Greasy Pole: Andrea’s Friend (2016)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

There have been many Prime Ministers who have tamed some persistently disruptive rival by giving them a job. So there were many questions asked when Theresa May promoted the likes of Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis. And among them was Andrea Leadsom, now Minister for the Environment. During the EU Referendum and subsequent Conservative leadership contest  Leadsom was notable for having certain doubts about her antecedents, her unwavering  prejudices and her forceful style of expressing them. It seemed likely that she would emerge as a front runner in a Tory leadership contest. Except that she withdrew before it came to that, which gave May a free run and the opportunity to promote the likes of Johnson, Fox and Davis – and Leadsom herself.

March

When Leadsom, framed in some expensive London doorway, announced her withdrawal to the assembled hacks and media gossips,  it was apparent that she was supported by, among  others, a man whose proximity to her and whose forlorn expression proclaimed that he was her most ardent supporter. This was Tim Loughton, the Tory MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, who was  briefly Under Secretary of State for Children and Families. He had become attached to Leadsom when they were – like David Davis – undergraduates at Warwick University. They were also members of The Patricians – a black tie dining club. Loughton was already active in the Conservative Party and signed her up. It was natural that this should encourage rumours about a rather deeper relationship but Loughton has always denied this (as if it mattered). He later took a close interest in her as another Tory MP and when Cameron resigned and she announced that she was in the running for the leadership he stood out among her closest supporters. He organised a campaign which included a small, but noisy ‘march’ on Parliament energised by the shouts between Loughton and the rest: ‘Who Do We Want?…Andrea Leadsom!!!…When Do We Want Her?…Now!!!’ The timing of this must have been faulty as it happened just before Leadsom decided to drop out of the contest so that Loughton later had to admit that the whole thing was ‘a bit of a cock-up’. After all, Leadsom had quickly abandoned the ‘march’ to take a posh taxi to the House of Commons. However there is no reason to think that Loughton’s enthusiasm for her and the party has declined.

Blunkett

In fact his experience in politics has probably taught him something about humiliation. His first attempt to get into Parliament was in 1992 as a candidate for Sheffield Brightside. This was also in its way something of a cock-up. Sheffield Brightside was represented by David Blunkett, blind but relentlessly ambitious, who in that election took 29,771 votes while Loughton got 7,090. What may not have been apparent to Loughton massaging his grief was that Blunkett’s career would not be some kind of conqueror’s march through the seats and corridors of Westminster. The future Baron Blunkett of Brightside and Hillsborough endured a long period of being in and out of important and influential ministries – typically Home Secretary – but was repeatedly cut down by what came to be coyly described as ‘ highly publicised matters relating to his personal life’ or ‘ external business interests’. His standards of professional judgement were often under scrutiny, such as when an ex-Director General of the Prison Service recalled that Blunkett had advised him to subdue rioting prisoners through the use of the army and machine guns. In one crucially influential case it was revealed that he had apparently used his powers as Home Secretary to speed up the renewal of a passport application by the Filipino nanny of one of his female acquaintances.

Sacked

Well, Loughton was able to offer a variation on that. For the 1997 election he had a gentler ride at the breezy seaside resort of East Worthing and Shoreham, where the accepted standards of poverty were rather easier than among the mills and mines of Sheffield.  In the 1997 election Loughton won with a majority of 5,098, which at subsequent elections rose until in 2015 it reached 14,949. In May 2010 he had been promoted to a post known as ‘Children’s’ Minister‘ and laid down his working principles by a vote against same sex marriages on the grounds that ‘…marriage is a religious institution and should be kept as a union between one man and  one woman’. Despite  or perhaps because of  this a few months later he was sacked in one of David Cameron’s reshuffles. Loughton did not take this too well, describing it as an example that the government had ‘dropped the ball’ over the recurrent scandal of child exploitation – ‘the children and families agenda has been a declining priority’, When a reporter from the local Worthing newspaper The Argus asked him ‘If you were doing such a great job why did Cameron sack you?’ he replied ‘You tell me… I was summoned to see the Prime Minister. I actually thought there was a chance I would get promoted. He sat me down and told me what a wonderful job I had done. Then he said he wanted to give someone else a go’.

War

Loughton’s response to this treatment was to declare a kind of war of relentless questioning against those who had taken over from him at what was known as the Department of Education. He dismissed his successor the Lib Dem Sarah Teather (who was also sacked) on the grounds that, unlike him, she ‘…did not believe in family as she certainly did not produce one of her own’. This was an argument subsequently used against Theresa May, pointing out that she is childless as against Leadsom being a mother of three. He condemned the Minister, then Michael Gove, being like Young Mr Grace in the TV sitcom Are You Being Served? The response from an anonymous member of the staff at the Ministry was to use the Spectator for an adjective-laden description of Loughton as ‘a lazy, incompetent narcissist obsessed only with self-promotion’. By that time Loughton had been reported for using a four letter expletive about an unpaid volunteer in Worthing who had reacted to a picture of him sitting with some children in a local school by asking how many of them would be suffering from worse poverty as a result of his government’s policies. In the Sunday Times  of 7 August Dominic Lawson referred to ‘The unfailingly foolish Loughton’ but it is not just the likes of him that we need to be concerned over. Think about Baron Blunkett, David Davis, Michael Gove etc and about this society, with its gruesome system which they are allowed by us to represent.

Ivan

Editorial: Ruling class split (2018)

Editorial from the August 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

By calling a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union in June 2016, David Cameron was counting on a victory for the Remain side to contain the Eurosceptics in the Tory Party and see off the challenge from UKIP. Far from overcoming the divisions within the Tory Party, the resulting victory for the Leave side has blown them wide apart.

David Cameron immediately cut his losses and ran, leaving his successor, Theresa May, to pick up the pieces. She attempted to gain the upper hand in her Party by calling a General Election a year later, but unfortunately for her, she lost her majority and is now more vulnerable to the Tory Party's warring factions.

The referendum result has had repercussions for Scotland and Northern Ireland, the two regions where most voters opted for Remain. The SNP government has used it as ammunition to press for a second Scottish Independence referendum. Leaving the EU could jeopardise the Northern Ireland Good Friday agreement, as this was predicated on there being a common customs area between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

Initially, partly to poach votes from UKIP and increase support in Brexit areas, Theresa May pursued a so-called hard Brexit, where the UK would leave both the customs union and the single market. However, facing up to the reality that most British businesses need to stay close to the EU and to avoid a hard border in Ireland, on the 6th July, the Government at Chequers produced plans which amounted to a "softer" Brexit. There would be a harmonisation with EU rules in trading with goods (but not with services). However, this was too much for some and there were howls of treachery and several ministers have resigned, including David Davis and Boris Johnson. Tory Brexiteers have threatened to mount a leadership challenge. May backed down and accepted amendments from a hardline Tory Brexit group to water down her Customs bill. This sparked a rebellion among furious Tory Remain MPs. May seems to be caught in a pincer movement between the Remain and Brexit factions of her Party and her authority is ebbing away. Some have argued that a Second Referendum on Brexit is needed to resolve this impasse. Others say that another General Election is required.

We are treated to the unusual spectacle of the Tory Party being unable to serve the interests of the majority of the British capitalist class, who favour staying in the Custom Union. Ironically, it is Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party that appears to better represent the interests of British capitalism on this issue.

This political crisis is really a matter for the capitalist class only, but the working class has been dragged into it. At the 2016 referendum, we argued that workers had no interest in supporting either the Leave or Remain campaigns, as either way they will still have to deal with the problems of capitalism, such as job insecurity, low wages and unemployment, and urged them to write ‘World Socialism’ over their ballot papers. Should there be a second referendum, we will again be advising workers to do the same.

Greasy Pole: What’s ‘Appropriate’ Then? (2018)

The Greasy Pole column from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is some time now since we could expect to be warmed and comforted by those big, declaratory Monday morning newspaper photographs of Prime Minister Theresa May, pondering on the most hopeful date to call the next election and how meanwhile she might wrestle with the likes of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox (remember him?), Gavin Williamson . . . She was obediently tailed by her husband James May and in accord with their respective backgrounds they were then emerging from some parish church not far from the Chiltern Hills. Mr May was smiling, which could have been motivated by the fact that he is a top executive of one of the biggest and most powerful financial institutions which controls assets worth trillions of dollars, including shares in Amazon and the popular coffee house Starbucks, which have both been listed by Theresa May in her sights for action (or whatever it is) against the keenest of tax avoiders. A lot has happened since then to undermine the political standing of the Prime Minister and her partner. For example there has been the exposure of the relationship between so many of their followers and assistants which has been such as to justify the term ‘inappropriate behaviour’ which means the opposite of something suitable and proper. It is called sexual abuse. 

Misconduct

But on that day, making their way from that local manufactory of delusion, Mrs May and her husband gave no hint that they were in fear of any particular crisis awaiting them in Westminster and beyond. Which probably made it more difficult for them to confront their raw feelings about what their supporters in Parliament and beyond had been up to. There was the brutal reality about the sexual misconduct of a clutch of Honourable Members towards party members and supporters, even as the facts were beginning to emerge. Much of it was revealed in what rapidly became known as the Spreadsheet of Shame – a survey which named 36 particular performers on that score. The events – the abuses – revealed in that document included ’handsy behaviour’ or of a former Member suggesting to his secretary that she might enjoy it to ‘feel’ how long his penis was or another planning to encourage a staff member to get drunk to assist his unwanted sexual advances.

Climbing

Notably prominent – to his own discomfort –  in all of this has been Mark Garnier the Conservative MP for Wyre Forest Worcestershire, whose local opponents are likely to be undermined by the very existence of the thousands who regularly support him. Garnier attended a couple of expensive local schools after which he became a junior clerk in an investment bank in London. This led to a partnership in a firm of hedge fund managers. In his politics he has contested Wyre Forest four times as a Tory. On his first attempt there he lost to an independent candidate but after that in 2010, 2015 and 2017 he won and his present majority is in the region of 13,000. Political climbing runs in the family; a cousin of his did a spell as Solicitor General and he himself was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for International Trade from July 2016 until being sacked in January 2018 – an event which was greeted by a local councillor who ‘. . . would just like to congratulate Theresa May on making a very sensible decision . . .  definitely the right move by the Prime Minister’. At that time Garnier was operating in a style which involved him asking his secretary, one Caroline Edmondson, to buy him some sex toys in a Soho shop while he publicly lauded her as a ‘sugar-tits’. The official government line on Garnier’s sacking was that it was to make way for new blood while he was also in breach of the ministerial code – except that this was contradicted soon afterwards when he was cleared by an official enquiry. Not surprisingly Garnier blurted out that he was bitterly disappointed at being punished for behaviour which he was assessed as not responsible for. It did not seem to occur to him that this was typical of the ruthless, unpredictable technique in the world of capitalist ’justice’. Then there was Damian Green who was until recently one of Theresa May’s special favourites as her First Secretary of State – effectively Deputy Prime Minister – until she had to ‘ask’ him to resign because he was so deeply involved in activities which once encouraged his then future wife to comment that ‘He’s got a very strong sex drive, he’s just not all that discriminating’.

Inappropriate

The affair of the misbehaving MPs, the appointments, the disputes, the sackings, was in response to their ‘inappropriate’ behaviour – a fascinating word for use in survival, even success, in the political world. To begin with, it does have some effect in diminishing the gravity of some of the MP’s actions, for example when the focus was on Mark Garnier. But there are many examples of governmental policies and actions which are considered as ‘appropriate’ but which in their effects are of the cruellest, and most damaging. One of the more recent was a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, on behalf of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which described the day to day effects of governmental policies which operate in response to the current problems of British capitalism. Helen Barnard who is head of analysis of the Rowntree Foundation, is quite clear about this: ‘Low-income households are facing a difficult 2018, with rising prices, frozen benefits and a wage squeeze all putting further pressure on household incomes’.

If Theresa May, as she drifted through the church door that day, had asked herself how effectively she could continue to play a role in this class divided society she might have felt the need to use that word ‘appropriate’. For this is typical of the crime against our very language, of how capitalism distorts every aspect of our lives. It is only the socialists who stand and work against this malignant chaos.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Catching a Crabb? (2015)

Stephen Crabb MP

The Greasy Pole Column from the September 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although he was out of step with his own declared standards of order – which included training ex-soldiers as teachers to impose stricter discipline in the schools – the former Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove in March 2014 gave voice to his opinion that David Cameron's inner cabinet included such a concentration of Old Etonians as to be 'ridiculous' and comparable to that of Robert Gascoyne – Cecil, Lord Salisbury, whose cabinet at the beginning of the twentieth century '... was known as Hotel Cecil. 'The phrase “Bob's your uncle” came about and all the rest of it. It is preposterous'. It was shortly after this outburst that Gove was moved from Education to become the Tory Chief Whip and then, after the 2010 election, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice so that his attendance at certain traditional events requires him to appear in robes that an outsider might consider to be as preposterous as those of any ceremonial Old Etonian.

Beard

But among Gove's colleagues on the Tory benches there is Stephen Crabb the MP for Preseli Pembrokeshire and Secretary of State for Wales, whose background and ready smile clearly place him outside the ranks of the blue-blooded but preposterous. For Crabb was brought up by a single mother – his father's violence in the family led to the parents splitting up – on a council estate in Pembrokeshire; as a student he spent his holidays working on building sites. He was first elected in 2005, winning the seat from Labour in what had been a 'Tory-free zone' and went on to increase his majority in 2010 and 2015. He was promoted to Secretary of State after his predecessor David Jones was sacked – a result of Jones' persistently combustible contacts with the Welsh Administration. There is another Tory MP in Pembrokeshire but he is Simon Hart who, in contrast to Crabb, went to public school and agricultural college and was for ten years Master of the local Hunt (the less respectful locals are inclined to lump the two MPs together as Crap and Fart). Another way in which Crabb distinguishes himself is that he has a beard; he is in fact the first Conservative Cabinet minister to be so adorned since the Fourth Earl of Onslow, an Old Etonian who in 1903 was President of the Board of Agriculture. But Onslow's beard, with his handlebar moustache, was bushy and abundant while Crabb's is cropped and trained; during Prime Minister's Questions he sits on the Front Bench inviting one of the cameras to swing towards him and he smiles – or rather the beard smiles. Its message is that he is contented with his record so far and expects it to see him into an exultant future.

CARE

In the beginning Crabb was a youth worker in London, going on to apply what that experience taught him as a marketing consultant at the London Chamber of Commerce. His first taste of the Commons was as a parliamentary intern – which then, as now, was a demanding but unpaid job - for an organisation called Christian Action Research and Education or CARE. There are now some 20 MPs using this service, supplied by CARE free of charge for work such as research and organisation. Crabb has one on his staff but there is no mention of it in his current biography website. CARE describes itself as a 'Mainstream Christian charity bringing Christian insight and experience to matters of public policy' but others prefer a term more in tune with its association with the 'mission' of the American pressure group Focus on the Family of 'defending the God-ordained institution of the family and promoting biblical truths worldwide'. These 'truths' involve a theory that homosexuality is a disorder which all-right thinking people would strive to 'cure'; opposition to equal rights, including marriage, for same sex couples, to the processes of assisted dying and to the repeal of the infamous Section 28. There are five MPs who have broken their contact with CARE, one of them describing its policies as 'deeply offensive'.

Food Banks

As part of his avowed intention to alleviate poverty, even as a staunchly ambitious MP, Crabb became a trustee of the Pembrokeshire Action To Combat Hardship. One of the starkest and most debilitating symptoms of hardship right now is evident in the growing dependence on food banks. Foremost of the charities in this field – the Trussell Trust – states the problem clearly and without doubt: between 1 April 2014 and 31 March 2015 they distributed three days' food on 1,084,604 occasions, feeding some half a million people, which represented a year-on-year increase of 19 per cent. Of the people they helped some 44 per cent were in emergency through delays in, or cessation of, their benefit payments. Crabb's response to this crisis of need was to vote to reduce the benefits of social tenants subjected to the infamous bedroom tax. And to vote against raising welfare benefits in line with price rises. These votes were a part of the government policy to inflict even worse damage on the people already suffering extreme poverty. At the same time they improved Crabb's chances of working his way up the Greasy Pole.

Expenses

And then there is the matter of his expenses. He claimed over £8,000 on a second home to refurbish a flat which he then sold at a considerable profit; then he 'flipped' a claim for a house which he was buying in Pembrokeshire and a room in another flat was classed as his second home. His justification of all this was that he had not '...claimed for things like plasma TVs, even though the rules allow it' and then that an official in the fees office had encouraged him in the manipulation: 'Steve I'm looking at your allowances and you've spent hardly anything... you'd get more for your allowances if you switched'. In all during four years he claimed £67,633 in second home expenses. These details must have been of some interest to anyone struggling to survive on what are called welfare 'benefits' and food bank 'charity'.  And to anyone interested in the flexibility of what Crabb presents as his 'Christian honesty'. To be recalled along with the 'honesty' of the others like Michael Gove, Simon Hart, David Jones . . .

Ivan

More Union Bashing (2015)

From the September 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July the government published details of its Trade Union Bill which is expected to have its second reading in the House of Commons in September or October. The Bill contains wide-ranging measures designed to restrict the organised working class acting collectively and taking industrial action.

The main proposals are thresholds for turnouts in strike ballots, restrictions on the right to picket and the removal of the ban on the use of agency workers to replace striking workers. The government is also extending the role and powers of the Certification Officer who is responsible for regulating trade unions, including providing this official with a new power to impose financial penalties on unions.

Industrial action, including strike action, will only be lawful if there is a minimum 50 percent turnout amongst trade union members who are entitled to vote, 40 percent of those who were balloted must vote in favour of industrial action. In addition, the Bill lays down that abstentions should be treated as 'no' votes for industrial action; which contravenes the policy of the International Labour Organisation which states that only votes cast should be taken into account. The 40 percent yes vote requirement would apply to four 'essential public services': health, the fire service, transport and education. This is in fact far more wide-ranging than it appears at first glance as transport services include roads, rail, aviation, maritime, border security and Transport for London (i.e. London Underground). There will be time limits for strike mandates which will reduce the momentum in union campaigns, reducing or removing trade unions' rights to facility time, specific and bureaucratic requirements for picket lines, the introduction of new criminal offences and sanctions for picketing although unlawful picketing is already regulated by both civil and criminal law.

The removal of the ban on agency workers to replace striking workers (a ban in place since 1973) will permit employers to use 'scab' labour to break strikes. This is manna from heaven for the capitalist class. Jack London, author of The War of the Classes wrote 'after God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumour of rotten principles. When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and Angels weep in Heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out' (The Scab).

Frances O'Grady, the TUC general secretary, responded that 'the government’s proposals on union ballots will make legal strikes close to impossible. Union negotiators will be left with no more power than Oliver Twist when he asked for more. After five years of falling living standards the prospects for decent pay rises have just got a whole lot worse' (Guardian 12 May).

The new Trade Union Bill follows the capitalist class onslaught on the organised working class in the 1980s and 90s. Alan Budd, the economic adviser to Thatcher has said 'raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes – if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since' (Guardian 23 April 2012). In the 1980s and 90s a series of trade union laws were introduced that removed immunities in industrial action, imposed restrictions on the right to picket, increased legal interference into the internal affairs of the unions, the closed shop was made unlawful and the definition of a dispute was narrowed, including restricting industrial action to disputes between workers and their own employer, thus outlawing solidarity action.

The current capitalist crisis and recession has seen production cut back and large numbers of workers lose their jobs, and as a result of high unemployment and job insecurity trade unions become less effective as bargaining organisations, meaning that laws restricting trade unions are easier to implement. Keith Ewing, President of the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom said in May there had been a 'shocking decline in collective bargaining with just 20% of workers covered by an agreement, compared with 82% in the 1970s. In 1978 I was one of 13 million trade unionists and I am now one of only 6 million. Our collective bargaining structures are collapsing' (Morning Star 14 May).

All this presents the working class with a problem in maintaining real wages. A pay increase which does not keep up with the cost of living represents a fall in 'real wages'. The capitalist class know this and will exploit it to their own benefit. Marx pointed out that 'the general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages' (Value, Price and Profit). It should be remembered that wages can never, for long, rise above the level which allows the employers to make a profit. The times when the workers can hope to gain an improvement are when the capitalists are doing well, expanding production and accumulating capital. The most successful strike is the one that never happens because when trade is brisk employers may yield to the mere threat of a strike interrupting production and profits.

The wage which the working class receive is the price of their labour-power and the price of this commodity fluctuates, like that of all commodities, around its value as determined by the amount of socially-necessary labour incorporated in it. If competition between the working class for jobs was unrestricted then wages would tend to fall below the value of labour-power, as often happened in the 19th century before effective trade unions existed. Combining together in unions to exert collective pressure on employers is a way the working class can prevent their wages falling below the value of their labour-power and below the subsistence level. To resist the intensity of exploitation and to maintain real wages against inflation workers will have no choice but to struggle for higher wages even if this means using the strike weapon. The strike, during an economic depression, though, is a blunt instrument to wield. It is difficult to use the strike to gain more pay when production is being curtailed, workers being laid off and the business facing bankruptcy.

Trade unions, then, are defensive organisations of the working class against what Marx called 'the never-ceasing encroachments of capital' but they cannot stop the exploitation of the working class. This exploitation is inherent in the wages system and can only be abolished along with it through the conversion of the means of production into common ownership under the democratic control of the whole community.

As Marx wrote: 

'at the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: 'Abolition of the wages system!' (Value, Price and Profit).

As socialists, we stand with our fellow working class in their necessary battles to defend themselves, but we point out at all times that the real victory to be achieved is the abolition of the wages system.

Steve Clayton