Pathfinders: Helicopters over Helvellyn (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world sees its first paper trillionaire while food prices rocket and existential crises loom on all sides. Have you concluded that capitalism has become a parody of itself, with psychopathic zombies in charge? Yup, and you know what else? You need a break!

If you’re a) reasonably fit and b) have the resources to get out into the countryside, the great outdoors might just save your sanity. It’s not just nature’s quiet grandeur, or the comforting knowledge that it will all still be there when today’s cardboard Caligulas are long gone. If you look closely, you’ll realise something important about people, even when there’s nobody in sight.

You may notice a general absence of litter. There is a thing called ‘broken windows syndrome‘, in which visible signs of neglect, litter and vandalism tend to encourage more of the same. There is a flipside. ‘No Littering’ signs don’t work half as well as there being no litter in the first place. The more pristine the environment, the more people try to keep it that way.

As you meander along your country paths and hilltop trails you will also notice how many have been flagged, stepped, safety-railed, bordered and gravelled. That’s all done to help you, and protect the landscape too, by people you will never meet and never be able to thank. And here’s the thing. They do it for nothing. No wages, no perks, no stakeholder shares or investment opportunities, no title deeds, no face-in-the-paper or picture-on-the-pub-wall. Mountain Rescue, those anonymous heroes of the high passes, rescue people from mountains. These volunteers rescue mountains from people.

For example, volunteers are currently repairing some of the high paths on Helvellyn, in the English Lake District, as part of a three-year project involving helicopters, hard work and hundreds of tonnes of stone. This is necessary because the paths are worn down by up to 19 million visitors a year. Says one local Ranger: ‘We are privileged to have such a great bunch of volunteers who are willing to head out into the hills in all weathers to clear blocked drains, build paths and engage with people all across the Lake District… We certainly couldn’t monitor and maintain all 400 paths each year without this vital contribution’.

You’ve heard that saying, ‘no such thing as a free lunch’. It’s a capitalist saying, which reflects a bitter capitalist mindset. In reality, ‘ordinary’ people are perfectly willing to give their cooperative labour for free if it adds something useful to the general commonwealth. Even when it’s at considerable risk to themselves. Mountain Rescue volunteers jeopardise their own lives because dopey urban types are daft enough to go swanning up a peak without a map, wet weather gear or a compass. Lifeboat volunteers plough grimly through heavy swells to rescue party-boat people who didn’t bother to check tides or a weather forecast. Socialists know all this very well. What we don’t understand is why so many people don’t know this. Instead they believe humans are vile and antisocial, therefore a post-capitalist cooperative society is impossible, and we deserve to be ruled by super-rich tyrants.

Another thing you might spot, on garden walls or gates, are eggs for sale, or jams or chutneys, with a little honesty box next to them. Sure, it’s all a bit twee, and most jam makers aren’t depending on the income. But now a whole cottage industry in baking has sprung up, with cake sheds ‘packed with cookies, brownies, old-school sprinkle cakes or lemon drizzle… for which you are trusted to pay through an honesty box system’. So successful have cake sheds become that local killjoy councils are considering stepping in to insist on trading licences, public liability insurance and health and safety certificates. With some bakers making £1,000 a week, trust has its limits. Those entrepreneurs have installed CCTV.

A recent sciencex.com article has this to say about trust: ‘Social trust is shaped largely by personal experiences of navigating the world, as well as by how strongly people believe others are likely to act honestly or dishonestly in everyday life.’ The article reports a recent Norwegian study of over 8,000 people which ‘shows that we often overestimate others’ dishonesty and that people are more honest than we think.’ Perhaps more surprising is that when study subjects were told that they had identified dishonesty where none existed, many promptly adjusted their expectations accordingly. Mistrust, it seems, is not ingrained. If better evidence comes along, we can change our minds and become more trusting.

Mistrust is the central and irreducible problem, not just in capitalism, but in any property society that relies on trade, even barter. Why? Because private ownership of property introduces a conflict of interests between buyer and seller. The seller has an incentive to rip off the buyer, so the buyer can never really trust the seller. The mistrust at the heart of the trade transaction then scales up to the whole society, rewards the biggest liars and con artists, and reinforces a mutual suspicion that affects and infects all human relations. It’s the broken window syndrome again. Lies and dishonesty beget more lies and dishonesty. Democratic sharing and free lunches? Don’t be so naïve!

In a gift economy, which is socialism, there is no central conflict of interests. The donor gains no material advantage by making the gift, so has no incentive to lie about it. Likewise, the recipient has no reason to distrust the donor. The trust at the heart of the gift economy scales up to the whole society, and reinforces a mutual respect and confidence that pervades everything. Truth and honesty beget truth and honesty. Just like the unspoilt countryside, we will collectively strive to keep it that way.

Still, you don’t have to go yomping up a mountain to see decent, selfless behaviour in action. It’s all around you, every day, in spite of ‘common sense’ and received wisdom. It’s why socialism will work.

Paddy Shannon

Town and Country: Marxism’s Answer to the Problems (1973)

From the September 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and Engels are the most contemporary of writers. Reading their work of a century ago, one is struck again and again by its potent applicability to today. The recently-published Grundrisse should be thrust in the hands of every sociologist playing handy-pandy in foam and backwaters: here is the social ocean itself expounded. The problems of the present are continually anticipated — and the only tenable conclusions drawn by relating them to the economic foundation on which the complex of human organization is built.

We think of civilization as towns, and modern man as urban man, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, between the towns is country and one-fifth of man in Britain remains rural man. What about the country? The environmentalists have brought attention to the problems suffusing it today: the long-term effects of agriculture’s chemical-propelled drive for short-term gains, the damage done by improvements and the car. Apart from gloomy prophecies of the ultimate from these developments, the question to be asked is what is the countryside’s future. Has it still an organic function in society or, as the present tendency appears, is it to become simply a townsmen’s recreation ground?

Divided and Distorted

Marx and Engels considered the past, present and future of the country. “The first great division of labour in society,” wrote Engels in Anti-Dühring, “is the separation of town and country.” In The Origin of the Family, he wrote:

“Also characteristic of civilization is the establishment of a permanent opposition between town and country as basis of the whole social division of labour.” (p.201)

Elsewhere, both he and Marx spoke of “the antithesis” and “the antagonism” between the two spheres. It is, says Marx,

“. . . the most crass expression of the subjection of the individual under the division of labour, under a definite activity forced upon him — a subjection which makes one man into a restricted town-animal, the other into a restricted country-animal, and daily creates anew the conflict between their interests.” (The German Ideology, p.44)

What is being said is that town and country labour create two types of man practically in opposition in their conditioned requirements from society. If you like, two kinds of human nature; and underlying them, and their conditioning, is the division of labour which is produced by and intensified under property society. Marx observes that it begins to exist “from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears”, and goes on:

“For as soon as labour is distributed, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.” (The German Ideology, pp. 20 & 22)

And for the final effect of specialist division of labour on man: “It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity.” (Capital, Vol. I, p. 396)

Is Migration a Factor?

Thus, the countryman sees the town-dweller as an overpaid smart-alec with unhealthy lungs, and the reciprocal view is of a cretin with straw in his hair. Underlying the townie concept is acceptance, conscious or otherwise, of the theory of migratory selection: the more dynamic move, the less able stay put. Despite attractive examples like the Parsees and the Jews, the theory does not hold water. It cannot be applied to the gypsies, for instance; and, obviously, with different working and living conditions it would be the “fitter” who stayed and the “weaker” who emigrated.

The matter therefore comes back to the division of labour. The real difference — the two kinds of human nature — was expounded by Engels in Anti-Dühring:

“The town artisans, it is true, had to produce for exchange from the very beginning.”(p.300)

“The first great division of labour . . . condemned the rural population to thousands of years of degradation, and the people of the towns to subjection to each one’s individual trade. It destroyed the basis of the intellectual development of the former and the physical development of the latter”. (p.320)

A great deal is covered by this. It includes the fact that the townsman’s idea of the countryman as simple and uncomplicated is the opposite of true. “Development” means rural workers’ difficulty in organizing because of their scattered situation, which reinforces their apparent backwardness and lack of ability to improve their conditions compared with industrial workers. It should be considered also that from the Middle Ages until very recently large numbers of country people were employed in servile non-productive work as domestics, gardeners, retainers and so on.

About Pollution

Yet the techniques of industry have, inevitably, penetrated the country. The brisk expert of today can tell us that agriculture has become an industry. Marx told us so a hundred and twenty years ago.

“But e.g. if agriculture itself rests on scientific activities — if it requires machinery, chemical fertilizer acquired through exchange, seeds from distant countries, etc., and if rural patriarchal manufacture has already vanished — which is already implied in the presupposition — then the machine-making factory, external trade, crafts etc. appear as needs for agriculture.” (Grundrisse, p.527)

Engels speaks of capitalist industry going outside the town concentrations and “bringing new large towns into being” in the countryside. This is not breaching the town-country division of labour, but in the same context Engels makes some startlingly prescient points. His comments on pollution would gratify any present-day ecologist:

“The factory town, however, transforms all water into stinking ditch water . . . The present poisoning of the air, water and land can only be put an end to by the fusion of town and country; and only this fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease.” (Anti-Dühring, pp.324-5).

Whatever may have been in Engels’s mind at the end of that passage, it applies now to the “sludge de-watering” plant which reduces sewage to clear water and a biscuit usable as low-grade fertilizer. It can serve only populations of 20,000 or less and could not deal with the amount of sheer litter that accompanies city sewage; but those considerations only support Engels’s case for a society of small communities.

Planned Spread

At the same time as attacking pollution, Engels points to the actual possibilities for decentralizing industry:

“Large-scale industry which has taught us to convert the movement of molecules, which is more or less universally realisable, into the movement of masses for technical purposes, has thereby to a considerable extent freed production from the restrictions of place. Water-power was local; steam-power is free … It is the capitalist mode of its utilisation which concentrates it mainly in the towns and changes factory villages into factory towns.”

(ibid., p.324)

For steam, electric power must now largely be substituted; but Engels’s remarks remain true. The economics of capitalism have led to even greater concentration of industry in and around major towns, and government attempts to have it re-located have been conspicuously unsuccessful. There are some examples whore decentralization has suited companies (such as Pye’s small electronics factories in villages), but they are exceptional.

Engels saw that capitalism had, in his own day, made the break-up of town agglomerations possible but impractical for its own purposes. To bring it to actuality, and end the innumerable existing problems, society must be reorganized:

“Once more, only the abolition of the capitalist character of modern industry can do away with this new vicious circle, this contradiction in modern industry, which is constantly reproducing itself. Only a society which makes possible the harmonious co-operation of its productive forces on the basis of one single vast plan can allow industry to settle in whatever form of distribution over the whole country is best adapted to its own development and the maintenance of development of the other elements of production.”

Greater Competence

What is specially important about these passages is that they present the dispersal of industry and the big city, and the ending of pollution, not as a simple-life dream but as a theory of social organization — based on the achievements of capitalism itself. “The technical basis of modern industry is revolutionary”, said Engels. In the same light, the abolition of the division of labour is not simply a cry for humanity but a leap to an immensely more competent organization of society. Marx put it:

“Modern industry, by its very nature, therefore necessitates variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility of the labourer . . . We have seen how this absolute contradiction . . . vents its rage in the incessant human sacrifices from among the working class, in the most reckless squandering of labour power and in the devastation caused by social anarchy.” (Capital, Vol. 1, p.460)

With the ending of the division of labour, the “opposition” between town and country gives place to their fusion. The two human natures become the one, Marx’s “mere fragment of a man” replaced by his “fully developed individual … to whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers”.

Villages of the Future

Engels went on to suggest, from his own analysis and from the projections made by Fourier and Owen (both of whom were conscious of the effects of the division of labour), how life and labour would be in Socialism. He approved their idea of social groups of between 1,600 and 3,000 people — good-sized villages. The closest thing to a town would be four or five of these situated near one another. Every person would work in both agriculture and industry, and young people would be given all-round training so as to incorporate “the greatest possible variety of occupation for each individual”. The country would become an integral part of everyone’s activity — not as a playground and a different place, but as a productive force and a source of pleasure simultaneously.

This was both practical and urgently necessary to Marx and Engels. The problems of the present day are not new, but were considered by them in their view of society. The country’s dilemmas are also the town’s; in The Housing Problem Engels shows how the town-country antithesis blocks attempts to deal with that chronic social misery. The solutions he and Marx gave remain the only workable ones — and needed all the more urgently today.

Robert Barltrop

These Foolish Things: “Scientific” research (1995)

The Scavenger column from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The basic contradictions in capitalism cause widespread death, destruction, pollution, poverty and waste. But this is to take the world view. Most of us experience day-to-day capitalism as a series of small stupidities, irritations and frustrations. Here are a few. If you encounter any worth a wry smile, please send them to The Scavenger who will publish the best.

“Scientific” research

Increasingly, large companies are shedding their own research departments and “buying in” research from specialists. The obvious advantage of this is that work does not have to be found for idle researchers.

But, more importantly, the external professionals can be assumed to be impartial in their findings. On the other hand, any findings they produce which are not to the liking of the commissioning firm can be referred back for “further confirmation”.

Gray Robertson, President of Healthy Buildings International, USA, a research company, did not wait for this. He personally altered the figures his researchers had established for cigarette smoke levels in buildings. He crossed out the figures and wrote in numbers half as high. This made it possible for the American Tobacco Company to deny knowledge of the addictive and damaging qualities of their products.

The annual budget for the US intelligence empire is S29 billion.

Transporting live cattle

The Transport Minister, Stephen Norris, has opposed the pressure for the government to spend large amounts of money on public transport systems to cut vehicle exhaust pollution. He said that the private car was: “extraordinarily convenient. You have you own company, your own temperature control, your own music and you don’t have to put up with dreadful human beings sitting alongside you.”

Know your place

This month, at the beginning of the new tax year, the government is abolishing the 120-year-old rate levied on field sports—or, more precisely, on the land used for shooting and fishing.

This should raise the market value of thousands of acres of wild, uncultivatable land in Scotland where the price has been depressed in the last few years. Estate agents calculate the value of such land by averaging the number of grouse shot, deer killed or salmon caught. The current value of a brace of grouse in this calculation is about £2,500, a stag at about £18,000 and a salmon in rich rivers at anything up to £10,000.

This is the main reason why Kristiansen (the Lego manufacturer) recently paid around £3 million for the Strathconon estate. The 20,000-acre Tulchan estate in Morayshire fetched £12 million and the rich 32,000-acre Yorkshire estate of Gunnerside was bought by Robert Miller, the American, for approximately £10 million. If you want to enjoy the same sort of freedom to slaughter wildlife, the 6,000-acre Lyon estate in Perthshire is on the market at £2.5 million. A bargain, by the look of it, because it has its own hydroelectric plant.

To be fair, not all such landowners buy the land for blood sports. For some, the objective is simply guaranteed privacy. They want to leave behind the places—and the people—that their wealth comes from. They want that essential quality of private property—to keep everyone else out

“The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself ” John Kenneth Galbraith. .

The Scavenger

Between the Lines: Primitive . . . (1989)

The Between the Lines column from the February 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Primitive . . .

Marx wrote about the increasing misery of the working class. By this he did not mean, as some who have tried to refute him have suggested, that wages would fall lower and lower, material conditions ever more harsh. Marx was right: the quality of living under capitalism becomes ever-more impoverished.

Country File (C4) provides a pleasant diversion on the bleakest of urban Sunday lunchtimes. It has features on farming and conservation and the world of animals: it reminds the viewer that, stuck with the noise and dirt of an artificial city, there is an environment beyond which is richer in what is natural and more in harmony with the senses. On 8 January it had a report about a growing social problem: rural violence committed by young frustrated workers in small country towns and villages — the children of the land whose daddies do not own the fields and whose futures are in the cities, where there is more chance of jobs. Others involved in recent acts of rural criminality are farm labourers whose jobs have been made more tedious by mechanisation and who are often paid below-poverty wages for making landowners rich. A police officer from Avon and Somerset spoke of how Saturday-night gangs were terrorising villages and vandalising beauty spots. There have even been reports in the press of the senseless slaughter of farm animals for fun.

No doubt there were irritated viewers in Devon or Yorkshire who switched on expecting to see how big turnips can be and how green fields can look in the right light. Such people would do well to ponder that life is becoming increasingly empty for vast numbers of young workers, squashed as they are between the obscenities of the bomb and the social mind of a world which is civilised only to degree that it offers hope when there is a likely profit attached.

The following evening World In Action (ITV, 8.30 pm) reported the results of a nationwide survey which revealed that women were more afraid of violent assault in the streets than death from cancer, being killed on the roads or nuclear war. Ninety per cent feared being attacked if they went out at night. Sixty-seven per cent said that they never go out at night alone. What an indictment of a so-called civilised society it is that the majority of women — the majority of the population — are too frightened to go out alone in the evening. This is the social-pay-off of the competitive society. The streets become a jungle where anyone with money, however old, frightened or disabled, is prey to the muggers. Women workers are right to be scared. Street assaults are frequent: more dangerous weapons are now used by the muggers (in imitation of our rulers who also like to sophisticate their murder instruments regularly); and most of us live in badly lit environments, which assist the fast-money attackers. The thief thieves because it is an easy way to make money. Ethics do not enter into it; he is a reflection of the economic motives of the more successful robbers in the City, whose activities are strictly legal.

It is not just that women are likely to be attacked, but that they feel threatened. Every walk in the dark streets feels like preparation for an attack. Young men are eight times more likely to be mugged than women, but this is a deceptive statistic: women are less likely to be mugged because so many are forced to seek refuge in their homes every night. They are under curfew. There is no way that a society which scares its inhabitants to that extent can ever be worthy of the description of “civilisation". The simple-minded blame the muggers, as if knife-carrying kids have chosen such a way of life as an alternative to the gentlemen's club. Socialists blame the profit system.

. . . and civilised

The same people that the profit system twists into muggers could, in different material circumstances, behave like the people of the Baka tribe, shown in three programmes by Channel Four called Baka — People Of The Rainforest. Modern society sneers at such primitive social relationships. The programmes allowed us to glimpse into the moneyless, wageless, stateless world of one of the few extant pre-property societies. Of course, the Baka are productively unsophisticated and have to work harder than they would need to do had they access to labour-saving technology. They are still innocently religious, regarding Nature as something above them and largely beyond control. It would be foolishly romantic — although very tempting — to depict primitive communism as The Way We Should Live. But what if we took all of the machinery of production which exists in modern Britain (where women are afraid to walk city streets and rural areas are echoing to the sound of furious working-class frustration) and combined it with the human relations of classless equality which characterise primitive communities? That is the prospect which world socialism holds before us now. We could have a society where people co-operate to produce the best that there can be to satisfy the needs of all; instead we have a society shown to us in a documentary by Clive James called Postcard From Chicago (11 January, BBC1, 9.30 pm) in which we were introduced to the gangs which inhabit the city's slum areas. These gangs — The People and The Folk — do not merely shout abuse at each other. They shoot — to kill.

Gang warfare, born of urban poverty, is a game that ends in murder. Often the killers and killed are in their mid-teens. Now. James is one of those "witty" types who likes to enchant the half-witted with empty aphorisms. It's seductive viewing, but a lot of tripe is squeezed into the maxims. For example, in watching workers making hamburgers in Chicago (note: you will always see James watching people work) he stated that “Marx had it all wrong”. There is no alienation; these descendants of Polish immigrants feel close to their work and are grateful to be close to food — unlike in Poland where they would have to queue for it. This self-evident rubbish is supposed to pass for serious social commentary. By the same reasoning. Rolls Royce car producers are not alienated from the luxury cars they produce — even though they may travel home from work in a second-hand Cortina. Clive James is, in fact, a virulent anti-socialist. That he is witty and entertaining makes him an all the more potent one.

Is Britain free?

Panorama (BBC1, 9.25 pm. 9 January) was all about the diminishing freedom which many of us perceive in Britain at the moment. The government, in the name of freedom, has made numerous moves to curtail trade union and civil freedoms which workers fought hard to win. But even without the much-discussed Thatcherite assault, a society without free access to goods and services can never be free. That conception of freedom was not once mentioned in the programme. It is as if the fullest extent of “freedom" can only ever mean a loosening of the chains. I fell asleep after ten minutes of the great debate about whether Britain is unfree, woke up to see Willie Whitelaw sounding silly and switched over to Minder (ITV), where one can see a far more vivid picture of phoney freedom and increasing misery under the capitalist social system.

Steve Coleman

Blogger's Note:

For some reason the February 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard misnamed 'Baka — People Of The Rainforest' as 'Baka — Children Of The Rain Forest'. I'm not sure what happened there. In 2012 the writer/director of the original documentary, Phil Agland, wrote and directed a follow up documentary entitled, 'Baka: A Cry from the Rainforest'. It can be viewed at the following link.

A Brief Exposition of Socialist Theory. (Continued.) (1920)

From the February 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

The example of the difference of the relations between men getting their livelihood by means of simple instruments of labour (typified by the threshing flail) and those producing their sustenance by means of more advanced means of production (typified by the threshing machine) which we have given by no means exhausts the field. Just as the social structure consists of much more than these primary and personal relations, so much more in the social life takes shape from the character of the instruments of labour and the methods in which they are used. Man stands not only in relations with his fellow men, but also with the world about him, and as far as these relations are within society they have their base in the conditions of wealth production.

In the classic age of the flail, for instance, the general means of producing wealth were about on a par with that implement. It was the day of the windmill, the spinning wheel and distaff, and the primitive loom. In the towns the smith's hammer rang out, without a rival in the production of ferrous ware. Everywhere was handwork, everywhere tools. Machinery, if not unknown, was of so little importance as to have practically no influence upon the method of production.

In such conditions as this what was the relation of men toward the world ? We have already seen that the instruments of labour in general belonged to those who operated them. Among the artizans of the towns, possibly, were many exceptions, but the lower we descend in the scale of the development of the instruments of labour, the more do we find the energies of the workers occupied in the production of the primary necessaries, food, shelter, and clothing. Therefore, in the period of which we are speaking, the production of these things were the predominating industries, and it was the general conditions prevailing in these industries which determined the general social relations.

It was not, therefore, the handicraft of the towns which determined the social form, but the economic conditions of rural industries.

Ignoring, then, the seeming contradictions of the towns, where goods were certainly produced for sale, let us turn to the countryside.

The worker of the Middle Ages, owning the simple means by which he produced his living, had an outlook upon the world entirely different from that of the modern worker. This difference commenced with his relation to the product of his toil. His very object was different when he took his instruments of labour in hand. The modern worker starts out to produced wealth which shall be the property of the owner of the implements he operates, but the feudal worker, owning the tools with which he worked, laboured to produce wealth for himself. Hence while the modern worker realises that his function in life, and therefore the reason he is permitted to live, is to work, the mediaeval worker could not take this view of himself and his relation to the world.

He worked to live. The product of his labour was a different thing at the moment of its production, from the product of the toil of his present-day prototype. The latter, producing wealth which, on production, belongs to someone else, necessarily produces what that other requires, and he cannot escape the conviction that he is only permitted to work (and therefore to live) in order to produce it. The feudal worker, on the other band, producing wealth for himself, produced those things which he required to satisfy his own needs, hence he saw himself only working to live, and took an opposite view of his place in the world to that of the wage worker of our present system.

A. E. Jacomb

(To be Continued.)

Where there's muck . . . (1985)

From 'The Place Where I Live' series from the February 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

These days. life out in the sticks, as a townie might put it. is not all it has been cracked up to be. To get out of bed in the morning and open the window only to be assailed by noxious vapours which invade one's nostrils with the venomous intent of an angry rattlesnake is no joke. (It has been averred that, to the unwary, the experience can be nearly lethal.) Unfortunately, to stagger back again from the bed. handkerchief clutched to one's livid face, in order to slam shut the greenly-misted window panes is of little use either: the room—the house!—is by this time uninhabitable. Even the flies lie dead along the window-ledges, and the dog, eyes streaming and lungs heaving, gazes out pitifully from his corner in the kitchen.

OK, so I exaggerate. However, it's not so very far removed from the truth. The name of the game is "intensive farming". Gone are the days of straw-bound manure pitch-forked from the back of a horse- or tractor-drawn farm cart. Nowadays it's a matter of chemically treated slurry sprayed over the valley-bottom in a manically determined effort to maximise production at whatever cost in environmental pollution to the local inhabitants and to the flora and fauna of the meadowlands. Moreover, the machinery by which this disgusting operation is carried out not infrequently deposits a film of slurry on the road surfaces which, particularly in wet weather, constitutes a very real risk to road-users. (Being a so-called National Park, the Yorkshire Dales hosts large quantities of tourist traffic. Then there are the limestone juggernauts which roar along roads never built to accommodate such monsters.) Of course, farming up here in the Pennine uplands is a vastly different affair from that obtaining on, say, the level plains of Norfolk or Lincolnshire. The lushest and most valuable pastures are to be found along the valley floors, which are divided and sub-divided by dry-stone walls. These grasslands provide pasturage for cattle and sheep, both of which are to be found grazing on the higher ground also. There is no arable farming here to speak of. The Duke of Devonshire is the most considerable land-owner around these parts and consequently not a few of the farmers are his tenants. The farms are often small and the parcels of land worked by the it individual farmers are often separated from each other by considerable distances, sometimes miles. The latest problem for Dales farmers is the government's acceptance of the EEC's 20 per cent cut in the so- called milk quota — an obscenity indeed when one considers the unmet need for milk which exists in this country alone, to say nothing of the world at large.

After agriculture we have tourism and the holiday trade — caravan sites, camping grounds, holiday cottages, coach tours, pony trekking — even hang-gliding for those willing to risk their necks seeking out the thermals pushed up by the rocky escarpments. There are the fabulously exclusive grouse-moors of our masters, and the somewhat more accessible fishing reaches along the banks of the Wharfe and the Skirfare. the Nidd. the Ure and the Swale. High up in the air may sometimes be glimpsed the odd hot-air balloon, usually advertising something or other. Above it. higher yet. may be seen—and heard!—reminders of more sinister things — vicious manifestations of capitalism's wars to come, as they rip the sky open in their passes over the hills.

Of course, the cash nexus is all. There are, not unnaturally, many exceptions to the general rule — civilised little organisations which cater for special interests: the occasional art-clubs, botanical groups, field societies, local folk-museums and so on. run by those who live in and respect the Dales and Dales people. But for the most part the Dales reflects a cash-consciousness as pronounced as that to be found in any other part of the country. Housing here is formidably expensive — so much so that many young indigenous Dales people cannot afford to live in their own "home" districts. Consequently, they are obliged to seek accommodation in the towns to the south of the Park. One effect of this state of affairs is to raise the average age of the local population, which must be detrimental to the elderly themselves. Who among us wishes to live in the elephants' graveyard which the Dales villages threaten to become?

Quarrying is capitalism writ large. The major conglomerate operating in Wharfedale happens to be the building services group. Tilcon (the Tilling Construction Company). One of the largest in the UK. its quarries division alone comprises some sixty sand, gravel, limestone, whinstone and granite quarries, spread throughout the British Isles. The concrete division comprises over sixty Trumix plants sited from Scotland to the Potteries. The Group also embraces a mortar division, a putty plant, plaster and perlite units. North Riding Garages, the Slater and Acey Transport companies, and the Scottish Brick Company, of over twenty brickworks, owned jointly with the NCB. also fall within its purlieu along with much besides. The existence in the area of this major capitalist undertaking, together with other considerable quarrying interests, is more or less taken for granted, despite strongly expressed objections to their vast appetite for more hillside to open up. and notwithstanding the inconvenience caused by the heavy traffic generated. One explanation for this acquiescence is that at least some employment is afforded in a district in which jobs are as rare as that other Dales rarity, the Slipper orchid.

This acceptance goes hand in hand with an even readier tolerance of the nomenclature "National Park" as applied to the Yorkshire Dales. A true national park on the one hand, and the massive extraction of limestone on the other, must be mutually exclusive. And of course activities such as intensive farming and exclusive house-building would likewise have no place in a national park. For a national park is, or ought to be, a natural wasteland, an area of countryside which has been allowed to revert as nearly as possible to its original condition. So we can discern a kind of hypocrisy here which, while speaking of the shadow of an ideal, seems quite incapable of coming to terms with the substance of capitalist profit-making.

Visitors to the Dales often illustrate this contradiction by their own illusions as to what the Dales are about. They will wander at will over what they consider to be freely accessible land, little realising that it is privately owned. (It is only fair to add, however, that much of the most elevated ground —usually unsuitable for agriculture or grouse-shooting — is freely accessible.) There are statutory footpaths, of course, although even these must be watched with the utmost vigilance since some local landowners have no compunction whatsoever but to remove or wire up the stiles. Nowadays. as a result of recent farmer-orientated legislation they are even allowed to run bulls over fields across which footpaths are routed. The truth is that the so-called National Parks in this country are, for the most part, private property in one form or another. Moreover, it is private property of a highly lucrative nature. Despite recent EEC legislation, land ownership is still more than just a comprehensively subsidised and very profitable means of wealth-accumulation. It is also one of the most effective hedges against the inflation which has done so much damage to those of us who are obliged to sell our labour- and brain-power in order to live.

Reference has been made to the quarrying interests which are taking such huge bites out of the limestone hills here, and the capital expropriation is vast indeed. The visual impact is, however, devastating. Visitors moving up-Dale from Skipton, the nearest town of any substance, must, on reaching Swinden quarry and limestone workings, wonder what they're in for round the next comer. This enormous apparition, thrusting sky-wards like some ghostly rocket launching site, casts its white pall over everything — trees, fields, barns alike, for many hundreds of yards around. It constitutes a monument to the capitalist system, symbolising the philistine greed of powerful entrepreneurs who, as we ought to have learnt by this time, will stop at nothing in order to protect and enhance their interests.

However, let's not end on too pessimistic a note. Much of the Yorkshire Dales remains more or less as it has been for centuries. In many ways those of us lucky enough to live here, despite the disadvantages, have much to feel thankful for compared with our brothers and sisters of the industrial areas to the south and east. And perhaps this good fortune is all the more reason for finding ways of getting the socialist case over. After all, it is a simple enough matter to pull on a pair of boots and climb to the bleak and windy heights with only the bird-calls for company. Up here, at least, one is enabled to think of the larger issues and to find ways of expressing them. What's more, it doesn't cost anything—yet!

Richard Cooper

Fox-hunting, Privilege and Power (2005)

From the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is not really about hunting. This is about the last hunting horn blowing the last call for the feudal system and the House of Lords...

In August 1997 the Socialist Standard wrote (half) jokingly, of the imminent demise of the quaint rural past-time of hunting landowners. Half, that is, because the joke contained some truth on the matter of the contretemps over the banning of fox hunting which will come (finally) into force next month.

Much fuss has been made about banning this blood-sport, its supporters twisting and turning, saying one minute it’s a cultural past-time, the next it’s an economic necessity of farming life. Either way, it’s by-the-by. What is interesting is the raw process of power involved in this debate.

Under any normal circumstances, such a Bill – like the banning of dangerous dogs (under the Tories), or the banning of raves (also under the Tories), or any other sundry such measures that restrict the mythic beast of personal choice – would have been nodded through parliament after a swift and enjoyable debate. With foxhunting, however, the inner secrets of the British constitution were revealed in all their ugly goriness as the New Labour hounds tore into the privileges of the owners of vast tracts of land who wanted the right to literally be a law unto themselves.

Under ordinary conditions, most legislation and acts of government are passed by the passive (at least) co-operation of the responsible bodies. For example, in the direct democratic aspects of the constitution of California, if the Lieutenant General does not oppose an initiative going to referendum it is much easier to have the vote – as in the recent one on stem-cell research held there in November. It could still be forced through, but unless the issue is strongly desired, most people wouldn’t bother to fight against the grain.

At least in California, though, the electorate have a chance of voting for new officials. With the House of Lords, the British legislature has the remnants of the descendants of cronies and toadies of monarchs past mixed with the cronies and toadies of top-politicos today. The toadies of kings past also have the advantage of owning the country – a kind of fringe benefit – and the latter-day toadies like to hang out with these wealthy landowners. The incentive for resisting encroachments onto their eminent domains is clear.

Posture politics

Add to the mix the quest of the increasingly marginalised Tory party to find a solid political base from which to challenge a government that tries to pretend to represent the whole nation, and you have a recipe for government attempts to compromise with the uncompromisable, reconcile the irreconcilable, and the spectacle of hard-done-by landowners taking to the streets under the banner of the “Countryside Alliance”.  And, after themselves banning raves and pitbulls, of the Tory party now crying out about restricting personal cultural liberties and who weep about the unnecessary slaughter of dogs.

That is a recipe for the most debased, ridiculous, irrelevant and futile posture politics stirred up by has-been politicos on the make, squabbling over the crumbs of power. That hundreds of hours of parliamentary time apparently needed to be spent over banning foxhunting, as compared to the single vote needed to launch a murderous war, shows where the priorities of these disinterested Lords and their Commons co-conspirators really lie.

The whole history of the House of Lords has been one of the rich and powerful trying to retain a voice and a vote to protect their vested interests against democracy. It had nothing to do with organically evolved institutions, rationally devised systems of checks and balances, and everything to do with shabby compromises and naked self-interests of the landed elite demanding their place in the legislature. Every twist of their fight with the Commons has come from their naked self-defence of their property – most famously with the Irish and other Lords conspiring to defeat Gladstone’s Home-Rule Bills in the late nineteenth century.

The first Parliament Act of 1911 came when the Lords tried to block a Liberal budget. They are only supposed to be able to delay legislation for two years under that Act (and now after the Act under the Attlee government, only one year). However, in a busy parliament, any delay means disrupting the whole schedule for other bills, and so can mean wreckage of any plans it wouldn’t be worth putting up a fight over.

After the Attlee government, the Lords agreed not to vote on anything contained in a government election manifesto, a concession to democratic legitimacy in order to be able to keep their undue place in the halls of the legislature. When New Labour removed (most of) the hereditary peers, they declared themselves no longer bound by this agreement, and began to make life difficult for the government. Hence why it has taken eight years to pass this Act.

The Countryside Alliance now is set to challenge the legitimacy of the Parliament Act 1945 – the power that finally allowed the Government to force the Act through despite Lords opposition – on the grounds that it wasn’t passed properly (the Lords never voted on it). Sixty years late, they discover this idea.  If they can’t win under the rules, they try and change the rules.

The government has pledged to continue with its reform of the Lords, removing the last vestiges of hereditary peerage, but keeping the likes of Lord Sainsbury – a man who gave millions of pounds to the Labour Party, with nothing in return save a peerage and a ministerial post.

In Scotland, where the new Parliament is not bound by an un-elected second chamber, a bill banning hunting was passed with ease, and, strangely, the world hasn’t come to an end. A stark illustration of the power exerted by the Lords in the British Parliament.

Hereditary property rights

The landed rich cannot begin to conceive that their will cannot run untrammelled. Representatives of the hunts have talked of landowners exerting their property rights, and withdrawing co-operation from national infrastructure. Withdrawing co-operation with the army (so much for their vaunted patriotism); withdrawing access to land holding electricity pylons railways and waterways. Some have even called for civil disobedience. They have claimed the police will not be able to enforce the Act (something the police deny), which is again betraying their usual stance that law and order must be respected (and also forgetting that the police could just turn up to their houses and serve warrants on them).

We have already seen their civil disobedience – abandoning cars in the street, storming parliament, fighting with the police in ways that could only impress hardened direct actionist anarchists (indeed, London Class War in the Autumn 2004 edition of their paper have called upon the pro-hunters to, erm, bring it on). Yet, they escape with only a slapped wrist compared with anarchists who get heavily fined and locked up.

The BBC have contacted various utility companies to find out what the ramifications for the withdrawal of co-operation would be. The answer is, whilst it could make life difficult, if withdrawal of co-operation were to conflict with operational needs of the electricity, rail or waterways, then there is legislation for them to force access. The landowners could be shocked, again, to find themselves at the wrong end of a copper’s truncheon.

They retain their faith in the holy rights of property, of the power of property holds to exert influence in society. They forget that the power of property rests upon the political power to enforce it, and now the law is for once against them, they don’t like it. Much as they don’t like the right to roam, for ordinary people to walk across their vast open spaces that they have a piece of paper saying they own.

The sad thing in all of this – apart from the genuinely moving look of surprise and hurt that hunt supporters have when they discover the police can be a bit nasty – is that many of them feel genuinely, passionately moved by this ban. Some have been heard to say in interviews that this is the first political issue they have ever felt strongly or passionately about. So, never mind thousands dying in war, millions dying of preventable diseases, the AIDS pandemic, millions dying every year of starvation, privation, squalor, poverty, meanness and misery in every town bred by poverty. The right to hunt foxes is what exercises them.

The countryside should not be a preserve of a tiny minority, shouldn’t be a source of division or overweening power. Disputes should be settled democratically, without tiny rich groups having more say than others. All of this just serves to show how the nexus of power and privilege that is part and parcel of capitalism prevents those sensible sentiments being carried out. The attempts of the rich and the powerful to maintain their power over making the rules and laws of society is an affront that serves to illustrate how shallow democracy under capitalism really is.

A telling strength of the remaining power of aristocratic privilege, is that at the dawn of 2005, we have still had to devote some 1500 words to discussing people in silly costumes hunting foxes at great expense and waste.

Pik Smeet

The Last Word: The right to eat landowners (1997)

From the August 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The good old English sport of sending hungry hunting hounds to chase aristocrats through the woods, catch them and rip them to pieces, has been slow to take off as a popular pastime. Despite claims that these predatory parasites are a foul rural presence, serving only to infect the countryside with their conceited greed and indolence, it has been hard to find dogs with sufficient brutality to enjoy the so-called sport. Those who favour such hunts claim that it is nothing more than a healthy rural tradition, misunderstood by town-dwellers, and that ripping duchesses and viscounts to shreds is the most humane way to rid nature of those who have only survived historically by plundering and murdering others. The Royal Society for the Protection of Useless Aristocrats has been long split on the issue, with one section accepting that such blood sport is "just a bit of harmless fun", while others prefer the idea of culling — or permanent quarantine in the House of Lords. 

This laboured account would be funnier were it not for the harsh reality that rich, privileged, barbaric bullies, most of whom are brutalised at birth by hereditary right and public-school conditioning, do indeed defend their right to chase around the countryside with packs of hounds in order to savage and tear apart defenceless animals. Their callous defence is mounted in the name of sport. And because it is traditional for these parasitical killers to dress up in the costumes of their class and indulge their pleasure in watching deer, foxes and other animals being ripped apart, they respond with well-rehearsed cries of arrogant immunity to humane behaviour when their ritualised sadism is opposed. 

I happened to be wandering through Hyde Park last month when this distasteful rabble of blood-sport enthusiasts gathered to demonstrate their right to be human vultures. A stench of hypocrisy pervaded the polluted city air as they cried for Freedom—not for their fellow humans, but for their cruel "right" to indulge in a sport of supreme inequality. The freedom of the armed hunters and horse-backed chinless wonders with their packs of hounds to pick on animals which stand no chance in opposition to them is not simply about sick behaviour. More than that, it illuminates the very descent into "the law of the jungle" which such people define as freedom. It is the same freedom which allows the very land on which we live, and the earth from which we are fed, to be owned and controlled by a minority of parasitical grabbers who believe that it would be the height of effrontery to invade their freedom by letting the earth belong to the people who inhabit it.

These depraved beings, who rejoice in their right to inflict pain on animals, are in the same class and historic tradition as those who proclaim the inviolable right to cast the peasant off their land and into destitution and starvation. The same haters of freedom who smashed down the communal utopia of the Diggers when those early communists sought to hold the land in common as a store of wealth for all; the same bullies who until a century ago enjoyed the propertied right to flog peasants and rape their daughters, and still today treat those who work on the land as if they are indebted to the landowners who steal the fruits of their labour. Looking at this savage minority of ruthless parasites, bleating their message of outrage against those reformists (destined to parliamentary defeat) who dared question their freedom to kill for pleasure, it was hard not to wish on them the fate of a frightened cornered fox, surrounded by a pack of dogs trained for the kill. 

But that is not the socialist way. Why should we lower ourselves to their brutal customs? As Shelley reminded us: "We are many, they are few." They are not worth the bullets which it would take to shoot them. Nor are they important enough to lead us from our hostility to the cause of violence, however guilty the victim has been conditioned to become. No the aristocrats need not fear our blood sports; the victory of our consciousness of human solidarity over theirs of class oppression will be reward enough for us. 

But look what these parasites are doing to the land. They spray it with chemical pesticides, killing off whole species of birds, butterflies and plant life in their quest for profits. They have fed cattle upon cheap and lousy diets, creating the BSE crisis and whole varieties of food adulteration which makes us and our children all the potential victims of their profit-lust. They have dumped millions of tons of soil into the rivers which pollute the water which we are charged to drink. They have pursued, in the name of efficient "factory farming", the most obscene practices of cruelty to animals which are tortured for the sake of making a few more pounds for their avaricious owners. They have contracted out farm management to City firms which seek to push down agricultural wages, casualise skilled farm work, thrown wage-slave-farm-workers onto the scrap-heap of the unemployed, and destroy whole rural areas in the name of agribusiness. 

The landowners, who protest for their freedom to enjoy themselves in exhibitions of collective brutality, remain free to rape and vandalise the countryside. As Graham Harvey, the agriculture adviser to The Archers (of all things) has written in his incisive new book, The Killing of the Countryside, "they [the landowners] favour a countryside devoted entirely to industrial-scale food production, with the products traded on world commodity markets in exactly the same way as coffee and copper . . . Since this 'progressive' view of farming is supported by big business and the City, it is the one most likely to prevail. If so, the current losses of birds and flowers from our landscape will turn out to be merely the first casualties in a long process of attrition." 

The beneficiaries of this rural plunder are the very few. One percent of the population owns half the land in Britain and two percent owns three-quarters of it. A mere 600 landowners own half the land in Scotland. These capitalist-farmers are subsidised by huge grants to support their manipulation of the market. They receive millions of pounds and euros in return for taking land out of cultivation so as to keep profits up. 

A horsy woman of uncertain age, with a voice like Ann Widdecombe and a designer-label outfit, approached me as I strolled through the Hyde Park demonstration and asked me if I would sign her petition to save traditional country sports. I asked her whether she had ever tried to emphasise with a sensate being chased by howling dogs and threatened with being ripped apart. "Oh, you're obviously a socialist do-gooder," she spat, as she drifted towards the next recruit. Which, as a contrast to a capitalist do-harmer, is not the worst thing in the world to be.

                                                                                                                                        Steve Coleman

Greasy Pole: Hoey Hoo-Hah (2006)

The Greasy Pole Column from the April 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why does she stay in a party which, she says, imposes policies it was not elected on?

Say what you like about rebel Labour MPs, in most cases they are consistent – or should that be boringly predictable? Foundation Hospitals? Against. War on Iraq? Against. Ban Hunting? In favour. All tediously predictable. Then along comes Kate Hoey, Labour MP for Vauxhall, to upset the pattern. The big issue for Hoey – the one which has earned her the most publicity – has been her support for hunting which she demonstrated, on the day the “sport” was banned by Parliament, by riding out with the Beaufort Hunt. She says the ban is unenforceable, that it has actually made hunting more popular than ever: “It’s part of the British rebellious streak that as soon as something is banned it becomes more attractive”. Which raises the question of what she is doing in Parliament, where they lay down laws which ban all kinds of behaviour as a way of making them unattractive to even the most rebellious person. She has also said of the Labour Party : “They don’t understand the countryside” – as if there is a lot more to “understand” than that the countryside is basically the same as the towns and cities, with a class structure which condemns one class to work for their living in varying degrees of poverty and insecurity.

Vauxhall

It is also fair to ask what drives her to be the MP for Vauxhall which, in the London Borough of Lambeth and including Kennington, Stockwell and parts of Clapham and Brixton, is as far from what most people see as the “countryside” as it is possible to be. It is, in fact, one of the toughest and most disrupted parts of London. To ensure that everyone, including the long-suffering voters of Vauxhall, knew where she stood on hunting, Hoey took on the job of chairing the Countryside Alliance – an organisation which tells us it campaigns about rural poverty and the decline of the villages but which was mysteriously silent on these issues until the 1997 Labour victory brought the first ever real threat to hunting. It was unfortunate timing that Hoey announced her new, additional job on the day the police shot John Charles de Menezes – at Stockwell station, in her constituency. This ghastly event did not dampen the Countryside Alliance’s joy at her elevation to lead them, which they said they were “delighted” about. Not all the voters of Vauxhall felt the same: many of them, worried about the living conditions there and the shooting at Stockwell, expressed their angry surprise that their MP had the time to take on so much extra work when she manages to attend only 55 percent of votes in the Commons.

But Hoey’s record of rebellion extends beyond hunting. She is against foundation hospitals (although she was once in favour of hospitals trusts, which many traditional Labour people feared would be a first step in betrayal of the NHS), against student top-up fees, the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, compulsory ID cards, the war on Iraq… She protests that it the others who are out of step, that the measures she opposes were not in Labour’s manifesto – as if it would have made any difference if they had been. And why does she stay in a party which, she says, imposes policies it was not elected on? Even the Tories are confused about her. In October 1996 the mischievous MP Giles Brandreth recorded in his diary that he plotted about her with Sebastian Coe:

“Why don’t we find someone to defect to us? We decided Kate Hoey was our prime target. We like her, she seems sensible, she isn’t valued by New Labour.”

And more recently a Tory MP in the Daily Telegraph showed that little has changed with her: “She spends more time in our division lobby than on the other side.”

Jowell

Quite what the fatigued electorate of Vauxhall think of the fact that they have elected a Labour MP who votes like a Tory will be apparent at the next election. Meanwhile they may take some kind of hint from Hoey’s assessment of Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell and her husband David Mills with their labyrinthine mortgages and offshore financial manoeuvres. Perhaps she is jealous of a more durable female rival but Hoey refused to acquiesce in the orchestrated campaign from Number Ten designed to discredit the exposure of Jowell as motivated by gender prejudice. She was one of those who wanted Jowell sacked from leading Labour’s campaign in the local elections, for; she “…grew up in a Labour Party that thought that talking money out of the country wasn’t a very loyal thing to do”. In fact the vast majority of the people of Vauxhall are not rich enough to practice that kind of “disloyalty”; as Hoey put it: “Most people have enough trouble just getting one mortgage”.

Before she joined the Labour Party Hoey was a member of an obscure Trotskyist organisation, which she later explained by confessing that “I didn’t have much contact with ordinary people. So I didn’t understand their concerns” (Brian Deer interview, Sunday Times Magazine 8 August 1993). After that embarrassing spasm she sat as a councillor in Hackney and Southwark waiting, with other hopeful future Labour stars, for the offer of a winnable seat. Hoey’s chance came when the sitting MP for Vauxhall, Stuart Holland, resigned from the Commons to take an academic job. Holland, who was a disciple of Tony Benn , was described by a fellow member of the Lambeth Labour Party as “…pitifully eager to acquiesce in whatever absurdities Lambeth Labour cared to expound”. Holland’s departure came as a relief to Neil Kinnock, tempered by the fact that the constituency party intended to replace him with Martha Osamor who, with her similar ideas, seemed to be no less of an embarrassment to the Labour leadership. So Hoey was imposed on a resistant local party as a “moderniser” – a word with a meaning we are all aware of now. She won the by-election with a majority of over 15000.

Sports Minister

Realising her ambition to be the first woman Sports Minister (she had a qualification in Physical Education, she had been Ulster high jump champion and Educational Adviser to a number of football clubs including Arsenal and Chelsea) brought Hooey up against the spin doctors of Downing Street. Against instructions from Alastair Campell she criticised the decision of Alex Ferguson (a special favourite of Blair’s) to withdraw Manchester United from the 1999 FA Cup, saying that the club’s supporters had been treated in “a quite shabby way”. She officially complained about the MBE awarded to Arsenal striker Ian Wright, because his behaviour on the field – shouting and swearing at other players and the referee – made him a poor role example. She lasted only a couple of years in the job.

And now, on the back benches there seems little more by way of a political career left for her. There is still her writing for the Daily Telegraph, there is chairing the Countryside Alliance and doing her abrasive best to upset her party as she goes into the opposing voting lobby. And of course there may be her memoirs, which should have the words Tally Hoey in the title. If she hangs on to Vauxhall there will be the job of ministering to the people there who, in their poverty, bad housing, crime and pollution, can be expected to be feeling distinctly unministered to. Like most rebels, Hooey will need to work at living up to her own image. Recently in the Daily Telegraph, she was described as wearing a Gucci watch and a jacket trimmed with fake fur. She did not miss this chance to boost her reputation for reckless confession: “The fur” she responded“was real. The Gucci watch was fake”, provoking a spokesman for the Trading Standards Institute to remind her of the realities of commodity society: “We deplore any public figure who seems to be celebrating the purchase of counterfeit items” he sniffed (which probably gained Hoey a few more votes in Vauxhall).

It was Oscar Wilde who once described Hoey’s favourite pastime as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. We may wonder what enduring, scathing epigram he would have fashioned about a Labour Minister indulging in such “sport” after her party had made all those promises about building a sustainably better society. Like all other “rebels” Hoey relies on the deception that she offers something so fresh and different that it has not been thought of before. In Wilde’s absence let us sum up the futility of it all: the unmemorable in pursuit of the unpracticable.

Ivan