Your wages are a problem (1962)

From the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do wage increase put up prices?

One of capitalism’s toughest problems is the size of the wage which is paid to the working people who keep the system operating.

Basically, it is a problem of almost mathematical simplicity. The working class produce values which are higher than their wages. They produce a surplus value which goes to their employers. If the workers can force their wages up, there is less of the surplus left for their employers. On the other hand, if the employers can force wages down, more of the surplus will go to them. This must hold good, however the productivity of the worker may be altered by changes in natural conditions or in the intensity of his labour.

It is inevitable that capitalism’s governments should concern themselves in this dispute which, by the way, is known as a “class struggle” by Socialists, who have an uncomfortable habit of calling a capitalist spade a spade. Governments do their governing in the interests of the employing, owning class of capitalism. It is, therefore, equally inevitable that when they concern themselves with the class struggle over wages, governments should take the side of the capitalist class.

Thirty or forty years ago there was no great need for the government’s intervention to be especially vigorous. With capitalism in the doldrums, with never less than one million unemployed in this country, the working class were badly placed to push home any demand for better wages. If they did push any such demands the government had only to stand aside and watch the workers starve themselves onto their knees in a strike or a lock-out.

Since the war, conditions have been rather different. Wage rises must now be restrained by government action and appeals, rather than by the old method of both sides beating their heads together. Sometimes, indeed, conditions have defeated even the appeals and the government itself has surrendered, offering wage increases rather than face a strike. This has happened more than once over the railwaymen, much to the annoyance of newspapers like The Economist, which irritably demands at such times to know whether the government is serious in its desire to stop wages going up.

An essential part of the official campaign on wages has been the thinking up of responsible-sounding excuses for refusing the workers’ demands. These excuses must be epitomised in a snappy name for the refusals. This time last year it was the pay pause which, it seems clear, was designed to hold wages in check for a few months. There are signs that the pause was at least as successful as the government could have hoped. Apart from the rises which were denied to government employees, the engineers themselves forebore to press a wage claim last autumn. The engineering employers have now conceded a three per cent. rise, but in the opinion of at least one newspaper, this would have come earlier but for the pay pause.

Now the “guiding light” on wage increases has replaced the pause, although it is being somewhat buffeted by the arbitration tribunals.

It is safe to forecast that, for those who are willing to do a little research and remembering, the events of capitalism will expose the government’s excuses for what they are. Just after the war, for example, the Attlee government launched a great campaign on wages. There was a propaganda drive to convince everybody that rises were inadmissible because, among other things, Britain’s international balance of payments was in jeopardy. Ministers lost no chance of parading statistics which showed how the British capitalist class were spending more on their imports than they were receiving from their exports. We heard many homely analogies about the difficulties of families which spent more than their income and we were invited to regard ourselves as members of a big, British, capitalist family.

A lot has happened since then. The international trading situation of Britain has varied considerably over the years. Once before—during 1959—the British capitalist class actually had a favourable balance of payments. Now it has happened again. The Treasury has announced that the first quarter of this year yielded a payments surplus in Britain’s international trade of £21 millions. The terms of trade—the ratio of import to export prices—are set fair for British capitalism and have been so for some time. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has suggested that over the year the surplus in payments might come to something like £150 millions.

At the same time another of the difficulties which faced the Labour government has gone, to be replaced by its opposite. There is no longer a desperate need to rush into a gaping wide world market, a market waiting to be filled with any substandard commodities which could be produced fast enough to pump into it. Coal, for example, was one of the big needs of the post war years. But so much has the demand for coal decreased that the National Coal Board has closed many of its pits and intends to close still more.

The dilemma

NCB chairman Lord Robens, speaking at the last annual conference of the National Union of Mineworkers, put his finger on British capitalism’s present dilemma:

“This is not an era of coal at any price—that ended in 1957; we are in the era of hard selling based on price, quality and service, and in this situation the fundamental need is to be able to produce the right produce at the right price.”

Conditions, then, have decidedly changed since the 1945 Labour government and in doing so have wiped out the excuses which were used to justify the wage freeze and the other restrictions of Crippsian austerity. The government itself has changed. But government policy on wage increases remains unaltered. All that has happened is that the old excuses have been replaced by the new. The catch-phrases of the late forties have given way to those of the early sixties. A pay pause may sound different from a wage freeze, but in fact it means almost exactly the same.

In one respect the government has not been caught napping by the changes of the past seventeen years. They have not run out of excuses. Now, we are told that wage rises are inflationary. The argument which goes with this assertion has almost become part of the mystique of modern capitalism.

When wages rise, runs the argument, the costs of production go up and the employers automatically increase their prices to recoup this. Higher prices mean that any unit of currency is able to buy less than before, which means that more currency units are needed to circulate the same amount of commodities. Thus wages are supposed to be going up closely followed by prices which, as they rise, nullify the wage increases and cut the purchasing power of the pound. This, say the pundits, is inflation.

This argument ignores several basic facts of capitalist life. Wages are the price of the commodity labour power and generally will fluctuate in accordance with the state of the labour market. But a market for one commodity can be buoyant at the same time as for another it is depressed. Although the coal mines are having difficulty in selling their product it is still possible for miners to get rises because at the moment most of them could get another job without great difficulty. The prices of many of the commodities which will for ever be associated with the so-called Affluent Society—television sets, refrigerators, washing machines—have tumbled over the past few years. But, as we have seen, the wages of the electricians and the engineers who make these goods have increased.

Karl Marx made the point over a century ago and it is still valid today. Highly paid workers can produce cheap commodities, and vice versa. A wage rise need not, therefore, be followed by a price rise.

The Guardian recently challenged the starting point of the inflation theory. In an editorial published on June 25, they said: This is the same mode of thinking as the one that regards success in enforcing a pay pause as the overriding test of present British economic policy. But in fact labour costs in the United States have risen sharply in periods of falling production and have actually declined in periods of recovery in spite of bigger increases in wages. . . . There is much evidence that the same is true of Britain.

Where, now are the protestations of The Guardian—and of other papers—that wage increases must put up labour costs? Are they buried, along with the other stale excuses? If so, we may be sure that they will return, even if in reincarnation.

Yes, wages are a problem and like most problems they are fertile in paradoxes. Perhaps the biggest paradox of all is that the problem will not be solved by putting wages up, or down, but by getting rid of them altogether.

Ivan

Editorial: What difference is there? (1963)

Editorial from the October 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour governments aren’t what they used to be. They no-longer send chills of horror down the spines of the rich, the near-rich, and workers with a few pounds in the savings bank. It was not always so.

Forty years ago when, for the first time a Labour government took over in Britain, there was quite a lot of fear and panic in the air, even though Ramsay MacDonald went to great pains to give his cabinet an image of respectability by appointing a number of peers. In particular by making one of them, Lord Chelmsford, who had no Labour Party associations, First Lord of the Admiralty so that those who feared the worst could at least feel that the Navy was not in dangerous hands. That Government lasted for about nine months.

The Norwegian Labour Government which came into office in 1928 was less circumspect about its power to inspire fear. Instead of putting the Navy into the hands of a conservative it announced its intention to disarm altogether and threatened other things horrifying to the propertied class. There was a sharp financial crisis and out they went after a fortnight. After a few years mellowing they were back again, with no panic, and continued in government with hardly a break for twenty eight years; only to resign now after narrowly escaping defeat on a Parliamentary vote of ‘no confidence’.

What is significant about the changeover from a Labour to a Conservative government in Norway is the general comment of political observers that it will make little or no difference. The Guardian’s comment was typical.

“Political observers,” it said, predict that the new government “will make few changes in domestic or foreign policy”. When the Norwegian Labour Party took over in 1928 it promised to put the interests of the workers first and to introduce what it called Socialism. Now the voters in Norway know that capitalism will carry on in much the same way whichever party is in power.

It is the same here. No one with any knowledge of the present political situation thinks that a Labour Party victory at the next election would be followed by drastic social changes. If such a thing were possible it would mean that the differences between the Labour Party and the Conservatives are deep and vital, whereas in fact the publicity men in both organisations have a hard time finding differences that look big enough to fight an election.

As fears of Labour government have receded, there is more scope for conservatives and others to air their views on problems of taxation and government, without being obsessed with their old apprehensions of ruin and revolution. So Mr. Harold Wincott, writing in the Financial Times last July, was urging his readers to consider what to them must have seemed a novel proposition. The great problem of the ‘nation’ (meaning of course, British capitalism) is, he argued that of halting and reversing the enormous increase of government expenditure that has taken place during this century. This, for him, is so much the greatest problem that he could write: —”I am …. sure that until a solution to it is found no government of whatever party, or under whatever leadership, will achieve more than temporary success.”

From that point Mr. Wincott’s reasoning goes thus:— A Labour government is likely to go on increasing the size of government expenditure; the Tories are better suited—in the long run—to tackle the twin jobs of getting economy and efficiency, but at present the Tory government is quite unable to think about it let alone do it; so the best solution would be a Labour government in office and the Tories in opposition where they could think about the great task of reducing the amount of the capitalist’s income sucked away to run the Administration. And he adds: —

“It seems that the real, long-term interests of Britain would best be served in part if the Tories lost the next election and. going into opposition, gave themselves the time to solve the outstanding problems of our age.”

That was Mr. Wincott in the Financial Times in July. Two months later the Editor of the Sunday Times (1st. September) started another hare. He would have agreed with Mr. Wincott that a Labour electorial victory was not particularly alarming, nor even a successful Labour government. What he fears is a Labour government which proves a failure:

“This would indeed be an alarming situation, since it would mean that both parties had failed in the same way at once. … If the Labour Party first wins and then fails, that would produce a crises of confidence not in the Government, but in ‘government itself.”

It could be summed up by saying that the Sunday Times is not afraid of a Labour Government because it would hardly be distinguishable from a Tory one. A year, or perhaps two years, after a Labour victory the electors may discover “that nothing really new has happened, that the Labour Party has no answers which the Conservatives did not have, that it has only some other and less energetic Ministers and a younger and perhaps more energetic leader”.

The Sunday Times and Mr. Wincott see the problem rather differently. While the latter appears to put the major emphasis on cutting down expenditure, the Sunday Times editor takes the line that administrative methods are hopelessly out-of-date and that top priority should be given to that problem. “Reform of the system of government is the essential preliminary to all other reforms”.

Of course the fears and hopes of those two gentlemen do not exhaust the possibilities, nor do the policies or lack of policies of the major political parties. If a realisation that there is little to choose between Labour and Tory Government turns workers’ thoughts to a realisation that there is a deeper problem, concerned with social structure and class relationship, they may be the readier to come our way and work for Socialism.

Macmillan changes nothing (1962)

From the September 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have been here before. There is no novelty in Government changes, even if they are in one big purge at the top, as Mr. Macmillan has just pushed through. Punch greeted the news with a reprint of a cartoon which showed a shelf full of discarded top ministers from the Balfour government of 1905. Clement Attlee was always liable to make important changes and in some of them won for himself a reputation for ruthlessness.

In one of his reshuffles he called to Ten Downing Street a minor minister who was generally accepted to be running his department satisfactorily. The minister left smiling brightly and the newspapers decided that Attlee had called him only to say, “Well done—carry on.” In fact, the minister had been brusquely sacked and was never seen on the front benches again.

This may have been typical of Attlee’s handling of his men, but it does not fit in with the popular conception of Macmillan. Up to his last purge the Tory premier had stuck to some of his men through thick and thin. When the responsible minister offered to resign after the shake-up over the Portland spy case, Macmillan refused to let him go. He has stood by Selwyn Lloyd under the opposition’s fiercest fire, answering criticism with promotion. This had given Macmillan a reputation for personal loyalty to his ministers.

So we have had a lot of nonsense from the press, who like us to think that the men who run British capitalism are affected in their work by sentiments like loyalty and friendship. There is a certain grim humour in this. Politicians, after all, are the men who must try to hold down our wages, decide to explode bombs which they know will release lethal fall out, declare war which they know will kill hundreds of thousands of people. And while they are doing all this, they must justify it by telling us that it is done in our interests.

So politicians must be hard and cynical and ruthless. They must be cold liars. They must be calculating mass killers. It is too much to believe that they are also the sort of men who will regret sacking a colleague because he went to Eton with them, or because he once took on one of capitalism’s dirtier jobs for them.

The men who are at the head of capitalism’s affairs are very remote from the rest of us. It is, therefore, difficult to discover the reasons for government changes, but we can discuss one or two aspects of them. Were the changes intended to reinvigorate the government? It is a popular delusion that a vigorous minister who runs a better department means a better life for us all. The Guardian plugged that line in 1950, when it thought the Labour government was tired and in need of a rest. It thinks something like that about the Tory government today. It may be that an energetic minister is better at his job than one who has been broken by years of trying to solve capitalism’s insolubles. But nobody has yet demonstrated that an energetic and efficient administration of capitalism benefits its people. Problems like bad housing and slumps and wars persist in capitalism, whoever may try his hand at getting rid of them. Sometimes, in fact, they can transform an energetic minister into one who is washed out. They did this to Anthony Eden. Sometimes they can break an entire government, as they did the Labour administration in 1951.

This goes, too, for the theory that young men make better ministers than old men. This theory is beloved in many places—perhaps most strongly among young workers, who hope that a young minister understands their problems. This was one of the themes on which Kennedy took power in the United States. Yet the facts shoot the theory full of holes. Young men who have risen fast in the government—men like Anthony Eden, Harold Wilson and Hugh Gaitskell—have shown no more skill than their older counterparts in taking capitalism’s hurdles. It cannot even be said for them that they have brought any especial benefits to young people. They have, for example, always eagerly supported the wars in which young men are pushed into the extremities of danger and suffering. In fact, young ministers have run capitalism, as best they may, no better and no worse than old ministers have run it.

Perhaps the Macmillan purge was designed to improve what is called the image of the government—its appearance before the doubtful electors. A government’s image is important; in some cases it wins or loses them votes. Yet in one way the changes do nothing to help the government’s image. For the image must be a successful one. And can a government which has had to be put through a shattering change be described as successful? Perhaps there are different interpretations of the word. Up to the last moment the government were assuring us that Selwyn Lloyd was successful, that his policies were correct and that he was administering them firmly and wisely. What sort of an image has Lloyd, now?

We could go on like this for a very long time; the politics of capitalism are full of double dealing, lies and worse. But let us consider the reshuffle from the point of view of the people who are meant to be impressed by it; the people who vote governments in and out; the people who keep capitalism running; the working class. For them, what are the changes worth?

In a word: Nothing. We have been here before and we have seen it all before. Governments have come and gone, been reshuffled, turned upside down, inside out and up the right way again. Prime Ministers have been ousted and replaced. The governing party itself has been changed. Through it all the same old problems have kept nagging at us.

Many workers who decided in 1945 that the Tories were a pack of played out, hard-faced men, were disappointed at the Labour Party’s efforts to do better. Whatever changes are made in any government’s personnel the results are roughly the same.

There need be no mystery about this. Governments run capitalism. And capitalism will keep throwing up economic troubles, personal insecurity, international disputes and the rest, as long as it exists. Whoever is in charge of any particular ministry can have no effect’upon these problems. Foreign secretaries have failed to remove war from capitalism. Chancellors have not been able to budget poverty out of existence. Housing ministers have been baffled by slums.

The evidence of the past says that this is true. So does the evidence of the present. One of the brightest stars to rise in the recent reshuffle is Sir Keith Joseph, who is now the Minister of Housing and Welsh Affairs. This man seems to have everything. Educated at Harrow and Oxford. A beautiful home, a lovely wife. Oozing with culture and knowledge. The top papers rushed to eulogise him and to tell us how lucky we are to be bossed by somebody like the elegant Sir Keith. One of them, carried away, described him as man who offers his opinions like fine sherry served on a silver platter.

Now what sort of sherry has Sir Keith to offer on the housing question, which nags and depresses and desolates so many workers? This is how The Guardian, on August 1st last, reported his contribution to the House of Commons debate on the homeless in London:

“The remedy was more new houses. At first he wondered if slum clearance could be stopped, but when one realised the condition of some of these slums. Cable Street, Stepney, for instance, no Government would wish to stop their clearance, however bad the housing shortage . . . ‘That is undoubtedly what we need, more low-cost housing in London, and my purpose is to try to help the L.C.C. and other authorities, and private enterprise, to achieve just this’.”

The remedy is more new houses! Not a very original conclusion—we have been hearing it for as long as there has been a housing problem. At the same time, we have also been hearing why capitalism cannot get around to building enough new houses; they can’t be afforded, or must take their turn in the queue behind armaments. We’ll be hearing the same from Sir Keith, before long.

Wondering if slum clearance can be stopped! Here, perhaps, is one solution to the housing question. But it can be extended. Has Sir Keith wondered about housing workers in caves, or in disused coal mines? There are going to be more of these going soon and some of them are probably better than Cable Street.

We need more low-cost housing! In other words, if the working class are to be housed they need more cheap, poky, substandard, working class homes. If they are to be cleared out of today’s slums, tomorrow’s must be ready to receive them.

This is what we are invited to accept as rare sherry on a silver platter. Sir Keith Joseph may be a charming, cultured, educated man. But capitalism has him beaten and fumbling, just as it has the people who vote for it and who don’t need an expensive education to do so. Yes, we have been here before and we shall be here again. Because capitalism keeps throwing up the same problems and bringing us back to the same realities. It is like a nightmarish roundabout, driven by nonsense and ballyhoo and simple lies.

Ivan.

The Confessions of a Tory MP (1962)

From the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cyril Osborne, Tory MP for Louth since 1945, often blurts out his thoughts on the state of the country without much regard for the embarrassment it must cause to his Party. He is a stockbroker, a company director, and an executive member of the Association of British Chambers of Commerce; he has a special interest in trade and finance.

He is gloomy about the present, and pessimistic about what comes after. Speaking to the staff conference of the Wholesale Textile Association at Oxford on July 9 he struck out in all directions; with force if not always with accuracy, if we judge by the report in the Times: “The Western capitalist system,” he said, is facing its gravest crisis since 1931, and “the communist powers” are not in better shape.

He found that in most countries excess manufacturing capacity has been built up in many basic industries, and “no one seemed to know how to increase consumption without starting galloping inflation”:

“They were all trying to export more and at the same time cut down on imports. President Kennedy was beaten by the problem and Germany’s exuberance was slowing down. The whole Common Market is losing its value, while Canada is down and out. Neither Government nor Opposition in this country is sure what is the right answer.”

Discounting some exaggeration, Mr. Osborne’s description of trade conditions in the Western world is indisputable. There are an increasing number of firms and industries here and across the Atlantic that are working far below capacity; not because they could not expand output by getting more workers out of the hundreds of thousands of job-seekers, but because they can’t find enough buyers who will offer profitable prices for their products. In some big industries, coal and railways, shipbuilding and aircraft production, the number of jobs is falling as sales decline.

It is a telling point Mr. Osborne makes that the countries are all trying to increase exports while curtailing imports, forgetting that one country’s exports are another country’s imports. (Mr. Osborne probably does not know that Socialists were making the point before he was born). And Mr. Osborne is at least getting a little nearer to the truth when he doubts whether the remedy is to be found in the Common Market, or in Kennedy’s policies, or in Canadian dreams of greatness, or in the way they run their trade in Russia. According to him, “the communist powers” are anxiously watching to see if we can find the key to the problem.

But first a word or two about Mr. Osborne’s personal and Party responsibility. He tells us now that the workers (and “the management”) have got to work harder and expect less, and put up with the loss of jobs that will follow the bankruptcy of many inefficient firms and that even so it is uncertain whether recovery can come “without the cruel harshness of an economic slump”: in other words, back to the nineteen thirties and the depression years.

He finds the root of the trouble in the outlook of this generation, “that has been told it can vote itself anything it desires.” But who told them that if they voted a Conservative Government back into power it meant voting to double the standard of living in this generation, and meant “Prosperity and Peace,” and “prosperity and opportunity for all”? Who told the electors in 1959 that 1951, when the Tories came into power, “was a turning point in British history”? Turning away from what to what? Surely it wasn’t supposed to mean turning to the grim outlook Mr. Osborne now threatens us with?

And it is transparently clear that Mr. Osborne knows no better than those he slates how to put things right. He wants the workers to work harder and expect less so that prices will be lower and British goods improved in quality. But just as it is impossible for all the world’s exports to expand if all the worlds’ imports are being cut—which Mr. Osborne sees—it is likewise impossible to make trading conditions better by having each worker producing more and buying less.

And while British industries are lowering prices and raising quality and producing more, what are the rest of the world’s manufacturers supposed to be doing? They will all be chasing the same elusive solution.

But note just how silly Mr. Osborne’s solution is. The problem, as stated by him, is “how to increase consumption” since many industries have excess capacity which will not be used unless consumption is increased—and his remedy is that consumption should be decreased (The workers must “expect less.”)

We have to correct one of Mr. Osborne’s errors, his belief that no one seems to know how to increase consumption without starting inflation. Socialists know very well how to do this and have been trying to get workers to heed it for a long, long time. All it needs is to bring the production and the consumption together. The world’s population needs, and would like, to increase its consumption of all kinds of things by very large amounts. The world’s resources of human labour, nature given materials, and machinery, etc., could vastly increase output of the things people want. Let Mr. Osborne tell us why the two should not be brought into direct relationship, with production solely for use without the complexities of buying, selling and profit-making that the Western and Eastern powers agree in supposing to be necessary.

Edgar Hardcastle

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.

News in Review: Hurrah for the NCB (1962)

The News in Review column from the March 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hurrah for the NCB

Who was it who once prayed to be protected from his friends?

When he was plain Mr. Oliver Lyttelton, Lord Chandos was a prominent member of the Conservative opposition which duelled with the Attlee government over its nationalisation bills. They fought in the House of Commons all day and. sometimes, all night as well. So effective was their propaganda that to many voters nationalisation became a very-dirty word.

But what is Lord Chandos saying about nationalisation now that he is a big industrial boss, chief of the mighty Associated Electrical Industries combine and of the Institute of Directors?

“Nationalisation of a fairly substantial sector of industry has come to stay. Whatever I may have thought in the first place about the wisdom of this policy, it is quite clear that every loyal citizen must try to make our nationalised industries work efficiently … As an industrialist I want cheap fuel and reliable supplies and I believe that with a little more working together that is what you [Lord Robens, chairman of the National Coal Board] will secure for us.”

Lord Robens need not feel embarrassed at this new friendship. Nationalisation was designed to give just what Lord Chandos wants — cheap and reliable supplies of vital commodities.

The only pity now is that Lord Chandos did not tell us this some years ago, when he was spreading the fairy tale that nationalisation had something to do with Socialism.

New Hospitals

One of the things which have missed out on the post war boom is the hospital. Over a fifth of those taken over by the National Health Service in 1948 were built before the American Civil War. Nearly half of them were built before the beginning of this century.

What has been done to put this to rights? Since the last war only one large general hospital has gone up—in Northern Ireland.

To the reformers who have been worried about this, the recent government White Paper must have come as a ray of hope. For plans are being laid to spend nearly £800 million during the next ten years to give us, in the words of the White Paper.” . . . the physical equipment and the pattern and the setting which will everywhere place the most modern treatment at the service of patients.”

This sounds fine. Who can disapprove of bigger and better hospitals? But we have heard this sort of promise before.

We heard it about the roads and the railways and about the Health Service itself. For Capitalism is full of problems which are left to fester until a government decides to tackle them with heavy expenditure.

Many of these grandiose plans have been axed out of recognition in successive economic crises, when, the government has been looking for ways of reducing its expenditure.

There will be more economic crises. Which means that there will be more cuts in expenditure. Which means that Health Minister Powell’s beautiful hospitals may never see the light of day.

Expensive Royalty

Many tongues were clucked at the news that the Royal Family is to have some more money spent on them.

It must cost around £400 a year in fees alone to send the Prince of Wales to Gordonstoun School. The fees, says the school, vary with the parents’ financial circumstances; which does not mean, of course, that the school is full of clever, deserving boys whose parents pay no fees because they cannot afford them.

It will cost about £85,000 to renovate the wing of Kensington Palace where Princess Margaret and her husband are living—£15,000 more than the original estimate.

Some critics say that Prince Charles should be sent to a comprehensive school, like a sizeable part of his subjects. Others think that the Princess should be content to live in a council semi-detached, which to them seems roomy enough for a couple with only one child.

These views are way off the mark. The Royal Family stand for the possessions, rights and privileges of the British ruling class. It is, therefore, only appropriate that they themselves should live in lavish privilege.

And nobody has yet explained how sending a prince to a council school, or sticking a princess in a small house, would help the working class parents who struggle to keep their children at school past the age of fifteen and who have to renovate their house during their summer holiday.

These problems are typical of what faces workers all over the world, under monarchies and in republics.

While the tongue-cluckers do their measly, pointless sums, Capitalism grinds merrily on, providing a fat living for a few of its people and condemning the rest to dull poverty.

Tory Unrest

The Government took on a slight list last month, under the blast of criticism from many quarters.

The strikes of railwaymen and engineers encouraged The Guardian to sigh that, although they reproved the strikers, industrial unrest was the inevitable result of the Government’s policy on wages. Other critics thought that the trouble was caused because the Government had not explained the pay pause properly to the workers.

Some standard bearers for free enterprise were disappointed at the Government’s refusal to interfere with the free enterprise take-over bid from ICI for Courtaulds. Labour had a go on Lord Home’s criticism of UNO. To cap it all Tory M.P. Sir Harry Legge-Bourke suggested that fellow Old Etonian Macmillan is getting past it and should hand over to a younger man.

It would be interesting to hear how a government could explain a wage freeze so that the frozen workers accepted it. Workers sell their energies to their employers, which means that they are bound to resist any effort to keep down the price of those energies, whatever tricky name it goes under.

Such problems are typical of the confusion of Capitalism and are bound to cause unrest as the Government—any government—grapples with them. Critics and rebels may flex their muscles impressively, but when it is their turn to do the grappling they never shape any better than the men they have criticised.

The fact is that the individuals who say they are in charge of the affairs of British Capitalism really have little control over events. And that goes for their critics as well.

So it does not really matter whether or not Macmillan manages to ride this latest storm. We shall still all be in the same boat together.

I’m alright, Alec (1963)

From the December 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

In many ways, the selection of Sir Alec Douglas-Home as the new Tory Prime Minister made political history. What Macmillan called “the usual processes of consultation” will one day be the subject of countless essays, articles and hopeful theses on the techniques of political dealing. In the end, Home’s succession was a surprise to most of the observers who are supposed to be able to forecast such things.

But in one way—a way that will not be mentioned in the histories—Home’s appointment came up as expected. It was certain that whoever got the job would do so in a smokescreen of what can only be called nonsense. There was, in fact, a different sort of nonsense for each of the candidates. Hailsham was said to be tough, colourful, impetuous—just the man to give some stick to Khruschev or, darkly hinted the Labour Party, to press the button in a disastrous moment of irascibility. Butler was smooth, remote, soft on coshboys. And so on.

The nonsense which was put out about Home was influenced by his peculiar circumstances. There was the usual stuff about the new Prime Minister’s amiable manner, about his propensity for chatting with Foreign Office chars, about the way he eats his breakfast porridge. We have grown accustomed to such stuff and have come to assume that it is all meant to prove something.

What was unique about the Home propaganda revolved around the fact that he was the latest of a long line of Scottish noblemen. The first of these was created a peer by James III, although his gratitude at this was not enough to dissuade him from later joining a rebel movement against the king. That particular peer died in 1491 later holders of the title met a grisly end or figured in a long feud with another Border family. The amiability for which the last Lord Home was famous could easily be due to the serene security in which he has always lived and to the curious reasoning by which some aristocratic families convince themselves that they hold their superior situation in life as a favour to the less fortunate masses.

This, as we might have expected, was meat and drink to the Labour propagandists. Just as they were basing their appeal on a drive to modernise and stimulate British capitalism, just as Wilson was telling us that the future lies in a disturbingly scientific Britain, the Tories make themselves appear outdated, obsessed with the old school tie, by electing the inheritor of an ancient Scottish earldom as their leader! How can such a man, demanded Mr. Wilson, know anything about the problems of kids taking the eleven-plus, or of a couple who are paying the mortgage off their house?

How indeed? But then, even if we accept that Home does not know anything about these things, would there be any advantage for us if he did know? The Labour Party have always tried to present an image of themselves as men who have come up the hard way and who are therefore, familiar with working class problems. Today they may pose as the party for young graduates who are bursting to get their hands on a computer and start driving the deadwood out of the boardrooms; not so long ago they were full of ex-miners who talked about getting the bosses off our backs. Yet what happened when the ex-miners came to power? The 1945 Labour government had many men like James Griffiths and Ernest Bevin whose early lives had been of appalling hardship. Did that government run the affairs of British capitalism any more humanely for that? Did they ever shrink from taking measures which, although essential to the interests of the British ruling class, were harmful to the very people whose votes and work had raised them to power? They did not.

The humble beginnings of some of the Labour ministers did not prevent them running British capitalism in the established manner, with all that that means. Indeed, perhaps there were times between 1945 and 1951 when miners, or dockers, or some other group of workers, may have wished that they were being governed by people who did not know so much about their problems—and about their methods of trying to alleviate them.

For all that, Wilson’s thrust at the fourteenth Earl was typically shrewd and may have set the tone for Labour's future attacks on Home. The Tories’ reply was enough to show that they are as concerned as they need be about the aristocratic lineage of their new leader. Heralded by Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday Telegraph, the Conservative machine set out to convince us that Home’s selection proved that a man can become Prime Minister on his own ability, and in spite of the fact that he is an Earl. This, in some peculiar way, is supposed to mean that we are developing a classless society in which all Britons are equal. Home himself made his own version of the point when he commented that the Labour leader is probably the fourteenth Mr. Wilson, which was joyously trumpeted by the Daily Telegraph as the best crack for a long time.

We can see, then, that the elevation of Home has released a flood of nonsense not just about the man himself but about the class to which he belongs and about the class division of society. Class, we know, is something of a dirty word, Every capitalist party strives to assure us that they do not stand for the interests of any one class and that their policies are designed to benefit us all. At the same time they work hard to convince us that their opponents' schemes are class-inspired. The Labour Party damns the Tories as the rich man’s party; the Conservatives sneer that the Labour Party is obsessed with class bigotry. That is not the end of the confusion. Some people think that classes do not exist, others believe that they do exist but they are not sure where the divisions between them begin and end. They talk about lower middle and upper-working class and other, equally meaningless, divisions.

Now the only way to clear up confusion is to present the facts. What, first of all, is a class? It has nothing to do with how much a person may earn, nor the sort of job he does, nor the school he went to. A class is a group of people who are united, whether they admit to it or not, by a common economic interest. This means that in modern capitalist society people are split into two classes, each of them with opposing economic interests. In this situation, it is nonsense to talk of a middle class—a class with “middle” interests somewhere between the two. The two classes which exist today are, on the one hand, those who have to work for a wage for their living and on the other those who can live without having to go out to work. The first of these—the working class have virtually no property in the means of producing wealth and for that reason are forced to rely on their wage to live. They sell their working ability to the other class —who, because they own enough stocks, shares, bonds, and so on, can live very well without having to work. The interests of capitalist and worker are opposed because one is a seller, and the other a buyer, of a commodity—the working ability of the worker.

It is a common fallacy that the gap between the classes is growing daily smaller. Yet there is obviously a pretty big gap between Sir Alec Douglas-Home and the working people of Scotland—the miners, the dockers, the clerks, the farm hands and the rest. The evidence, in fact, says that the gap is as large as ever. The Ministry of Labour Family Expenditure Survey for 1962 gives some idea of what it means to be a member of an average working class family. In the year under review, the ‘families which had a weekly income of between £15 and £20 spent an average of £1 14s. 4d. a week on their housing, £5 7s. 10d. on food—and made what the Survey calls a “net loss” of 4s. 4d. on betting. We know, because these figures are pretty general for all of us, that this sort of expenditure does not allow a very opulent life. But that is all that the average member of the working class can afford.

On the other side of the gap it is a very different story. Last September a young heiress lost her life m a sailing accident off the South Coast. Although she was only 21 when she died, she left a net amount of £82,309—which is far more than any worker can ever dream of earning. A classless society? The Earl of Harrington recently put up for auction his family seat, Elvaston Castle, and the 4,500 acre estate that goes with it. This estate includes three villages. This sale, which was worth over a million pounds to the Earl, will not leave him homeless. He owns 5,000 acres and will be going to live in his other place in County Limerick. These are only two glimpses at life on the other side of the gap. We may not exactly know, but we can take a guess, at what that life is like and at the sort of expenditure the people, on that side can afford. It will not be anything like that of the average family under the Ministry of Labour's microscope.

It is obvious on which side Sir Alec is. He is a member of the capitalist class who also happens to lead a government which avowedly stands for capitalism. The Labour Party may not have many leaders to compare with Home's aristocratic background, but this does not alter the fact that they also stand for capitalism. In fact, what matters is not whether the men who run the private property system of society are blue-blooded or bear the blue scars which prove that they once sweated and suffered down a coal mine. Experience has told us that the ex-miner runs capitalism as ruthlessly as any Tory nobleman. The important thing is what each of them stands for.

Capitalism, by its class ownership of the means of living, its inequalities and its privileges, perpetuates the class system. It is hypocrisy for a party to say that they are opposed to class privileges while they stand for the social system which fosters them. And all the capitalist parties are guilty of this. All of them, in whatever accent, pay lip service to human equality. And all of them in fact support the world in which the masses are condemned to the paltry and the shoddy while a small minority own the land we walk over, the things we work with, almost our very lives themselves. This minority live, to put it mildly, very well off the masses. Perhaps, of a night, they offer up an extra prayer—I’m alright, Alec; do your best to keep it that way.

Douglas-Home has no proposals to alter this state of affairs and neither have his Labour and Liberal opponents. If class society is to be brought to an end, the first essential is that the nonsense has to stop. But capitalist parties thrive—indeed they live—on nonsense. If the working class were to see through it all—now that would really make history and Alec would no longer be alright.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Death of a Buffoon (2001)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Quintin McGarel Hogg, Lord Hailsham of St. Marylebone in the City of London, who was “a sweet, dear man” (Woodrow Wyatt); a “political genius” (Harold Macmillan); a “cantankerous old man” (Margaret Thatcher); “a gentleman” (himself) died last month. He was 94 years old and his life was richly productive of the kind of material beloved of fawning obituarists, who did him full justice. By the time we had absorbed that he was a kind, effervescent, clever, intellectual giant we could only wonder how the world would survive without him. Could it really go on, with its wars and disease and poverty, untouched by the death of one of capitalism’s more arrogant and volatile politicians? Should we not reproach ourselves for failing to value this paragon more appropriately when he was alive? Except that Hailsham, was not quite like his admirers make him out to be.

He came of a family of lawyers and politicians and ended his career in politics seemingly welded to the Woolsack, holding the job of Lord Chancellor longer than anyone since the days of Lord Halsbury at the end of the 19th century: “. . . he couldn’t go on being that for ever” said an exasperated Margaret Thatcher when she was contemplating removing him from that office. His father held the same job in the 1920s and was the MP for St. Marylebone. His son Douglas is an MP and has held some minor ministerial jobs – although not to wide acclaim or without controversy. A daughter is a High Court judge. The Hogg family looks likely to carry on into infinity, producing volatile eccentrics who are willing to play their part in running British capitalism in the interests of the class they are born into.

Eton and All Souls

Hailsham was educated at Eton; where else could a boy like him have gone to school? He was said to be the cleverest pupil there, too clever for some of the masters and he was fully aware of it, being known as “. . . a disagreeable boy, academically clever, but emotionally arrogant and extremely self-centred”. Of course he was elected to Pop, that self-appointed aristocracy above the aristocrats of the school. Members of Pop wore fancy waistcoats and walked about arm in arm, they were fawned on by many of the masters and feared among the other boys for their arbitrary powers of flogging and the enforced servitude known as fagging. Clearly, Eton had little to teach the young Hailsham (or Hogg, as he was then, before succeeding to the title) about asserting himself as a member of the ruling class. He was notorious for the gusto and frequency with which he beat other boys (his half-brother, Edward Marjoribanks, was “passionate” about it and had a reputation for sadism). It was a useful education in guiltless suppression of anyone classified as socially inferior.

After collecting a succession of prizes at Eton which proved how clever he was Hailsham went to one of the more traditional of Oxford colleges, got a first class degree and was accepted as a Fellow of All Souls. This is a kind of Pope of the university, although more sober and industrious. It was founded in 1437 with the main purpose of praying for the dead (part of its landholdings include Willesden Junction, a grimy part of North West London where the inhabitants need rather more than prayers to give them some hope). Hailsham began his time among the brains of All Souls as a “Screw”, whose job was to decant the after dinner port which was drunk in such quantities. Places like All Souls, with their exclusivity and their rituals, play a part in informing the working class that they must accept their inferior status in society, the running of which should be left to their betters. How reliable a concept this is can be judged by the kind of politician to have passed through those privileged doors – recent examples were Keith Joseph and John Redwood, who have gone down in history as eccentric blunderers. We shall see how Hailsham measured up to the popular expectations of him.

Suez

He burst onto the political scene as Conservative candidate in a bye-election at Oxford City in 1938, supporting the Chamberlain policy of “appeasement” of Nazi Germany against an all-party candidate. This took some living down later, when appeasement became a nasty word and Chamberlain was universally unpopular. Hailsham survived the war with a slight wound and continued as an MP with a reputation as a kind of verbal blunderbuss in his attacks on the Labour government. Some time after the Tories won power he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, which pandered to his need to behave like an attention-seeking adolescent. But behind his posturing the fact was that, although he was one of the Service ministers he was kept in the dark about the secret negotiations between Britain, France and Israel which laid the plans to justify the Suez invasion. Hailsham denounced the Egyptian take-over of the Suez Canal as “wholly illegal” (as if such concepts are of the slightest consequence in capitalism’s wars) and never doubted that Britain and France were right to “intervene” (as he called it) in the war between Israel and Egypt. It was not the most penetrating analysis of that sordid affair.

Under Macmillan’s prime ministership Hailsham, who succeeded to the title when his father died in 1950, was given the kind of jobs which could have paved his way to the top. Appointed party chairman, he seized the opportunity to engage hysterically with the membership. In 1957 at the Tory conference in Brighton he made his first appearance in the early morning on the beach, wearing baggy trunks and plunging briskly into the sea for a swim. It was not coincidence that he was accompanied (although not into the water – there are limits to the call of duty) by a posse of newspaper hacks. At the end of that conference Hailsham grabbed the chairman’s bell and rang it in a frenzy, declaiming the poet’s words about who the bell tolls for – meaning the Labour Party. The party faithful loved it, stamping their feet and cheering but others – particularly his rivals in the party – were sourly uneasy at his vulgar publicity-seeking.

Flat Cap

This behaviour was rewarded in 1963 when Hailsham was given not one, but two, jobs involving responsibility for sport and for injecting some hope into the North East, where unemployment was at 4.5 percent compared to 2.4 percent nationally. The region’s most important industries – steel, shipbuilding, coal – were in decline. Hailsham was not a sportsman – he regarded the very idea of a minister of sport as akin to fascism – and he was not an economist. This did not disqualify him from holding the jobs but it did make the appointment look like a typical piece of Macmillan gimmickry. Hailsham did nothing to dispel this by touring the region wearing the kind of flat cap usually seen in working men’s clubs, or the dole queues. Later he tried to explain this away as a matter of chance; he had left his bowler hat in his car in London and was offered a choice of a pork pie hat or the cap. He chose the cap because it would be useful when he was out shooting. But the impression endured, that he was either making fun of the hard-pressed workers there or was clumsily trying to convince them that in spite of his Eton education and his large house in Sussex he was really one of them. “I do not pretend” he wrote later “that the plan (which he drew up after his visit) succeeded to the extent that my visit to the North East permanently solved the chronic difficulties of the region”. Well no, it didn’t but at least he got a nice new cap out of it, for his times on the grouse moors.

Later that year his big chance arrived, when Macmillan decided to resign and the Tory party descended into the kind of frenzied back-stabbing which should have had no place in what was called, in the days before Thatcher, the gentleman’s party. It all happened at their 1963 conference where, after Macmillan’s announcement, the atmosphere was, according to William Rees Mogg, “ugly”. Hailsham was Macmillan’s first preference as his successor but he had to get rid of his title and return to being plain Mr. Quintin McGarel Hogg. Without following the custom of first informing the rest of the cabinet he launched his bid for the top job in a carefully stage-managed announcement at the end of an otherwise dull meeting, which erupted into hysterical applause at the news. Randolph Churchill roamed the conference pinning large badges with the letter Q onto anyone unwise enough to stand still within arms reach. Hailsham got himself photographed spoon feeding his one year old child in the hotel foyer. All of this was not to Macmillan’s taste and so from the chaos of ugliness emerged the unlikely figure of Douglas-Home. Hailsham had blown it.

Relief

Which must have been a relief to the many people who had him correctly summed up, not as a genius but an arrogant buffoon, isolated by his conceit from the real world around him. Throughout his life he was buoyed up by the assumption that he and the rest of his class were superior, born to rule in the best of all possible worlds which is capitalism. The rest of us should only be grateful that there are people like Hailsham who are willing to exploit, degrade and ridicule us. To anyone concerned for society and its people Hailsham will not be missed.

Ivan

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

Finance and Industry: The experts are fallible (1962)

The Finance and Industry Column from the July 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

The experts are fallible

The economic experts of capitalism—the City Editors, the economists, the financial seers—sit on something of a pedestal. Whatever twists and turns the economy may take, they are never caught without a remedy. Their readers, political parties, even governments, hang upon their words.

Which makes it very embarrassing for everybody, if the experts are shown to be as fallible as the rest.

Mr. Samuel Brittan is the Economic Editor of The Observer and last year, like all men in his position, he was expected to comment on the Selwyn Lloyd “pay pause” Budget. This is what he wrote, on September 3rd last:

I have a feeling that Mr. Selwyn Lloyd is going to surprise many people by his success in carrying out his economic policies . . . many of the people who are now most vociferous in denouncing him may be loudest in his praise a year from now.

Mr. Brittan went on to point out that in some ways the Lloyd policy was following behind events and then gave his reasons for thinking that ". . . Mr. Lloyd has been so much luckier than his predecessors . . ." 

Now—almost a year after—what does Mr. Brittan think of the Lloyd policies? Is he loud in his praise? He is not. He has been doing his homework in The Economist and has been impressed by an article in the 12th May issue of that weekly which drew some striking comparisons between the Lloyd squeeze, and what has followed it, and the Butler squeeze of 1957 and what followed that. This is what Mr. Brittan wrote in The Observer of 10th June this year:

On both occasions the same kind of arguments have led to the same mistakes. Mr. Selwyn Lloyd too often gives the impression of believing that history began in July, 1961, and has not devoted enough time to studying the mistakes of his predecessors.

And later in the same article:

Government financial measures have in recent years actually accentuated the trade fluctuations that they were supposed to control. 

If Mr. Brittan was wrong, a year ago, when he expected the Lloyd policies would be lucky enough to succeed, he could of course equally be wrong now that he is criticising the Chancellor. Capitalism is a baffling system which can catch out the experts. But if that is going to happen, there is no point in basing experts, is there?

By a few shares

A new campaign is announced by the Wider Share Ownership Committee, aimed as its name suggests to encourage more people to buy shares. It would seem to have timed its effort rather badly. After the recent Wall Street debacle we would imagine that many a small investor has gone back to his account in the Savings Bank or the old sock under the bed.

The number of shareholders in the U.K. has apparently increased over the past ten years from about a million to 3½ million. Much of this increase is presumably accounted for by firms like ICI distributing shares to their workers and to lots of small men being persuaded on to the stock exchange band-wagon by tales that capitalist inflation and prosperity were here to stay.

It will be interesting to see what success the campaign has and we hope the Committee will oblige us in due course with details of the number of shareholders in say six or twelve months time. They should make interesting reading, especially if there have been a few more stock exchange shocks in the interim.

At the same time, an analysis of how many hold how much would be useful as well as instructive. We have an idea that the greater part of those 3½  millions hardly matter when it comes to working out who really own stocks and shares.

Do they know?

Our editorial this month deals with the recent stock exchange shake-ups and makes the point that they basically reflect the general unease amongst capitalists concerning present economic prospects.

This unease has spread to most sectors of the economy and is obviously causing our politicians and their advisers some real headaches. Nor, in spite of the long words they like to use and their knowing looks, do they seem to have much idea of what to do about it all.

For example, hardly had Mr. Selwyn Lloyd finished warning us that he might have to lake fresh steps to tighten up demand than he calmly goes and cuts the minimum H.P. deposit from 20 to 10 per cent. Only a little while before, he had eased some of the restrictions on the banks. When it is remembered that he was apparently worried only a few weeks ago about a hire purchase boom, it all seems rather strange.

Some cynics have tried to explain the quick turn round as a by-election gimmick to help the Tories in their present political troubles. Perhaps so. But we have the shrewd suspicion that it only requires capitalism to go into the faintest suggestion of a spin for all the politicians and their economic experts to lose their balance. To be quite frank, we don't think really they have a clue.

The Gold Rush

One further thing we have heard for several years past from our experts is that with the new theories about money, credit, and the general control over capitalism, the importance of gold has become a thing of the past. Some of them have even gone so far as to regard it as a myth, a hoax that has been shown for what it really is by the new economic theory.

Unfortunately, our capitalists only seem to think there may be something in these theories when there is little chance of their being put to the test. Immediately things begin to get uncertain, they forget all about the theories and rush us quickly as they can into gold. Which explains the present sudden interest in gold mining shares and the heavy buying of the metal itself.

This is the classic way the capitalists have always acted in times of stress. Not currency, not stocks and shares; but lovely, shiny, golden, gold. As for economic theory, they will come back to that after the crisis has blown over.

Karl Marx, over a hundred years ago, would have found it a quite natural thing for the capitalists to do. He for one was under no delusion about the importance of gold to the capitalist system. The universal equivalent he called it, and universal equivalent it still is.

Stan Hampson