The problem is not the Tories . . . . (2024)

From the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘GENERAL ELECTION NOW. TORIES ROBBERS MUST GO’ screamed a recent headline in a Trotskyist paper. It could have been one of many but this one was from the March issue of Counterfire, an SWP fragment.

The article denounced ‘fourteen years of Tory rule’ as ‘fourteen years of austerity, of cuts in our standard of living, cuts to public services, cuts in wages and conditions, cuts in benefits and cuts to the NHS.’

This is a more or less accurate description of what has happened since 2010 when the Tories came into office (with the LibDems as their junior partners for the first five of these years). But correlation is not causation. That the Tories were responsible for all these things is the standard Labour Party line, the suggestion being that they would not have happened had there been a Labour government. But wouldn’t they? These sorts of things have been known to happen when there’s been a Labour government in office; in fact under every Labour government that there’s been.

The cuts to public services, benefits and the NHS since 2010 were imposed by the government as decisions on these are a government responsibility but, in the economic circumstances of the slump that followed the financial crash of 2008, the government had no real choice. The capitalist economy is driven by the quest for profits and any government has to give priority to helping this.

In a slump this means reducing taxes on profits and cutting back on government spending. In theory a government could choose to refuse to do this but that would only make things worse by prolonging the slump. The cuts, then, were forced on the government that happened to be in office at the time by the operation of the coercive economic laws of capitalism. If Labour had been in office for these fourteen years they would have had to have done much the same. In any event, the fall in the standard of living and worsening wages and working conditions are a direct result of capitalism having been in a slump. That’s what happens in a slump and no government can stop this.

Counterfire is of a different opinion. They suggest governments do have a free choice in the matter. The budget, their article stated:

‘is an attempt to con us into believing that there is not enough money to fund the basic services we need, and a decent income for everyone. This is a lie. The truth is that there is plenty of money to go round; the truth is that austerity, the impoverishment of the British people and the devastating cuts to the NHS and public services are a political choice’.

This is left-wing populism as its stupidest — the money is there but the government refuses to spend it to provide ‘a decent income for everyone;’ they are robbers; kick them out. The money — or at least some of it — is there but no government is going to prioritise using taxes to improve public services, even less to provide a ‘decent’ income for everyone. That’s not its remit. Capitalism’s economic laws force governments to give priority to profit-making and conditions for profit-making. As government spending comes from taxes which ultimately fall on profits, governments cannot simply increase taxes to improve living conditions for the population. Under capitalism production is for profit, and must be, not to meet people’s needs. No government can change or even challenge that.

There is reason to be believe that Counterfire know this — some of them have written books which indicate some knowledge of how capitalism works (one by Chris Nineham is reviewed in this issue) — and so are just being populist in a bid to gather a following. This is in the Leninist tradition of contempt for the intellectual ability of the working class. They think that workers are capable only of reaching a trade-union consciousness and so there’s no point in putting before them anything that goes beyond this. Hence the populist rabble-rousing.

The politics of the headline is equally incoherent. They want the ‘Tory robbers’ out and are calling for an immediate general election to bring this about. So they want the Tories to be voted out. In other words, for workers to vote for some other party. But they don’t say which. Their call could be interpreted as saying vote for any party whose candidate has a chance of beating the Tory one; which in practice would mean voting Labour in most constituencies but voting LibDem in ‘blue wall’ seats. It certainly rules out voting for the Greens or any fringe left-wing candidate such as those of Galloway’s Workers Party (which he says hopes to contest every constituency in Britain).

But supposing this happens and the Tories are voted out. That means that there will either be a Labour government or, less likely, some sort of Lib-Lab arrangement. Nothing else changes. The means of life continue to be owned and controlled by private capitalist businesses. The economy remains driven by business investment for profit. Profit, not satisfying people’s needs, is still the aim of production.

In these circumstances the new government won’t be able to behave much differently from how the Tories have been. It too will have to abide by the economic laws of capitalism and give priority to profit-making. It is certainly not going to allocate any of ‘the plenty of money to go round’ to reverse previous cuts. The likely future prime minister has said so in so many words. He told last year’s Labour Conference that a Labour government would not be ‘a cheque-book state’ and declared in December that ‘anyone who expects an incoming Labour government to quickly turn on the spending taps is going to be disappointed’. He at least understands the limitations capitalism places on what governments can do in this respect, even if Counterfire doesn’t (or feigns not to).

So what’s the point of kicking the Tories out (objectionable as they are and happy, as many will be, to see the back of them) just to replace them with others who will have to pursue the same basic policy of prioritising profit?

The problem is not the Tories, it’s capitalism. It’s capitalism that must go.

Adam Buick

Pathfinders: Doubleplusungood (2010)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Orwell as can be expected…

The UK science community has been heaving a small sigh of relief lately having suffered less damage than expected from the spending cuts. True, the boffins are facing a funding freeze, keeping their £4.6bn budget at 2010 levels for the next 5 years, meaning a probable cut through inflation of around 10 percent in real terms, however this is as nothing compared to the mass cattle-trucking of scientific projects in the direction of the knacker’s yard that many had expected. But before the techies had even reached for a pipette of champers in celebration they were sobered by the further alarming news that the director general for science and research, the official in charge of that science budget and traditionally from respectable scientific stock, could soon be replaced by a – gasp – civil servant (‘UK research spending decisions set for a shake-up’, New Scientist online, 17 November).

It would be a mystery to anyone who has been following the Orwellian tactics of the Con-Dem Coalition lately why scientists should be shocked at this. Indeed, despite what they may think, they have still got off lightly. It could have been far worse.

A miasma of doublethink pervades the Con-Dem Coalition’s every political pronouncement as they manoeuvre to secure their grubby rich friends every concession while bamboozling their victims into believing that they are the ones getting more ‘freedoms’. Home Secretary Theresa May, for example, has been loudly ridiculing the Equality legislation planned by that silly Harriet Har-person, claiming that inequality somehow makes you free (‘Theresa May scraps equality in the name of fairness’, Guardian, 17 November). The Equality Duty was designed to end decades of legal confusion in which victims of discrimination had virtually no chance of redress against big corporations, and instead to place the responsibility on employers to demonstrate through good practice that they were not discriminating in the workplace, a kind of guilty-until-proved innocent reversal of emphasis. Instead, in a spin of doubletalk, May uses the very failures of the old legislation to argue against any new legislation that might potentially solve the problem. In the name of fairness, the bosses get themselves off the hook and discriminated groups can look forward to having to make all the running to get anyone to listen to them – just as it’s always been. They are free to complain, and the bosses are free to ignore them, which is what the Coalition means by freedom.

 

Similarly emancipated are workers everywhere on medication, as the Government cuts the cojones from the drug regulatory body the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and hands prescription powers entirely to GPs. No longer shall poor old Mrs Jones be denied the £30,000 treatment that might have kept her in miserable pain for an extra six weeks, because that demonic nest of Doctor Deaths at NICE considered it not worth the money – now any GP can prescribe anything! Anything, that is, that their budget can afford and that they can be badgered or bluffed or blackmailed into buying by the omni-present pharmaceutical salesmen. No more Mr NICE Guy, now it’s Mr Market and drugs for whoever can pay the most and shout the loudest.

 

 Best to stay healthy and away from doctors then, but in that case you’ll be taking advice on how to stay healthy from the very businesses which have always devoted so much of their time and your money in making you unhealthy in the first place. With a cynicism that could collapse lungs, the Health Secretary has given up the usual murky practice of consulting with big business behind closed doors before making health policy, and handed the power of policy-making entirely over to the businesses. In what is one of the most blatant displays of English Tea Partyism, and in a broadside designed to de-mast the dreaded Food Standards Agency, Andrew Lansley has set up new ‘responsibility deal’ networks to deal with obesity, alcoholism, exercise, behavioural problems and health and safety at work, in which key consultants are members of Unilever, the Wine and Spirit Trade Organisation, Mars, all big supermarkets and a raft of other commercial interests not famous for their health credentials. In the craven old days, a minister would at least formulate policy first and then run it past these moguls to see what he could get away with. In the galloping gutlessness of the new order, Lansley has simply invited the moguls to come up with their proposals and run them past him, in order to see what he can get past the media. An early casualty of this supine approach has been the abandonment of the simple and easy to understand ‘traffic light’ nutritional coding system in favour of a different system known through studies to be incomprehensible to customers, despite the fact that some supermarkets had already agreed to give the traffic light system a try (‘Good for the nation’s health – or big business?’ Guardian, 13 November).

What next, one wonders? The handing of UK defence policy to the arms industry perhaps. Meanwhile the doublethink redoubles as public sector workers are being liberated from their jobs and told that they have the freedom to take over their former workplaces and run them as ‘John Lewis co-operatives’, after the style of the mutualised department store. Taking the name of this column cruelly in vain Francis Maude, the minister in the Cabinet Office in charge of civil servants, has launched 12 ‘Pathfinder’ initiatives, fledgling public-service but employee-owned mutuals who are the supposed trailblazers for a new era in which all responsibilities formerly borne by the state will now be borne by social workers and health visitors running their own co-ops. As Thatcher gave us ‘right-to-buy’, Maude is giving us ‘right-to-run’, but not everyone is fooled by the spin. As some pundits point out, such co-ops will have a huge uphill struggle, and most will collapse and be eaten up by, yes, you guessed it, the big corporations. And what is so liberating about exposing public services to the free market anyway? wonders Unite General Secretary Tony Woodley: “You go to John Lewis to buy a sofa or a fridge, not to have chemotherapy” (Guardian, 17 November)

In view of these developments, the science community should think itself lucky it’s only getting a civil servant to administer its budget. In a year from now it could be a McDonalds executive. The proof that capitalism is fundamentally not good for healthy science or the science of health is made clearer by the fact that, although government regulation solves none of the basic problems facing science in a money age, the further the drift towards an unregulated free market, the worse it gets for science, as indeed for everyone else.

Paddy Shannon

Voice From The Back: The madness of capitalism (2010)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The madness of capitalism

Capitalism is an insane society. Millions die with easily prevented or curable diseases whilst millions of dollars, pounds, euros and yens are spent on new ways to destroy human beings with ingenious methods of military mayhem, but surely capitalism has reached the epitome of madness when some children are trying to exist on less than £1 a day and we can read of the following insanity. “It’s simple, but no less appealing for that. Celine’s classic box bag may cost a pretty penny but its sleek lines make it among the most wanted bags of the season. Price: £2,150″ (The Independent, 20 September). Yes, the equivalent of years of nourishment for a child spent by some parasite as a gift of a handbag to his latest girlfriend. Mad, mad, mad.

Pay cheque to pay cheque

The media constantly reminds us how lucky we are to live in an advanced capitalist economy. We should be grateful to our masters that we don’t live in a backward third-world economy. The United Kingdom, the USA and Canada must surely be free from the poverty of those third-world nations according to the media – but what is the reality? “The recession may be officially over, but six in 10 Canadians are still surviving from paycheque to paycheque, a national survey showed Monday. Fifty-nine per cent of Canadian workers say they would be in financial trouble if their paycheque was delayed by just a week – the same proportion as last year when the economy was still mired in a downturn, according to a poll of 2,766 people by the Canadian Payroll Association. The survey comes as the OECD today warned that record high debt levels have left many Canadians vulnerable to any future adverse shocks” (Globe and Mail, 13 September). Like our fellow workers in Canada and the USA we in the UK live from pay day to pay day. That is how capitalism operates.

Dollars and democracy

One of the illusions that supporters of capitalism like to boast of is the notion that whatever the failings of the profit system at least it is thoroughly democratic. This is a complete fabrication as by the expenditure of million of dollars, euros and yen the owning class completely distort any pretence to democracy that capitalism may possess. A recent example of this manipulation by the power of money has emerged in the USA. “It likes to present itself as a grassroots insurgency made up of hundreds of local groups intent on toppling the Washington elite. But the Tea Party movement, which is threatening to cause an upset in next month’s midterm elections, would not be where it is today without the backing of that most traditional of US political supporters – Big Oil. The billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, a private company with 70,000 employees and annual revenues of $100bn (£62bn), used to joke that they controlled the biggest company nobody had ever heard of. Not any more. After decades during which their fortune grew exponentially and they channelled millions of dollars to rightwing causes, Charles and David Koch are finally getting noticed for their part in the extraordinary growth of the Tea Party movement. The two, 74-year-old Charles and David, 70, have invested widely in the outcome of the 2 November elections. One Koch subsidiary has pumped $1m into the campaign to repeal California’s global warming law, according to state records” (Guardian, 14 October). Like Bob Dylan once wrote “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”

Behind the rhetoric

Politicians’ stock in trade is pretending to represent the whole of society when in fact only representing the owning class. Thus we have Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats claiming that he is concerned about the poor and exploited at election time, but in power forced to declare his real aims. “Poor must accept benefit cuts: Clegg on collision course with own party by backing welfare axe. Nick Clegg has waded into the row over welfare reform by warning that benefits should not be there ‘to compensate the poor for their predicament’. On the eve of the Liberal Democrat conference, the Deputy Prime Minister backed the Coalition’s programme of welfare cuts and dramatically shifted his party’s policy on the subject” (Daily Mail, 16 September). If you represent the owning class, despite your glamour TV image, you sometimes have to tell the truth. You are poor? So what, we are not here to “compensate” you, declares this politician once in power.

Spending challenge (2010)

From the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

To prepare the cuts announced on 20 October the Treasury issued a “Spending Challenge” on its website for members of the public to suggest savings. Here’s a socialist reply.

The capitalist system has become obsolete for most purposes. It cannot prevent large numbers of the world’s population from experiencing worsening deprivation and misery. This includes Britain, where we face deteriorating living standards as the rich capitalist minority require governments to keep cracking down on the working class majority so that their pig troughs are kept as full as possible. The incomes of the many will keep being squeezed by whichever government is in office so that the incomes of the few on top can be protected and increased. Politicians will tell us all that is needed is better money management, and no doubt, some members of the public will fall for this, and go along with monetary cuts directed against others in their own (working) class.

In reality, what is needed is something that will strike most people as being bizarre and scary when they first hear it. A complete end to money, and the outdated capitalist system that requires it! Here’s a surprising fact. We, the working class majority, do NOT need money to produce all the goods and services that a modern society requires. Only capitalists need money to carry out their exploitation of those able to work and everyone else.

If we reject capitalism and money, and choose a new system (“moneyless real socialism”), how would the jobs that need doing get done? Well, when we are all the direct collective owners of the means of production and distribution (factories, farmland, power stations, rail systems, sources of raw materials etc) we will also collectively own everything that is produced and provided. The food produced in factories and on farms will be ours. The electricity from the power stations will be ours. The trains will be ours. Iron ore and all the other minerals mined from the planet will be ours. You do not have to buy what’s already your property, and therefore, everything that we have to pay for today will be freely available. Obviously, the work will still have to be done, but by doing so, everyone will have the right to a home of their own, the right to take whatever they need from shops (this will not result in blind greed because taking more than is needed will then be daft and pointless), everyone will be entitled to free travel, free medical care and education of the highest standard possible, and much more.

Won’t we have to work far harder? Absolutely not. The opposite, in fact. In Britain alone, there are millions of people doing fundamentally useless money-related jobs only necessary under capitalism (making money, manufacturing cash machines, sales, insurance, welfare benefits, banking, accountancy, debt recovery etc). When capitalism and money are dumped, all these millions of people will then become available to contribute something of real benefit to society. Furthermore, without money- related problems, arguments and crimes, many more people involved in policing, prison work, social work, solicitors, courts etc will also be freed up to contribute. All these millions of extra people, added to the millions of unemployed not wanted by capitalist employers, will mean that the average working week will be considerably shorter than it is now.

Money is not the answer. It, and the outdated system that requires it, is the problem. We need a new economic system, and moneyless real socialism is the only option.

Max Hess

Cooking the Books: Debts and Doubts (2011)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The public sector union UNISON has provided its activists with briefing notes on the economic crisis, based on the illustrations used in a talk by Barry Kushner that can be found on YouTube.

 

He shares the illusion that the economy is a tool which governments can manipulate to ensure growth or more equality (or less equality) or whatever. In other words, he ignores the fact that the profit-motivated market economy that is capitalism is governed by economic laws which governments have to accept and apply if they don’t want to provoke an economic crisis.

 

This said, he does make some valid points about the scare stories about the National Debt put out by the present government to justify its austerity programme.

 

The National Debt is the government’s debt and has nothing to do with the debt of the individuals who make up the supposed “nation” (it is not the total of private debts). As such, it is better called the Government Debt (its official name is “Public Sector Net Debt”). Similarly, the Deficit is the government’s. It’s the difference between what it raises through taxes and what it spends, which it has to cover by borrowing. What it spends includes the interest it has to pay on the Government Debt.

 

“We are told,” says Kushner, “that our country was nearly bankrupt, that our debt payments are £120 million per day, that our debt is nearly £1 trillion” and quotes George Osborne as saying on the Andrew Marr show that “we were on the brink of bankruptcy” and another government statement that “our debt is higher than it’s ever been.”

 

The Government (not “our”) Debt is only higher than it’s ever been in nominal (face value) terms, only because £1 trillion today is not the same as £1 trillion in the past. Kushner points out that the usual way of measuring the level of the Debt is to compare it with Gross Domestic Product (basically the value of new wealth created in a year). At the moment, this ratio is around 60 percent. One of Kushner’s graphs shows Government Debt as a percentage of GDP from 1900 to 2010. From 1920 to 1960 it was consistently well over 100 percent; just after WW2 in 1945 it was 261 percent. In other countries it is much higher: 100 percent in the US, 200 percent in Japan

 

The government does not need to be in a position to pay off the whole Government Debt in one go. Since about 80 percent of GDP is made up of what people consume and what the government spends on essential services, 60 percent could not be devoted to repaying the Debt in one year without mass starvation. Most of the Debt is continually renewed as those lending the money to the government want to keep on receiving the interest.

 

Interest payments on the Government Debt are £120 million a day but, at £43.3 billion a year, this is less than 3 percent of GDP, which is easily affordable. Kushner points out that in 1981, under Thatcher, interest payments were in today’s money £174 million a day or over 5 percent of GDP, adding that we “didn’t hear talk of bankruptcy then”.  According to www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_debt, “experts say that when interest payments reach about 12% of GDP then a government will likely default on its debt”. As just seen, the British government’s payments are nowhere near this figure. 

 

There never was any danger of bankruptcy. Osborne was just scaremongering to justify cutting government spending for other reasons. The cuts are being made to try to restore profitability. It’s because saying this openly would not go down well that the government has resorted to the scarce stories and lies about bankruptcy, unsustainable interest payments and the like.

The Archbishop is Right (2011)

From the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

“We are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted” (The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams).

He is right. The government is implementing policies for which no one voted, or would vote for. No one voted to cut care services for the old and the disabled. No one voted to close hospital departments or to delay repairing schools or to close libraries and sports facilities or to reduce rubbish collection. Yet this is all happening as a result of what the government is doing.

It’s what governments always do when capitalism goes into one of its periodic crises. If nothing else this shows that capitalism is not a system geared to improving people’s lives. If it was, this sort of thing would never happen. As productivity went up (as it does slowly but surely each year) then society would be able to produce more and so be more able to provide better care for the elderly and better amenities for everyone.

That is what the increasing surplus of wealth over and above meeting basic needs would be used for. Under capitalism, however, it takes the form of profits, and competition between profit-seeking enterprises forces most of these to be reinvested in production rather than in improving people’s lives. Any government that tried to do this by diverting profits from capital accumulation would soon find itself in economic difficulties. Governments that have tried have been forced by capitalist economic reality to do a U-turn and give priority to “growth” as they call capital accumulation. But this growth is not a steady process but a series of fits and starts, of periods of booms ending in a crisis and a slump when amenities and living standards have to be cut as a way of creating the conditions for capital accumulation to resume.

Which is where we are now. People getting what they didn’t vote for also shows that capitalism is incompatible with democracy as an expression of “the people’s will”. This is not because there are no procedures in place for people to decide what they want, but because the way the capitalist economy works prevents some of these decisions being implemented. Capitalism is not geared to doing what people want. People want the problems they face to be solved but capitalism simply can’t do this. And no amount of making the decision-making process more formally democratic can alter this because that’s not where the problem lies. It’s that capitalism is a system geared to making profits and accumulating capital irrespective of people’s decisions and needs.

This is not happening just in Britain. In some other countries it’s even more blatant. In Iceland a law was passed during the financial bubble guaranteeing the savings of depositors, whether from Iceland or abroad, in Icelandic banks in the case of a bank failing. No one expected that banks would fail but they did. The Icelandic government didn’t have the money to hand to honour this promise so the British and Dutch governments stepped in and sent the bill to Iceland. The government there told these creditors that it would find the money by drastically worsening the life of the people in Iceland. And did so. The people of Iceland have voted twice in referendums to reject the terms of the deals. To no effect. In the end the Icelandic government will have to pay up and cannot reverse its austerity programme.

It’s the same in Ireland where the government had given a guarantee to underwrite bank losses. Fintan O’Toole made a valid point in the Irish Times (3 May) when he criticised the twisted logic used to justify making things worse for people there:

  “The basic proposition is that ‘the Irish’ borrowed loads of money and ‘the Irish’ must pay it back. Each and every citizen of a particular nationality is responsible for the misdeeds of others who hold the same nationality. National identity trumps everything else. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t borrow the money or that you had no way of knowing what decisions private banks were making. You’re Irish, the banks are Irish, so you’re all guilty. (…) so the nurse in Ennis and the factory worker in Portlaoise have to pay it back.”

The Irish government will have to honour its guarantee, and nurses and factory workers and others will have to suffer. The Irish voted to kick out the previous government but that hasn’t made any difference. The new government will have to continue doing the same, as will the new government in Portugal and as the old government in Greece has been doing. It’s what managing capitalism – whichever party or coalition of parties is in office – involves at the moment, what the Archbishop (who seems to be rather perspicacious) described in his article in the New Statesman (9 June) as “managerial politics, attempting with shrinking success to negotiate life in the shadow of big finance”. He described this as “not an attractive rallying point”, but that’s all that’s on offer and can be on offer.

In other places it’s yet worse still. The government of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean decided recently to float its currency against the dollar as “essential to cut the country’s ballooning budget deficit and stabilise the economy” (Times, 6 May). As a result “almost overnight, the price of staples such as rice and bread soared by 30 per cent”. Hence the news item’s headline: “Violence in the holiday island intensifies as food prices soar.” The opposition party there is trying to use the unrest to get back into office but even if they succeed they would still have to attempt to negotiate life in the shadow of capitalism. This is all governments everywhere can do.

People don’t take this lying down and, rightly, try to resist their lives being made worse. But if government action cannot overcome the iron laws of capitalism, neither can strikes, street demonstrations or riots. The most these can do is slow down the worsening a little but not reverse it. The cruel fact is that within the context of capitalism, as Mrs Thatcher said to the archbishop, there is no alternative. That’s the case for socialism.

Adam Buick

Political whores trading (2010)

From the June 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Extract of MI5 recording, number XA4821S, Westminster, May 7. Principals in cross-Party coalition talks, House Speaker residing.

Chair: I must begin by asking you, gentlemen, if any here present are intending in disregard of honour or scruple to prostitute all their principles simply for the sake of power at any price?

All: Of course!

Chair: Oh. Ahem. Well, that’s alright then. Now, to business.

Clegg: Still think I’m a joke, Cameron?

Brown: I think you’re both bloody jokes.

Clegg: I’m not even speaking to you, Brown.

Brown: Alright, I resign.

Chair: To order. The agenda is how to rake back £163bn without ending up with Greek fire in Whitehall.

Clegg: PR! AV plus! STD! No wait, I mean…

Cameron: I’m a liberal Tory, that means I’ll screw the poor and cut child tax credits but I won’t give the rich that huge inheritance tax bonus until next year.

Clegg: I want no tax for the 10k superpoor. And did I mention PR?

Chair: Do Labour wish to say anything?

Blunkett: Ok, we give in.

Cameron: What?

Reid: Who wants to be a coalition of losers?

Clegg: But you said you wanted PR!

Reid: Balls.

Chair: Come again?

Ed Balls: We’ve got what we want, Brown’s head on a pole, plus we won’t get blamed for the cuts we would have had to make in office. We’ll clean up next election. Cameron will be toast and Clegg will be cornflakes.

Chair: You mean you’re walking out on the negotiations?

Harman: Manning the lifeboats actually. Good luck with the deckchairs. The Titanic’s all yours.

Clegg: I knew they weren’t serious. Cameron, we’ve got to do something. The axeman cometh.

Cameron: You mean the IMF?

Clegg: No, I mean our rank and file. If I don’t screw a deal out of this hung parliament I’m hung, and if you don’t, your name will be down there with Ian Duncan Smith.

Cameron: Oh my god. But we’re diametrically opposed!

Clegg: No, that was yesterday. Today we’re liberals. Any deal will do. Now about PR…

Recording indistinct. Sounds of Miliband brothers scuffling and Alex Salmond singing ‘Whose bonny wee lassie am I?’)

                                     _________________________________________________

Political whores trading

We strongly suspect that the attached transcript (above) is a hoax, which is why we didn’t pay good money for it.

However, something like it probably did happen. Not for a generation has there been such an edge of the seat performance from all three main parties on a high turnout vote, with voters queuing up for hours to get in on the act and then being turned away by the jobsworths running the polling stations. All that drama for a holy grail they all knew was a poisoned chalice. The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, had predicted that whoever formed the next government and made the required cuts in expenditure would be out of power for a generation afterwards. Perhaps this was why Labour apparatchiks like Blunkett and Reid were throwing in the towel even before the votes were all in, and all that warm Liberal friendly pillow-talk during the election rapidly cooled as the realisation dawned that sometimes it’s better to be outside the tent pissing in.

 An election which produced no clear winner did however produce three clear losers. All three leaders immediately faced the guillotine, Clegg for being the golden boy who lost seats, Cameron for his secretive, Blairlike reliance on an inner circle and disregard of anyone else, as well as his crap and meaningless ‘Big Society’ election message, and Brown just for being Brown when New Labour was supposed to be about Blair, flair and razzle dazzle. A shaky coalition forced to wield the machete on wages and public spending amid general public rage over fat cat corruption has got to be any politician’s worst nightmare, and as if that wasn’t enough, the spectre haunting Europe this season is one of Greeks burning down banks. Hanging over this new government, even before it’s got started, is a ghastly sense of foreboding.

 In the event, desperation has forced Cameron to marry Clegg, on the grounds of better a bad hand than no hand at all. Clegg in particular was in a hard bind. He would have been crucified for not making a deal, their first chance in 30 years, and given the Lib Dem ‘democracy’ mantra, no less crucified for hypocritically siding with Labour when they were in a clear elective minority with no mandate to govern. As it is, he will probably be crucified by his own party for this deal with the Tories. As one Liberal put it: “I think we could be wiped out for a generation by this decision. We will probably be annihilated at the next election” (Guardian, 12 May).

 A common assumption doing the rounds is that, regardless of Cameron’s plan to shore up the ConDem’d government with 5 year fixed term legislation and an increase in the majority requirement for a Parliamentary vote of no confidence, the whole show will probably collapse in disarray in a couple of years or so. Labour certainly are banking on a short period to regroup in opposition and another ‘97 like landslide. But coalitions only look shaky because they don’t happen often in Britain.

 In other EU countries where proportional representation is the norm, coalitions happen almost routinely and government still manages to function, insofar as governments can ever really be said to function.

 The socialist view of all this has been echoed by, of all people, Michael Portillo (see Editorial). Governments don’t control the money, the money controls governments, and when money says ‘Jump’, it is always the working class who are for the high jump. It is with some sadness that we predict that the poor will pay the bill, however the politicians work out their debt repayment schemes, while the rich will do alright, thanks very much. What’s not going to happen is that capitalism somehow falls flat on its face and dies of a seizure.

 Experience shows that capitalism is good at surviving, even though it may consume many of its supporters in the process. All governments are really coalitions of capitalist class interests against the working class, so if workers want something better than pain and oppression for themselves then they had better stop voting for its continuation. Were socialists ever to be in a parliamentary minority and faced with the Clegg dilemma, there’s no question what we would say: A plague on all your houses, you’ll get no deal from us.

Paddy Shannon

Greasy Pole: Wind At Daybreak For The New Politics (2011)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

As dawn broke on 6 May Danny Alexander, the fresh-faced Chief Secretary to the Treasury, sat alone in the Sky TV studio and, in what one seasoned observer called “a Facebook moment”, relieved himself of an explosive fart.

At the time he was composing himself to spout some predictably scripted excuses and evasions about the LibDem losses in the local elections and their disappointment at the result of the AV referendum. Somewhere outside the studio the Tories were gloating. He assumed he was unobserved but his contribution to the day’s entertainment was recorded on some 100 monitors. Well it was a change from the usual noxious emissions from the mouths of politicians but should we be worried about Alexander and his flatulence? Was it the only way for him to relieve his despair at the exposure of the LibDem’s deceit, their savaging by their supposed Tory allies and the crumbling of a generation of baseless ambitions? Was it heralding his guilt at his own part in provoking his party’s debacle?

He rose, after all, through the ranks as a personal assistant of the disastrous Nick Clegg. He was deeply involved in composing the LibDem election manifesto – including those pledges such as opposing any rise in tuition fees – and he was at the lead in negotiations to form the coalition, heedless of the disastrous effect on his party of previous such arrangements. Which did not affect his enthusiasm for the job of Chief Secretary and its work of “deficit reduction”, which entails reducing the incomes if masses of people who so meekly vote for a social system which brings them such misery and fear. Any examination of Alexander must reveal that his ailments are chronic and resistant to treatment.

Clegg

However hapless his condition, Alexander cannot rely on any therapeutic example from his colleagues (and, of course, his rivals) in his party. Clegg, for one, persists in what might be called his optimism were it not so perilously separated from reality. On the first anniversary of those blissfully exciting days when the coalition came into being in the fragrance of the rose garden at Number Ten, he said: “There is a reason neither of the two bigger parties won last May. Neither of them were really trusted to deliver both a strong, dynamic economy and a fair society. We can be trusted on both counts…I am confident that showing we can combine economic soundness with social justice – competence with a conscience – will make us an even more formidable political force in the future.” Those words were breathtaking in their audacious refusal to acknowledge the real situation – for example the survey for ITV News which showed 49 percent regarding the Coalition as “bad for Britain” and 63 percent saying they do not trust Clegg.

Then there was his boss Cameron who made a contemptuously obstinate dismissal of LibDem claims to be able to smooth the crueller edges of Tory policies: “I don’t accept the whole idea that the role of one party is somehow to moderate the other. The Conservative Party, under my leadership, has changed. It is a new and different Conservative Party.” That statement is crammed with falsehood, paying no attention to the fact that the Liberal Party – whatever alliances it has embroiled itself in, however it has re-shaped its name – has not been a nationally considerable political force for some ninety years. Their typical response, when their real situation became too distasteful, was to gorge themselves on fantasy.

Steel

One notable addict of that variety of political narcosis was David Steel who was Liberal leader between July 1976 and July 1988 and who, perhaps as consolation for joining the ranks of failed leaders of his party, was in 1997 transformed into Baron Steel of Aikwood. During his time in charge he did a favour to James Callaghan’s ailing Labour government by joining a pact to keep them in power in return for being consulted on some aspects of policy. That arrangement fell apart with Thatcher’s 1979 victory but Steel became excited again by the scent of power in 1981 when the Gang of Four broke from the Labour Party and, in spite of his former gruesomely futile expedition into such territory, he felt encouraged to join a SDP/Liberal Alliance. Here, he thought, was at last a real chance of worming his way into a position of fame and influence which would get the cameras watching him striding along Downing Street smiling at the reporters’ cheeky questions, then emerging from the black door to issue some history-making declaration to the waiting world.

There was some encouragement in such dreams by the opinion polls which indicated that the despair about the previous Labour government was widespread and deep enough to give the Alliance a realistic hope of success. Steel was impressed enough by this to bellow at the 1981 Liberal Assembly that party members should “…go back to your constituencies and prepare for government”. And when the ecstatic uproar caused by that historically embarrassing, desperately forgettable, blunder had died away there was Thatcher and the war in the Falklands and a smashing win for the Tories in 1983 and the virtual death of the Alliance and all its dreams and nightmares.

Conservatives 

None of this, nor of the other such disasters, seems to have influenced Clegg – nor Alexander and the others – when Cameron offered them the chance of again living the dream denied to their party’s previous leaders. Indeed the early attitude of the likes of Vince Cable and David Laws gave the impression that they were satisfied they had made the right choice, working for policies which they knew would adversely affect the lives of masses of people – workers, children, the elderly and the sick… We know now that situation has changed; there is a dominant Conservative Party (now condemned by Cable as “…ruthless, calculating and thoroughly tribal”) which may calculate on being in power for a period comparable to Thatcher’s. During last year’s general election we were promised, especially by Clegg who was suffering from a kind of hysteria arising from his ecstatic TV ratings, a New Style of Politics. The elections this year exposed that lie but there is a way to go before the end of any politics, old or new, signalling the end of this entire rotten system in which reality is swamped in toxic fantasy.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Grow up and understand (2011)

The Greasy Pole column from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

You can’t help feeling sorry for coalition ministers with their sleepless nights and restless days having to do something they call Taking Tough Decisions even when these lead to thousands of people catapulted into unemployment, agonising over whether to pay the rent or mortgage or buy food or try to keep warm in the winter. So it helps to know that, at any rate for those struggling ministers, there is another way. Some spin doctor in the deeper recesses of Westminster has come up with the idea that the victims of current policies might regard themselves as less repressed and impoverished if they could accept it all in a more mature and perceptive manner. One great advantage of this reasoning would be that it promises to be stunningly cheap to operate. Another is that any residual resentment by penurious benefit applicants and the like might well be stifled by their feelings of guilt at their own inadequacy in accepting reality.

Clegg

Here, for example, is Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, seemingly unshaken by his being abruptly transmogrified from the focus of a national mood of “Cleggmania” into “the most hated man in Britain”. The tension between the LibDems and their patient fans was aggravated by the fact that Clegg had led his party into the coalition along a path of dishonoured pledges and his excited complacency at holding so eminent a governmental post. Last November, before the Commons voted on the proposal to increase the university tuition fees, Clegg wrote to the President of the National Union of Students and, after asserting that the government’s intention was that graduates on lower incomes would be better off than now, stated that “I believe it is crucial that all of us are able to ensure that people know the true picture”. Take note of the use of words like “crucial…all of us…ensure…true picture…” designed to imply that anyone who does not fit into this compliant mould has defects which are – well, crucial. This argument might be more effective if it was not put by the same Nick Clegg who, when he was touting for votes during the general election, said that to raise tuition fees would be “a disaster”. So while we consider how to maintain a maturely informed attitude among the confusion, can we also settle where we place Clegg? Are we impressed that he eventually admitted the LibDems (including himself) should have thought more carefully before signing those flamboyantly reckless pledges? Or would it be more instructive to remember that this confession was a response to lost votes and the fact that Cleggmania had decayed into a septic memory of a disreputable past.

Cable 

Which brings us to the Deputy Prime Minister’s deputy who, while never embellished by Cablemania, has coincidentally been reduced from the world’s most immaculately insightful economist to piteously Vincible Vince. Among a procession of savaging blunders in early November Cable boasted to two undercover reporters from the Daily Telegraph who came to his constituency surgery pretending to need his advice that he had the power to scupper Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to completely take over BSkyB and that to get his own way in the coalition he could operate the “nuclear option” of threatening to resign from it. Although supposedly a hardened political operator, the terror of affluently bonused bankers, Cable seemed powerless of suspecting that he was being set up precisely to embarrass himself in such an unwise, almost terminal, style. An outraged David Cameron swiftly relieved him of these feverish delusions – and of some of his ministerial responsibilities. But he clung on as Business Secretary, in which post he had brushed aside the protests at the planned rise in tuition fees: “I think a lot of the people who are protesting actually don’t understand what’s being proposed. It doesn’t actually affect them – we’re talking about a system of graduate contribution that will only affect people who start going to university in a couple of years’ time”. There are however problems for anyone eager to give any weight to Cable’s views in this matter since he has himself demonstrated a distinct confusion in understanding – at times declaring himself to be in favour, then against, the rise in fees, then that he would abstain from voting (there are no prizes for guessing that, when he came to it, ambition overruled and he obediently supported the rise). But how are we to regard anyone so susceptible to trickery and confusion, who nevertheless tells us that we “don’t understand” our everyday problems?

Cameron

From the other bit of the coalition David Cameron, in what seemed like a fit of exasperation, hit out at the opponents of the “reform” of what are called public services (in which this government is merely following Labour’s policy). Cameron’s complaint is that the critics need to grow up and realise that what counts is the standards of the service rather than which organisation – state, private, charity – delivers it. Well growing up – although not in the way Cameron means – is mostly a useful, not to say necessary, process from which a certain education is assumed to follow. But until that happens we must work with the outrageous fact that an Old Etonian, ex-member of the vandal Bullingdon Club such as Cameron can lecture us about maturity when he is unable – or perhaps reluctant – to confront the fact that the working class exist under continual pressures of survival in their everyday lives. Dependency on employment in order to survive is a vastly educative, maturing experience. For example the housing charity Shelter recently reported that some 3 million people have problems paying their rent or mortgage, which means that millions of people live under the persistent threat of being homeless. According to Shelter’s chief executive “thousands of people are hanging on to their homes by the skin of their teeth…”. That is the kind of experience which should be enough to result in such enlightenment about capitalism as to be mightily serious for the Tories, Labour, LibDems and all other supporters of this chaotic, degrading social system.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Oliver Letwin – Eccentric or Fake? (2011)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is more to West Dorset than the Jurassic Coastline. It is also a parliamentary constituency where, in the 2005 general election, they registered the highest turn-out in the United Kingdom. Effectively it is the Lib Dems who are now the opposition there – and this in a constituency which includes the tragic village of Tolpuddle. The Tory-comfortable loyalty of this corner of rural England is now represented by Oliver Letwin, consistently one of the party’s policy wonks, once Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Shadow Home Secretary, author of a doctoral thesis Ethics, Emotion and the Unity of the Self, but also the originator of some of the most spectacular blunders even among Honourable Members. He refuses to read newspapers because they tell him “nothing I need to know” – but what they tell us about him suggests there are other reasons for his calamitous record.

Liberals and Fabians

Even before he came into Parliament, Letwin was displaying symptoms of what we might politely call a characteristic confusion. At Cambridge he was active in the university Liberal Club and later explained how this fitted in with his career aim to become the Conservative leader: “I was also a member of the Fabian Society…this was because I was interested in the thoughts of Liberals and Fabians (and still am) rather than because I was a Liberal Democrat or a Fabian”. It is probably kindest to assume that the famously brainy Letwin resolved this contradiction with a typically clever evasion – joining a party opposed to both the others – which, incidentally, offered him the best chance of reaching the top in politics. His first attempts to become a parliamentary candidate were for two London seats. West Dorset in 1997 was much gentler and more secure, offering shelter from Tony Blair’s landslide. But then came the blunders. In 2001 he was credited (Gordon Brown went so far as to thank him) with helping Labour to stay in power by proposing, as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, that a Tory government would reduce public expenditure to the tune of some £20 billion – a seriously unpopular suggestion. Many politicians would have responded to such pressure by simply bluffing it out, but Letwin chose to go underground, which provided yet more ammunition to his opponents, such as the Labour party member who dressed as Sherlock Holmes and, complete with bloodhound, pretended to sniff out the fugitive Shadow Minister.

Predators

Letwin’s stints as Shadow Home Secretary followed by the equally prestigious Shadow Chancellor, may have boosted his self-esteem to the point of seeing himself as a future party leader and then, after a little inter-reaction with the voters, Prime Minister. But it would also have made him vulnerable to the predatory tunnelling of his rivals. In 2003 he was leaked as saying that he would “rather go out on the streets and beg” than let his children go to an inner-city London comprehensive. In reply to the consequent storm of outrage the best he could do was to protest that the remark had been made in a private conversation – which failed to answer his critics and left untouched the central matter of Letwin’s acceptance that what is called education is, like all else in capitalism, class determined.

Schooled in these prejudices at Eton, Letwin is now a director of the Sherborne School for Girls, whose annual fees are as much as £26,700. A multimillionaire, he works for N.M.Rothschild, described as a finance house, where he “earns” £5020 for 35 hours work in a year – not enough to pay for a place at Sherborne but a useful sum to the parents of comprehensive kids. This secure lifestyle is in contrast to that of employees such as teachers and hospital staff, who were recently attacked by him for their supposed lack of application to their work. At a meeting at KPMG – another collection of financiers – he gave vent to what seemed to be a particular frustration to him: “You can’t,” he raved, “have room for innovation and the pressure for excellence without having some real discipline and some fear on the part of the providers that things may go wrong if they don’t live up to the aims that society as a whole is demanding of them”. However, he seemed to be ready to abandon his own guidelines for disciplining fear when in May 2005 he was moved from Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs at his request for a less demanding job to follow his career among the bankers and the hedge traders in the City. After the Tory win in May 2010 he got even more free time when Cameron appointed him to the new, vaguely titled job of Minister of State for Policy.

Sheffield

Despite his reassuringly avuncular exterior, Letwin can give voice to some pretty scabrous opinions on those he regards as his social inferiors. In April, in a clash with his fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson over the expansion of airports, he sneered “We don’t want more people from Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays” – which united Johnson and several thousand others, including Sheffield Hallam MP Nick Clegg, in outrage. Undeterred, Letwin attracted further merciless exposure in the media when he was observed, while walking in a Westminster park, stuffing a lot of official correspondence into rubbish bins and giving some to a collector. His attempt to defuse the matter by explaining that “I…simply wanted to make sure the pieces of paper were not weighing me down” was less than helpful to him. It has been known for a politician who is in a tangle with the voters to try to divert attention from their confusion with a cloak of beguiling eccentricity. It is, however, unusual to be confronted by so blatant and unrepentant a practitioner as the Rt. Hon Oliver Letwin MP – one of the more extreme, exotic leaders to personify the system’s stagnant and wasteful character.

Ivan

Editorial: Profits Before People, Again (2012)

Editorial from the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

At least the Coalition government knows how capitalism works –it runs on profits, so priority must be given to profitability and profit-making. It’s written all over their economic policies and was confirmed in last month’s budget.

The only way capitalism gets out of a slump is when profit-making opportunities reappear. When they do, “growth” resumes. This means that, in a slump, any government must not do anything that will adversely affect profitability and profit-making prospects. Just the opposite, it must encourage these. That is, if it is going to do anything. Another option is to simply let spontaneous economic forces operate to restore profitability, as through unprofitable firms going bust and their assets passing cheaply to their rivals and increased unemployment pushing down wages.

A government can help restore profitability in two ways. It can reduce taxes on profits.  In the budget, for the second year running, the Chancellor announced a cut in corporation tax, a direct tax on profits. This reduces government revenue, which means that it has to cut back on some of its other spending, as the present government is doing with a vengeance, forcing local councils to reduce public amenities and slashing payments to those who can’t find or who are unable to work. With more to come.

The second way a government can help restore profitability is to reinforce the downward pressures that mass unemployment exerts on wage levels. Two recently announced measures openly proclaim this as their aim.

The Chancellor confirmed that national pay bargaining for public sector workers is to be replaced by regional bargaining on the grounds that the present system results in wage levels in some regions being too high, so high that to attract workers employers have to pay higher wages than otherwise. The aim of regional pay bargaining is to reduce wages –and so boost profitability –in areas of the country where public service workers are considered to be overpaid.

The minimum wage is to go up in October but by only half the rate of price increases. So, it’s going to be reduced in real terms. For those under 21, the rate is not going to be increased at all. Business Secretary Vince Cable justified this on the grounds that it would make it easier for young people to get a job, i.e. the lower wage is aimed at boosting the profit prospects of firms employing workers on the minimum wage.

But what about taxes on the rich that have also been announced? That’s a side-show. “Tycoon taxes”, “mansion taxes” and the like are not taxes on profits, but taxes on the consumption of the capitalist class. A government can safely increase them in a slump as they don’t affect profitability. This even has the political advantage of allowing them to justify the austerity measures imposed on the rest of the population as “fair” as even the rich are effected.

It is true, though, as the Labour Opposition has been quick to point out, that this propaganda ploy has been rather undermined by the government’s reduction of the rate of tax on incomes over £150,000 from 50 to 45 percent, supposedly to attract overseas businesspeople to come to invest in Britain. But, as the traditional party of the rich, the Tories can’t clobber their clientele too much.

There is no alternative under capitalism. As long as capitalism lasts all governments have to pursue a policy of giving priority to profits. Profits before people is the rule. It’s why we need socialism.

Greasy Pole: Jeremy Spanks the Baby (2012)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every so often the political firmament witnesses the emergence of a Rising Star, suitably welcomed by the party leaders as evidence of their resolve to bring fresh minds with new ideas to their tortured deliberations. For the Rising Star as well, it can be exciting, with hardened journalists pursuing them for their behind-the-doors revelations on the latest Cabinet scandal, the anguish of rivals left beneath them as they ascend the Greasy Pole and, as climax to all this, assumptions about record sales for an audaciously revealing volume of memoirs. And of course there would be the quivering excitement from the terror of television appearances fending off a notoriously ruthless interviewer while defending government policies in some current emergency.

Accountant
Conservative MP for North Norwich, Chloe Smith, came into the Commons in July 2009 as a Rising Star and, aged 27, the Baby of the House. She took the seat previously held by Labour’s Ian Gibson, who resigned over irregularities exposed in his expense claims. Fresh-faced as a member of the school hockey team, flashing a wide, ready smile, Smith may have been a relief to the Norwich voters after the tawdry scandal of the fiddling by those outworn parliamentary manipulators. She held the seat at the 2010 election and, after a spell as a Conservative whip, was abruptly elevated to Economic Secretary to the Treasury – in fact benefiting from another scandal, that of Tory Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, who had to resign over his relationship to his ‘adviser’ Adam Werrity. Among the resentful mutterings of disappointed rivals (“inexperienced but super loyal” was one grouse) there were suggestions that perhaps Smith’s promotion was intended to pacify women voters after the cuts in Child Benefit rather than through any merits of hers. In fact, at the time the Prime Minister, Cameron, was under the impression that she was a Chartered Accountant – which seemed to be a recommendation to him on the theory that anyone qualified in that way was sure to be able to control and direct capitalism into an ordered, beneficial society – something his government was clearly unable to do. In any case, when Smith owned up to him that she was not an accountant he dismissed this as irrelevant, and with the words, “never mind!” he welcomed her into his Cabinet.

U Turn
Safely on the Front Bench, Smith had a name – the Ice Maiden – which she earned for her coolness under the kind of pressures which ministers are expected to meet pretty well daily. This was pretty seductive stuff and it may have persuaded her to put herself forward for an assignment which many of her colleagues would have gone to some lengths to avoid. This came when the government announced that it would postpone a rise in fuel tax the day after insisting that it would impose it. The move was hailed as yet another policy U-turn, symptoms of a government that was disastrously muddled in its efforts to manage the economy. Smith volunteered to appear on Newsnight in the hope of representing the U-turn as good news for everyone, although she knew this would expose her to being grilled by the merciless Jeremy Paxman, whose victims include the likes of Michael Howard, William Hague and Tony Blair. Smith seemed quite unable to have memorised the kind of transparent evasions which are commonly used by politicians when they are in such straits. Not at all the super-cool informed minister, she fumbled her way through, allowing Paxman to ask at one point: “Is this some sort of joke?” and at another: “You ever think you are incompetent?” Which in one sense helped Smith as it diverted some of the Tories’ anger onto Smith’s boss George Osborne who was taking a relaxed dinner at Number Eleven while she faced Paxman at his most rampant.

McBride
Such are the perils of a minister’s job it is often necessary for them to be ‘briefed’ before explaining away some embarrassing facts. A master practitioner of this art was Damian McBride, one of Gordon Brown’s most aggressive spin doctors, who recalls a session to prepare the new Prime Minister by shouting abuse at him in a private room at the Treasury: “Blood on your hands…!”; “You’re a murderer…!”; and, in summary: “Sod off you Scottish git!”. This degrading but typical episode is illustrative only of the brutal cynicism of capitalism and the demands of its politics. In any case, would it have helped Smith if she had been subjected to the same preparation? We might all have our own ideas about the style of the abuse she deserved, except that that would be no less futile than McBride’s sessions with Brown. And then there is the fact that Smith has presented herself as one Baby who could be pretty tough. At university her interests were not politics but “drinking and dancing with the best of them”. She expels any tensions playing badminton, swearing or “turning the air blue” as one opponent put it. She tells us that as a minister “I focus very hard on the job in hand,” which in her case includes child poverty, the size of which is testified by many published facts and figures. The Department for Communities and Local Government recently stated that there are still more than two million children living in what is officially termed as poverty, with a 14% rise to over 50 thousand in households officially accepted as homeless – the highest since 1998. There is no sign that this situation is about to get any less desperate but Smith is not impressed: there is, she says trendily, “no Plan B, certainly not” because “we know Plan A is working.”

Paxman’s job gives him an opportunity at times to rile us with his exposure of the deceptions and diversions of capitalism’s political leaders. Smith’s job is to lie her way through the system’s implacable misery and waste, even if at the cost of her humiliation. Neither of them is interested in a proper response to this – a valid, ready method of so changing society as to leave the politicians and preening media stars to a disreputable past.

Ivan

The Voice of Protest and the Voice of the Lord(s) (2013)

The Halo Halo! column from the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the week that the government announced its latest welfare reform attack and Iain Duncan Smith sneered that he could live on £53 a week if he had to (though he wouldn’t be doing it because calls for him to do so were just a ‘stunt’) there were, among the voices of protest, a few from charities and church groups.

One bitter complaint, however, in the Daily Mail (29 March) to David Cameron from former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey had nothing to do with poverty or the government’s contempt for the working class. No, what Carey wanted to complain about was what he saw as ‘aggressive secularism’ from Cameron and Co, particularly in their position on gay marriage.

This, of course, is absolute nonsense (Cameron himself recently advised Christian leaders to ‘stand up and oppose aggressive secularism’). Governments have always relied on the priesthood to help keep the working class in its place and now Carey, it seems, believes that in return the Church has the right to have its own views dictated to us via the government.

But the suggestion that to hold ‘secular’ views, i.e. views that are ‘related to worldly as opposed to sacred things’, views that are ‘not concerned with or related to religion’ and views that are ‘not within the control of the church’ (Collins English Dictionary), is an act of ‘aggression’ is surely bordering on paranoia. And to claim that it is aggressive to disagree with or not want religious mumbo-jumbo in our lives demonstrates the arrogant conceit of the god squad and its leaders who hold that unless we believe in and trust their imaginary friends to solve the world’s problems we are doomed to whatever kind of hell they currently have in mind for us.

When it comes to getting the voice of working class struggle heard, and the constant loud protests of ‘aggressive secularism’ from the self-righteous, secularism, aggressive or otherwise, is not an issue. Religion is far from being vocally restrained in this country. It is still a Department of Education requirement for collective worship to be held in state schools, and the UK is the only country in the world to give bishops the right to sit in its parliament.

Ah yes, the ‘Lords Spiritual’, another one of those jolly old British eccentricities. How much say are these unelected bishops in the unelected House of Lords given?

According to www.churchofengland.org ‘Christian religious leaders have had an active role in the legislative affairs of the country since before the formation of the Church of England. Prior to the 11th century feudal landlords and religious leaders were regularly consulted by Saxon kings’.

‘… Apart from a brief interruption following the English Civil War, religious leaders have played an active role in parliament ever since.’ 

‘The continuing place of Anglican bishops in the Lords reflects our enduring constitutional arrangement, with an established Church of England and its Supreme Governor as Monarch and Head of State.’ 

‘There is always a Lord Spiritual in the House of Lords when it is sitting, to read prayers at the start of the day and to participate in the business of the House’…‘bishops also choose to attend the House on an ad-hoc basis when matters of interest and concern to them are before it.’

So how come with all that input from the bishops the country is in the state that it is? Well, assuming anyone’s listening to their prayers either the matters that they find ‘of interest and concern’ have nothing to do with poverty or contempt for the working class, or they’re not bloody well praying hard enough.

NW

Cooking the Books: A ‘Factual Point’ (2013)

The Cooking the Books Column from the July 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lord Young is an adviser to David Cameron on ‘enterprise’. In a report presented to the Cabinet in May, he wrote:

  'The rise in the number of businesses in recent years shows that a recession can be an excellent time to start a business. Competitors who fall by the wayside enable well-run firms to expand and increase market share. Factors of production such as premises and labour can be cheaper and higher quality, meaning the return on investment can be greater’ (Observer, 11 May).

The TUC was outraged, but a Downing Street spokesman said that Lord Young was merely stating a ‘factual point’. We have to agree. He was merely describing what happens in a slump.

Growth under capitalism is not in a steady upward line but in fits and starts. The overall trend is upwards but through cycles of boom and slump in which booms create the conditions for the succeeding slump and slumps for the next boom.

A slump is a fall in total production due to overproduction, in relation to its market, typically in a key sector of the economy which has a knock-on effect on other sectors. The only way production will start to grow again is if the prospects for making a profit increase and spread. This is a slow process and does involve, among other things, what Lord Young describes.

Like he says, inefficient firms go to the wall. Their customers pass to the more efficient firms that survive so that the sales – and profits – of these firms grow. The assets of the inefficient firms pass cheaply to their rivals too or even to some new firm as Lord Young points out. Cheaper premises and equipment mean that, even with a smaller amount of profit, a higher rate of return can be anticipated. The downward pressure on wages exerted by increased unemployment has the same effect.

Other factors, not mentioned by Lord Young, also help the move to recovery, such as the clearance of unsold stocks and the lower rate of interest due to the supply of money-capital exceeding the demand for it.

Eventually – but there’s no telling how long it might take – all these factors together restore profit prospects and the recovery begins.

In Marxist terms, what happens in a slump is that capital is devalued; this raises the rate of profit since any profits that are made are compared to a smaller amount of capital, the rate of profit – what Lord Young calls the ‘return on investment’ – being the ratio of profits to the value of the capital invested.

In a boom the opposite occurs. The demand for money-capital, premises, equipment, materials and workers increases leading eventually to an increase in their price; this exerts a downward pressure on the rate of profit even though the amount of profit is increasing. Eventually the boom bursts and capital accumulation falls.

Quite apart from overproduction in a boom in one key sector of the economy precipitating a slump, Marx saw slumps as an inevitable part of the process of long-term capitalist growth. Slumps, by eliminating inefficient firms and by devaluing capital, restored the rate of profit which boom conditions had reduced, so allowing capital accumulation to resume.

It’s a continually repeating cycle that has gone on ever since capitalism became the dominant form of production (the first recognised slump was that of 1825) and will continue until capitalism is abolished. That’s another factual point.

Tory Bluster About ‘Human Rights’ (2014)

From the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Tories are hard at work trying to reaffirm their reputation as the Stupid Party. In an imbecilic and shambolic fashion, they have announced they intend to repeal the Human Rights Act (HRA) and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. Even further, they are threatening to renounce the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and withdraw from the treaty. Noticeably, they only sent their press release announcing the move to the Fleet Street tabloids, ignoring the broadsheet press. The draft document was then found to be error-strewn and ill-thought out.

When their document became available legal minds across the internet immediately began to pick it apart, showing up inaccuracies and ignorant comments scattered throughout. It claims, for instance, that the European Court of Human Rights has banned whole life sentences: when in fact all it did was say that there must be a mechanism for review of the sentence (and, indeed, the British Supreme Court has since said it believes sufficient such structures are already in place).

It has been pointed out that narrowing the ability of courts to read legislation in such a way as to make it compatible with human rights (as they are obliged to do under the HRA) would lead to courts striking down legislation more often. They also promised to stop British courts being bound by Strasburg rulings, when they are already not. Just as all courts have always done, they listen to rulings and reasoning from other jurisdictions and use it as part of their own reasonings.

It has also been suggested that the Westminster Parliament alone might not have the power to repeal the HRA or withdraw from the ECHR, because the devolved bodies for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have had these documents incorporated into their foundation (in the case of Northern Ireland, this is underpinned by an international treaty).

Former Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, who has been booted out of the government for opposing this policy, has written in Prospect Magazine pointing out that since 1815 the UK has signed up to over 800 treaties that commit to some sort of international arbitration, and the ECHR is just one of those. Far from the EHCR undermining political sovereignty of Britain, it in fact entirely relies upon the Sovereign British state entering into and agreeing to uphold treaty obligations.

The power to make treaties is an executive power (or, in the byzantine world of the British state, a matter of Crown prerogative). It is thus part of the anti-democratic aspect of the state. The Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary can negotiate, practically in secret and bind the state in the eyes of the world. Necessarily, this limits what Parliament can and can’t do since it means that Britain cannot pass legislation that would break its obligations to other countries. This is the basic means by which Britain has entered into the European Union, and all European Law is actually a treaty obligation which is given effect by the British Parliament passing compatible legislation.

As Grieve notes, ‘in promoting the Convention and adhering to it, we have followed a long tradition that has seen our national self-interest bound up in promoting international order.’ That is, British capitalists benefit from promoting international order and transparent processes to protect their property rights and investments.

The rights of property

The ideology of capitalists has always been based around contract, as they seek to mediate both competition between themselves and against other classes in society. In particular, in their battle with the absolutist states of feudalism they sought protection in the language of rights to protect their property and business interests. In today’s world, they still have to protect themselves from arbitrary expropriation by state actors (and also from other capitalists reneging on their obligations). The interest of big British business depends on a stable rights-based world, where contracts can be enforced. We need only look at Russia, where rival groups of capitalists have used the state to imprison their rivals (and indeed, have frequently resorted to British courts to try and resolve their differences).

Codified human rights are a way of ensuring that the state cannot be used by rival factions (and also so that state actors can know what they are supposed to be doing). That is the function of rights within the ruling class. Rights, though, also form a sort of peace treaty between the ruling capitalist class and the working class. Rather than fight in the ditches over every single scrap, rights allow us and them to let routine matters of conflict be resolved. Their state gets to operate in a way which is considered broadly fair by the wider population. When it doesn't, then open fighting resumes (usually in the form of riots, strikes and civil disruption, but also at the ballot box). The enunciation of civil rights and their enforcement is a reflection of the balance of class power.

This can be seen in the history of every significant document of rights. The Twelve Tables of Rome, the Muslim Constitution of Medina, Magna Carta: all were created following a period of civil strife as a means of putting an end to the present conflict (and also leaving the existing social structures in place). What this means in practice is that rights are not essential, universal or transhistorical, they are always the outcome of the social relations in a particular society and the relative strengths of the class forces to enforce them. The 1936 constitution of the USSR was touted as the most democratic on Earth (as, indeed it was, on paper). The fact that it was completely ignored and useless in practice was down to the lack of any independent capacity of the population, and the working class, to demand it be lived up to.

Human Rights are an outgrowth of both the competitive class and social division of society and the existence of the state. Just as people who do not keep lions do not need a set of written lion safety manuals, so a society of free individuals without a state will not need a written set of state safety manuals. Instead of rights on paper, we would have the practical fulfilment of human needs with the equal access to sufficient democratic power to secure those needs.

Window-dressing

The Tories know that this is just bluster and window dressing. They cannot effectively remove the rights in the ECHR. The games they are playing are just symbolic efforts to shore up a right-wing coalition. The number of times they fulminate against Traveller sites and planning laws in their document on the British Bill of Rights shows that they are mostly interested in addressing the grievances of people who are big fish in small village ponds (the sort who may vote UKIP because they don’t have big businesses that rely on international stability).

At most, they are seeking to bring control of the law back into the hands of British judges, who share cultural and family relations with the domestic capitalist class, and can be relied upon more than foreign judges to support the interests of the ruling elite. These judges, though, have already shown a willingness to incorporate human rights language wholesale into common law, and have made significant rights based rulings without reference to either HRA or the ECHR.

We should not let ourselves depend on these judges for our freedoms, though. We can defend ourselves and protect what freedoms and rights we have best by building our own movement for socialism and pursuing the class struggle through our unions. We can only ever have the rights we fight for and can defend.

Pik Smeet