism has been forced, after much dithering, to face up to the harsh realities of its own world. No more can it ignore the increasing challenge to its position in a highly competitive world market, and the fact that the relatively easy markets of the British Commonwealth are no longer sufficient to offset this. As The Observer pointed out almost three years ago:

“At the moment the Commonwealth accounts for nearly half our trade but it would be foolish to pretend that it offers anything like the growing market of Europe.”

This must be a major consideration to our rulers, despite the high-flown claptrap which they have talked on occasions about “Commonwealth family of Nations.” So Britain goes cap in hand to “the Six” and Tory Ministers make a flying tour of the major Commonwealth Countries in an effort to ride out the inevitable storm of protest which their decision has aroused.

Since the end of the Second World War in particular, successive Governments have never tired of telling us how important it is that Britain should export more and more. So perhaps we may be forgiven if we have forgotten that Britain itself is a large and important market for goods coming from Canada, Australia and New Zealand, for example. And it is the fear of losing this which is behind the undignified squabbles which have taken place over the past few months.

Canada

In a recent survey by The Times we read that “. . . . there is an undoubted fear that by Britain’s closer association with Europe, Canada is going to suffer in what is her second best market, especially in agricultural and chemical products as well as in a newly found market for her manufactured goods.” So seriously do the Canadian capitalists view the prospects, that only on November 11th last, The Observer was able to report that relations between Canada and Britain on the Common Market issue were worse than at any time since preliminary negotiation began.

Over the other side of the world in New Zealand, there is near-panic at the threat of a shrinking market for primary products—lamb, wool, butter and cheese—in Great Britain. Understandably so from the viewpoint of the N.Z. farmers. Apparently fifty-seven per cent. of their total exports were sold in the United Kingdom in 1959. And more recently The Dominion (Wellington) asserted that some eighty per cent. by weight of N.Z. dairy products now go to the British Market. The remarks of Prime Minister Holyoake further emphasise with what trepidation the future is viewed; just listen to his words, reported in the National Party Journal Freedom for July, 1961 :

“It is no exaggeration to say that our dairy industry and our lamb production have been based on and are designed to serve the needs of the United Kingdom Market. They have been based on the idea that our expanding production could receive a full and remunerative outlet. Without it, the whole economic future of New Zealand is thrown out of balance.”

Strong words indeed! And matched equally by (hose of leading government spokesmen in nearby Australia. Their Common Market Communique issued on July 11th speaks of “. . . the serious adverse consequences for Australian producers and for the Australian balance of payments which would confront Australia if the United Kingdom were to enter the Common Market on a basis which failed to safeguard Australian trade interests for the future.”

Australia Looks Elsewhere

Wheat, meat, dairy products, bas; metals, sugar and fruits constitute the bulk of Australian exports to Britain and are currently valued at almost £200 million Sterling. The Minister for Trade, Mr. McEwen, has asserted that Britain is Australia’s biggest market. So little wonder then, that there was such “full and frank” discussion with Mr. Duncan Sandys when he paid his visit a few weeks before.

But despite the forebodings of official spokesmen, it does not seem that Britain’s decision has taken the Australian Government completely by surprise. For some years now, attempts have been made to find alternative markets, and it is interesting to learn that Japan has now become the biggest buyer of Australian wool and a top-level buyer of many other important products. Trade with Japan in 1960 was worth £160 millions.

In a press interview on last July Mr. Menzies admitted the great political implications of the Common Market. He has described it as possibly “a third power” in the world :

“(But) we record our view that the Commonwealth will not be quite the same . . . this will lead to a loosening of Commonwealth relations.“

So where will they turn then? Might there be just the possibility that yet “a fourth power” will emerge, embracing Australia, New Zealand and other far eastern States, and with Japan as a leading member? Does it sound too far fetched? Nothing should surprise us in a capitalist world. Canada in her turn could swing politically in favour of the U.S.A. if the tariff walls of the Common Market go up against her. She already has close economic links and American capitalists have large investments in Canada.

And for the workers of the Commonwealth? Well, there is one market which they have always had in common with their opposite numbers in every other part of the world, and that is the labour market. This basic fact will not, of course, be altered. They will remain workers facing the common problem of Capitalism—and how to get rid of it.

Eddie Critchfield

Direct elections: another non-issue (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The attitude of the Socialist Party of Great Britain towards the Common Market has been consistent: that it is a political and trading arrangement between capitalist States. Whether Britain should have gone in, should stay in or should withdraw does not concern the working class. Thus, during the 1975 referendum, we urged workers to vote neither “YES” nor “NO” but, if they wanted Socialism, to indicate this by writing the word “SOCIALISM” across their ballot paper.

This attitude distinguished us from all others calling themselves “socialists”, most of whom were urging a "NO” vote on a variety of grounds. For instance, we were urged to oppose the Common Market on the ground that it rules out the possibility of establishing “socialism” in Britain because it infringes “the sovereignty of parliament”. But, in imagining that Socialism could be established in just one country or that “socialist measures” could be taken within the framework of capitalism, those who argue like this show that they don’t know the first thing about Socialism, which can only be world-wide like the system, capitalism, it will be replacing.

What such people in fact stand for is not Socialism at all, but British state capitalism. The sort of anti- Common Market propaganda put out by these people—the left wing of the Labour Party and the so-called Communist Party—is falsely done in the name of Socialism. By waving the Union Jack and playing on British nationalism, they reveal themselves as opponents. Socialism can only come into being when workers throughout the world have, among other things, got rid of all national prejudices and come to regard themselves as citizens of the world.

The Common Market, even if it evolved into a United States of Europe or something similar, does not make the establishment of Socialism any harder. It does not undermine the institutions (the ballot box and parliament) which the working class should use to establish Socialism. It is true that the Common Market does transfer the right to legislate in certain fields to its own law-making body, the Council of Ministers (not the European Parliament which is not a legislative body at all). But the Council of Ministers is made up of representatives from the governments of the Member States, which in turn are responsible to their elected parliaments. Thus, if we argue at this purely constitutional level (which apparently we must when dealing with the arguments of the Eric Heffers and Norman Atkinsons), the Common Market could not hold up the establishment of Socialism, for, if socialist majorities existed in the national parliaments of its Member States, this would automatically mean that the Common Market’s law-making body would also be controlled by socialists.

We are not interested in using parliaments to pass laws dealing with trade, patents, social security, free movement of labour, etc.—in short, laws to administer capitalism—but only in using them for the one revolutionary purpose of abolishing capitalism and establishing Socialism. The diminution of the powers of the British parliament brought about by the Common Market does not mean that it—or the parliaments of the other Member States— can no longer be used as an instrument to establish Socialism.

The so-called European Parliament is not really a parliament in the generally accepted sense of the word. It has no law-making powers (and has a final say as to how money should be spent in a very limited sphere) and plays a purely consultative rôle. Common Market regulations—which really do have the force of law, some being directly applicable in Member States without needing to be enacted by national parliaments as well—are made by the Council of Ministers on proposals from the Commission in Brussels. It is the Council of Ministers, not the European Parliament, which in the Common Market carries out the functions normally associated with parliaments (law-making, approval of the budget).

Nevertheless, it has been agreed (by the Council of Ministers!) that the European Parliament, instead of being appointed as now by the national parliaments from amongst their members, should be directly elected in all-Europe elections to be held in May or June next year. That these elections will take place is not yet absolutely certain since each Member State has to pass legislation to permit them in its country and if any one fails to do so then there will be no elections anywhere.

The “left wing” of the Labour Party, in accordance with its nationalist state-capitalist aim, is trying to stop Britain passing the necessary legislation. Once again we are told that direct elections to the European Parliament is something socialists should campaign against. Once again we disagree. Nevertheless, we can recognize that it is better that political bodies under capitalism should be directly elected instead of appointed from above; this makes it easier for the working class, when they have become socialists, to take them out of the hands of the capitalist class.

This does not mean we advocate direct elections to the European Parliament, but merely that, now this has been offered by our rulers, it is something that can be accepted. Thus, our attitude to the elections when (and if) they take place next year will be the same as to all other elections. We will use them to publicize Socialism; and we shall be urging those who want Socialism to write “SOCIALISM”— or “SOCIALISME” or “SOZIALISMUS” or “SOCIALISMO”, as the case may be—across their ballot papers.

Adam Buick

By-Elections: The Government’s reverses (1962)

From the July 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

That was an interesting flurry of by-elections. Now that the votes have been counted, the shouting has died and the government are left with some nasty wounds to lick, it is time for the summing up. Not, mark you, in the sense that the political correspondent of the Daily This or the Sunday That has summed up. They can tell us efficiently enough why one candidate beat another, and what effect this might have upon the government. There is need, now, for a different perspective to be put on these matters. What are the by-elections worth? Will they change anything?

The government are certainly in difficulties although there is of course nothing unusual in that. Have we ever known a government which has not run into squalls in its attempts to organise capitalism? Even so, at least one of the present problems is in some ways unique. We refer, of course, to the Common Market negotiations, which face the British capitalist class with their most agonising decision for a long time. The gamble they took years ago, that the European Economic Community would not become a viable enough organisation to cast doubt on the value of the Commonwealth Preference system, has not come off. This has left the British ruling class in the humiliating situation of having to bargain away some of their cherished advantages for a chance at the European market—provided they can also break the stony resistance of de Gaulle.

Should they abandon New Zealand to its fate in the world meat and dairy market? Can they persuade the six in Europe to let them keep the protective tariffs for some Commonwealth products and still take advantage of the Common Market? These problems are such that the Empire builders in the palmy days of Victoria never thought to be confronted with. Neither did their modern counterparts in the Conservative Party. That is why the Tories—and the Labour Party, for that matter —are split over the Common Market.

Nor is all well on the home front, where the government are desperately trying to hold a broken line on their wages policy. Keeping wages in check has always been a problem for capitalism's governments, in this country and abroad. For governments are there to run society in the interests of its ruling class, who rule because they own. The ruling class are the people, in one way and another, whom we work for and who pay us our wages. The big problem, for us as well as for them, is that the more we get as wages the less they get as profit. That is why wages are such a persistent cause of dispute to capitalism and why governments have to try to hold them down. Since the war, with employment at a high level, the pressure has been for wages to go up. And since the war, from Cripps' freeze to Lloyd’s pause and guiding light, governments have tried to keep them in check.

The Tories have presented their wages policy as sober and responsible and have damned anybody who runs counter to it as the blackest of black sheep. Mr. Macmillan told the last Conservative women’s conference:

Some employers, selfishly secure in the knowledge that they can recoup themselves from higher prices at home, may give in too easily to unreasonable demands. Some unions, arrogant with organised power, will try to grab too large a slice of the cake.

This, and the other speeches in the same style, may have impressed the well-hatted Tory women but its effect upon, say, the dockers and the nurses (who, said the Prime Minister, should have a large and immediate increase — “ If we could be guided solely by our hearts ”) and the other workers in the pay queue was probably negligible.

Because workers, whether they are “respectable” civil servants or less “respectable” dockers, and whether they are called selfish and arrogant or any other name, will always struggle to improve their wages. They cannot get away from it; the relationship of worker to employer which pervades capitalist society sees to that. While capitalism lasts, there will always be a class struggle over wages and other conditions of employment.

But if the Common Market and wages are two of the government’s worries, can we say that they had any influence on the by-elections? Do workers weigh up such matters and cast their vote accordingly? If they do, there must be a crushing majority in this country in favour of the Common Market, to judge from the lost deposit of the anti-Common Market candidate in Derbyshire West. And if the workers do weigh up the issues involved in an. election, how thoroughly do they do so? They apparently missed the fact that the post war Labour government, despite its professions to having human interests at heart, started the British hydrogen bomb programme and took this country into the Korean war, which might at one stage have exploded into a world conflict. Whatever the reasons for the Labour Party's defeat in 1951, its zeal for prosecuting capitalism's wars was not amongst them.

Similarly, the Conservative Party is kept in power by the ignorant docility of the working class. The Tories do not see their votes decline as a result of their being the men who gambled with world war in their Suez adventure. They do not lose M.P.'s because they are the government in charge of the British bomb tests, which play their part in poisoning the atmosphere in the search for an all-powerful weapon of destruction. If the Tories do suffer a decline, as they did in 1957 and 1958, it is not for these reasons and they can soon come bouncing back into favour and into an even more secure majority, as they did in 1959.

Why, then, are the votes at present running against the government? The people who profess to know —the newspapers’ political correspondents — have their theories. The Guardian thinks that it can be put down to “impatience” (they are impatient with the government themselves); The Economist has spoken of ineffective public relations; another observer has said the electorate are “bored” with the government. If these reasons have any substance, it would be nice to know why the electoral mood can change so easily. Were the workers bored and impatient in 1958 but patiently interested enough in 1959 to put in an overwhelming Tory vote? And why, basically, are they bored and impatient?

The truth is that workers vote for capitalism, whether it is capitalism organised by a Labour or a Conservative government. These governments can often be made to look foolish and impotent by the caprices of the very social system they are trying to run. The Attlee government did look foolish over the 1947 fuel crisis and over potato rationing. The Tories are impotent to control the opposing pressures of wage claims and the temptation to inflate the currency. It is an easy thing to poke fun at a government which is in such difficulties. Yet simply to vote against a government, to switch support from one capitalist party to another, is just as foolish and futile. And worse; because to do this is to fly in the face of all facts, all the evidence, all history, it is a depressingly ignorant thing that the millions of working class voters do at election time.

Yet we do not need to look very hard at the world around us to realise that there is a desperate need for an end to the political ignorance of the workers. Consider, for example, the letter which The Guardian published on June 1st. last; a tragically moving letter from a mother whose little girl had died from leukaemia. This mother is convinced that her child's death was caused by radiation from bomb tests and perhaps she is right. Some radiation, we know, is natural but we also know that bomb tests can cause leukaemia and other frightful illnesses. And the men who decide on the bomb tests also know this, of course. The mother wrote bitterly of the world’s important statesmen assuring us that the danger from tests is “negligible” and of what the word means. For her, ‘negligible” risk meant a baby obese from the multitude of drugs which were pumped into her, a baby choking on its own blood in the night and crying for help to a helpless mother.

This is capitalism. The bomb tests go on, regardless of the pain and suffering they cause, because they are necessary to capitalism, and that is what the bored and the impatient and the ignorant vote for. That is the perspective in which we must view the by-elections. The dead child's mother pleads for the major political parties to take notice of what the ordinary people of this country want. But in fact she can only get the sort of world she wants when the ordinary people decide that they will not leave their wants to be interpreted by political leaders, major or minor. It is worth thinking over this one, the next time we have to put those crosses on the Ballot papers.

Ivan

The Passing Show: Social revolution in Japan (1963)

The Passing Show Column from the July 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social revolution in Japan

Under the above heading The Times told us recently of changes in Japan brought about by the war. But if the reader expects to learn that the wealth producers, the Japanese workers, have taken over, he will be disappointed though he should not be surprised. What in fact the article deals with primarily is the rise of new propertied group and families in place of the old.

The richest man in Japan has an income of 440m. yen (£440,000) a year. He is Mr. Konosuke Matsusha, chairman of the Matsusha Electric Industrial Company. His declared income is nearly twice as large as that of anyone else in the country. According to figures based on tax returns for 1962. the 20 richest men in Japan have incomes ranging from £121,000 to £440,000. All but one are industrialists. Some of the names in the list are almost unknown to the general public and the famous pre-war names—Iwasaki (founders of the Mitsubishi combine), Okura, Mitsui and Sumito Mo—do not appear anywhere.

Of course, there has been no social revolution for the other Japanese, those whose names are always unknown. The latest figures published by the International Labour Office show average earnings in Japanese manufacturing industries, ’’including family allowances and end-of-year bonuses,” as 22,834 Yen, or about £22 16s. 8d. a month.

Bigger and Fewer Breweries

Official figures published in the April issue of Economic Trends showed how far take-overs have gone in industry as a whole. In eight years, 1954-1961, £1,600 million was spent on take-over bids, but of this total nearly half came from the 98 companies each with assets of £25 million or more, though they represent only a tiny proportion of the 2,600 companies whose shares are quoted on the Stock Exchanges of this century. Altogether 3,400 companies were taken over (most of them not quoted on the stock exchange).

One industry in which amalgamation has gone far, but with more to come, is the brewing industry.

In place of a multiplicity of breweries many of them small and local, a writer in the Financial Times (May 25) writes of the industry now being dominated by six major groups.

What the boards aimed to achieve by take-overs was to consolidate brewing and distribution in large regions and thus achieve big economies and larger profits. Local breweries are being closed down and a considerable number of the local ”milds, bitters and light ales” are disappearing, ”no longer worth producing in small quantities.” Standardisation of a smaller number of nationally advertised brews is the order of the day for capitalism in brewing. It is ironic to recall the old argument against Socialism that it would deprive us of the variety of choice that capitalism gave us. Maybe the local varieties were no better (or worse) than the TV advertised popular brands, but that is not what drinkers were told before the change took place.

Common Market under a Cloud

When the drive for British entry into the Common Market was in full and hopeful flood the line taken by its advocates was to say that all was well inside the Six and British industry must be in to share in the benefits.

It was equally to be expected that immediately entry was blackballed by De Gaulle, they should nearly all have a change of heart and say that it really did not matter after all.

Now a few months have passed and some of the earlier arguments have begun to look rather thin. In place of the supposed absence of labour disputes we have seen massive strikes in France and Germany. French farming interests which were partly responsible for the objection to British entry have now brought the French and German governments into conflict, and both of them into conflict with American farmers over the entry of their exports into Europe.

The bloom has gone off the German industrial and stock exchange boom, because of falling profit margins and stronger pressure for wage increases.

At the same time, helped by some industrial recovery and rising profits, many British capitalists and politicians are thinking that they can do better out of Europe, and British exports into the Common Market have increased, as also exports to Russia.

The fact is that both before and after, the arguments were based on wrong or too limited assumptions. The European Common Market carries no more guarantee of permanent rapid expansion than any other large or small region of capitalism, and no more able to escape wage disputes and fluctuating profit margins.

And what happens to one industry inside or outside the Market is not necessarily the experience of other industries. . While motor car exports to Europe have been rising, and the Ready Mix Concrete Company claims record sales on the Continent, one firm, Wilmot Breedon, producers of motors, aircraft engines and domestic appliances, reports that the profits made in Britain were overshadowed by the heavy losses of its French subsidiary.

So for the moment the Common Market is rather out of favour.

What Mr. Profumo did to the Stock Exchange.

One of the emptiest dreams of the capitalists is to imagine to themselves how happy they could all be if only they could go on making, profits without the constant interruption of “politics." One of a cloudless sky politics keeps blowing up. On Monday, June 10th according to the Evening Standard, the London Stock Exchange had its biggest slump since Cuba—not this time the work of one of the K’s, but of Mr. Profumo. “Dealers, nervous about the eventual outcome of the Profumo affair, marked share prices down all round."

The same issue of the Evening Standard had an article asking whether Mr. Profumo, out of politics, can hope to find an outlet for his talents in business. The argument raises diverting side issues:

A man in public office has to have a high moral character and appear totally incorruptible. . . In business, however, standards are not always that high . . . But the business world doesn’t think much of a liar, especially if he gets found out

The writer of the article, the City Editor of the Standard, asks: “If he came knocking at your door would you give him a job ? ” But there is no urgency about it:

The ex-Minister of War comes from a rich family. The Profumos have for many years controlled the £34,000,000 Provident Life Association of London.

Most of the shares are held by trusts in which Mr. Profumo has an important role. In 1961 the trusts sold some £1,000,000 worth of shares for cash in a public issue. But they still own around two-thirds of the company’s Ordinary share capital, Worth some £3,700,000 at current market prices.

Mr. Profumo, of course, is only one of the beneficiaries. But he must draw quite a useful income from the investment.

Last year Provident Life paid out £120,000 in Ordinary dividends, of which the trusts must have received a considerable share.

Edgar Hardcastle

50 Years Ago: Subsidizing food destruction (2024)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the first pieces of legislation to be presented to the House of Commons this session has been the Horticulture (Special Payments) Bill. The intention of this bill is to provide for payments to be made to commercial growers of horticultural products, especially growers of apples and pears, facing ‘special difficulties’ as a result of Britain’s entry into the Common Market.(…..)

As we have pointed out before, governments, of whatever political persuasion, exist to protect the interests of the capitalist class (ie, the owners of the means of life). This they do in a number of ways — tariff barriers and subsidies to producers for example — always bearing in mind that by such measures they expect a healthier national capitalism to be the outcome.

The Horticulture (Special Payments) Bill is just such a measure, and has been welcomed as such. Payments are to be made to growers of apples and pears who discontinue production. The scheme is expected to cost £4.5 million to £5 million over the period 1974-78. This figure is far in excess of the £440,000 spent up to mid 1972 under a similar scheme (see Socialist Standard January 1973). There are to be checks on the growers who apply for the ‘grubbing up’ subsidy to ensure that the orchards dug up are not replanted for at least five years. In effect the government are subsidising the destruction of productive resources.

In this way, it is hoped, the competitive efficiency of British horticulture will be improved by reducing the amount of produce reaching the market. As a result market prices are expected to continue their upward trend after a period during the ’sixties when prices stagnated while costs increased. ‘Surpluses’, that is more being produced than the market can absorb profitably, could upset this state of affairs. As Roger Moate, M.P. for the Kent constituency of Faversham, pointed out:

‘It needs only a small amount of surplus at any moment to disrupt the market entirely, and a grower can quickly lose almost his annual profit because of the disruption’ (Hansard, 16 November, 1973).

So once again, in a world where food is short, market considerations get priority over the needs of people. All we need now is for a cynic to point out that the trees dug up could help to alleviate the fuel crisis.

(From the article Subsidizing Food Destruction by Gwynn Thomas, Socialist Standard, January 1974)

Doing the Splits (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

How seriously should we take the splits in the Labour and Conservative parties over the Common Market ? Is there likely to be some massive realignment of capitalist politics, with Roy Jenkins leading a coalition of Liberals and pro-Market Labourites in a new party ? Will the great machine of capitalist politics suffer irreparable damage, or can we still sleep of nights secure in the knowledge that it will continue to deceive, coerce and exploit us ?

To begin with, nobody should allow themselves to think that the splits have anything to do with principles. Of course all members of the capitalist parties say their political allegiance is based on principle, but issues like the Common Market, which they say are also matters of fundamental principle, cross the party lines so that George Brown agrees with Heath, Wilson with Enoch Powell and so on. This shows how flexible are the “principles” of our parties and it tells us something about their splits.

One notable, but not unusual, feature of the splits over the Common Market is that both the big parties are suffering at the same time. This makes it difficult for either of them to adopt the attitude of pious shock which they affect when only the other side is split. Then they can say that such disputes are evidence of their opponents’ irresponsibility. When they themselves are divided on some issue they claim that this goes to show what a lively lot they are, vibrant with debate yet tolerant and united enough to contain the argument and apply it for the benefit of all those voters outside. This is all part of the jolly game of politics.

In this country, it is the Labour Party who have become famous for their splits, very often splashing them into the public eye. This has tended to promote the idea that the Tories are more stable and united but there is some evidence that this is not true. Since the 1929 Labour government, the Labour Party have had only four leaders—Lansbury, Attlee, Gaitskell and now Wilson—and of these Lansbury was never more than a caretaker after the defection of MacDonald. During the same period the Tories have had seven leaders —Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Home and Heath—and in almost every case they have changed to the accompaniment of a public dispute.

At the same time, behind those gentlemanly Tory facades, there have been fierce splits over matters of policy. For example, Macmillan was much occupied with persuading his party to move out of the Edwardian era (which he was said to personify) and to accept the decline of the British Commonwealth. This seemed to be no more than accepting the obvious and the inevitable, but Macmillan was bitterly fought by a strong section of the Tories headed by Lord Salisbury, who always looked and spoke and thought like an archetypal Tory backwoodsman. For Salisbury, the final blow was the surrender of independence to Cyprus and he resigned to snipe at the Tories for their policies on the old Empire and to mumble about the shocking treatment being handed out to our kith and kin in Rhodesia.

Life was no more placid for the Tories before the war. They were split on the best method of dealing with the rebirth of German capitalism; when that matter was settled in the forties they found scapegoats for their own doubts and disunity in Baldwin and Chamberlain. Of these two, Chamberlain always kept a pretty firm grip on his party, at least until the end, but Baldwin’s career at the top was almost continual turmoil, as he was under constant attack.

The Labour Party do not have the Tories’ reputation of the party of gentlemen and usually conduct their rows like public house brawls. Perhaps that is why they are so famous for their splits, which have very often blinded the voters to the fact that Labour is always solidly united on the basic issue of trying for power to run British capitalism. Their most damaging split, in 1931, was not on any fundamental issue; they were united in the opinion that the working class had to suffer in some way during that time of crisis for British capitalism. None of them ever suggested Socialism as a way out of the whole sorry mess.

Having survived the debacle in 1931, Labour had a comparatively tranquil time until they came to power after the war, when the group which eventually became known as the Bevanites were constantly rocking the boat, which was in any case leaky and unstable. Here again the splits were never on fundamentals but were always over the best—often, quite openly, the most vote catching — methods of running British capitalism. In the end, at the Brighton conference of 1957, Bevan shocked many of the followers to whom he was a new Messiah by publicly making his peace with Gaitskell. The conference was debating nuclear armaments and Bevan, who was supposed to be the man who would guide us all to Socialism, argued that British capitalism needed these arms to protect its position against the other capitalist powers and that failure to recognise this would be electorally disastrous.

At that time the Labour Party, in the aftermath of Suez, were smelling the approach of power. In the event the Tories hung on and when the election came in 1959 Labour’s defeat threw them into another uproar of dispute, with the Gaitskellites arguing that the party’s traditional policies (or rather their traditional propaganda, because the policies were so easily ignored by governments) should be abandoned. This was to be, not because the policies were not socialist, not even that they went against working class interests under capitalism. It was simply that they lost the party votes. The next couple of years saw another row, this time over nuclear weapons, until Wilson came along and settled the whole matter by running British capitalism with a single-minded concern for the interests of the ruling class, while assuring everybody that he was doing something entirely different.

It very often happens, that a split reveals a future leader—sometimes in the role of peacemaker, like Wilson, sometimes as a man of honesty. In this Common Market split in the Labour Party, Roy Jenkins has come into prominence; he has been a consistent supporter of British capitalism joining Europe and perhaps one explanation of all the coverage he has had recently is the publicity boys’ surprise at finding a politician who says the same thing on more than one occasion.

It is distinctly pathetic, to see the Labour Party putting so much faith in Jenkins, perhaps as an overreaction to the exposure of Wilson as a tawdry trickster. They were once similarly hopeful about Wilson, as they were about all the many leaders who disappointed them before. Once again they are ignoring facts; the records show that Jenkins is no less cynical, no less a vote-grabbing politician, than the rest. For example, in a book he wrote in 1959 — The Labour Case — he avowed that Labour’s policies could be carried out “. . . without any question of an increase in the tax burden. On the contrary, they should leave room for substantial reductions.”

Apart from the fact that Jenkins was here descending in his anxiety to grab votes for his party, to pandering to the ignorance of workers who think the level of taxation affects their material interests, it is clear now that he was making another of those empty politicians’ promises. The Wilson government based a lot of their policies on steeply increased taxation—and Jenkins, as Chancellor of the Exchequer for about two years, was directly responsible for a lot of it. He was the inspiration for a lot of the Wilson government’s attacks on workers’ living standards, frequently lecturing us from the television screen on our spendthrift ways which were causing such terrible poverty among the grouse moors and the slums of Park Lane and Eaton Square. In a recent debate in the Commons (see The Guardian, 10 November 1971) he denounced unemployment just as if his government was not in power when it first became a serious problem and attacked the Tories for their ". . . silly little argument . . . that unemployment was an inevitable result of wage claims, and that those responsible must just take the consequences.” Yet this is what he said when he was Chancellor, at a union conference which was debating a motion condemning an incomes policy backed by legal sanctions:

An uncontrolled wages situation could undermine the Government’s central purpose, by putting back into people’s hands the purchasing power that the Budget had siphoned off . . . (The Times 25/4/69).

Jenkins is said to be a “liberal”, yet he did not resign over the racist laws passed by the Wilson government, which outdid the Tories in pandering to working class colour prejudice. He supported the reintroduction of prescription charges — much higher than the Tory charges which Labour had stopped; the raising of the school leaving age, the end of free school milk, the cuts in the housing programme. He was prominent in a government which kept the British nuclear weaponry. And that is only part of the list of anti-working class acts for which honest Roy, martyr to his conscience, must take his full share of responsibility.

So if the Labour Party decide to put their faith in Jenkins as yet another new saviour, they will be as bitterly disappointed as they were with Wilson, MacDonald and the rest. Jenkins may look and speak like a stern, unbending schoolmaster but what he actually is, is an ambitious capitalist politician. His function is to get power to run the affairs of the British capitalist class and to carry this out he is quite ready to join in the deception and the trickery which make an essential part of capitalist politics.

When the uproar over the Common Market has died down and workers who have been so fascinated by it, and who have been deceived into taking sides, have settled back into their proper, lowly place in capitalist society another incident will have been written into the history of politics. Then the whole futile business can start all over again.

Ivan