TV Review: Camping it up (1994)

Brookside

TV Review from the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the history of British TV comedy there has been little to match the comic effect of an outrageously effeminate male camping it up with the best of them. Exaggerated mannerisms and affectations have delighted audiences for decades. Many of the popular sitcoms have had a camp figure of fun somewhere - Frank Williams as the overblown vicar in Dad's Army, the twinkly German Lieutenant in ‘Allo 'Allo, Melvyn Hayes in It Ain't Half Hot Mum and John Inman in everything he’s ever been in are among those that spring readily to mind.

As far as mainstream British comedy has been concerned, campness is the “acceptable” face of an unmentionable homosexuality to the viewers and actors alike, so much so that such a great actor as Kenneth Williams — as camp as a row of tents to the end — could barely admit his own homosexuality to himself let alone anybody else, as his Diaries testify. Williams was clearly aware that camp humour, in his day at least, hinted at homosexuality but rarely endorsed it in any way, being content to remain at the level of innuendo and whimsy. In recent years one or two comics have broken this unspoken rule, most clearly Julian Clary whose full frontal assaults on the sexual sensibilities of the audience have won him an army of gay supporters, but most homosexual actors have kept with the approach developed in the music halls and adapted for TV and film.

The British film and TV industries have been the masters of camp humour. It can still be seen in Coronation Street occasionally, though with the welcome twist that it emerges most notably of all in the affectedness of the definitely heterosexual Racquel. barmaid at the Rovers. More straightforwardly. Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howard and Charles Hawtrey all became household names because of their ability to mince in front of the cameras. Did they do their sexuality a disservice? To the extent that they reinforced one of capitalist society’s most enduring stereotypes, probably, but those homosexuals in the acting profession and elsewhere who took an outwardly hostile stance towards homosexuality for the sake of their public image did a greater disservice still.

Innumerable actors have been paid to betray their own sexuality. A recent re-run on BBC2 of one of the classic Steptoe and Son episodes saw old Albert berating Harold for consorting with an antique dealer he considered to be "a bleeding poof’, in the true style of a working class Tory bigot. What many viewers wouldn’t have been aware of was that Wilfred Brambell, the actor who played Albert, was himself a homosexual convicted in the early 1960s under the British state's anti-gay sex laws. Watching this episode again, it was difficult to raise much of a laugh.

Prisoners all

The current cult TV show among the active gay lobby in Britain is the Australian import Prisoner Cell Block H, which is still showing on most ITV networks. This is strange, as Cell Block H is a programme transparently about Good and Evil, and the active lesbians have generally slotted into the latter category. The leading lesbian, a warder called Joan Ferguson, otherwise known as ‘The Freak", has a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp and the general manner of a woman whose role in life is to cause as much anguish for others as possible. Since Prisoner finished its turn in Australia several years ago. we can surmise that she can soon expect the call-up for EastEnders.

The only reason lesbians can find this show attractive, apart from its marvellously worked-out plots, is that it focuses on the lives of oppressed women. But with what is commonly considered to be a psychopathic "bull-dyke” as the chief character, it is not much of a blast forward for the gay counter-culture. In truth, for all her entertainment value, "The Freak" gives far more succour to the stereotypical image of homosexuals than Kenneth Williams or Larry Grayson ever did.

To find the most realistic treatment of homosexuality on TV we must turn, once again, to Channel Four's Brookside. Here, the unfolding of Beth Jordache’s lesbian sexuality has been tastefully and seriously portrayed, even if her lesbianism is a partial reaction against the sexual abuse meted out by her father. Most pleasing of all, the character of Beth is not stereotyped — on the contrary, she appears to be a normal intelligent teenager confronting bigotry and deceit, and winning support because of the strength of her arguments to live her life without the interference of those who want to impose their own norms on her.

Brookside could have gone for cheap laughs with this storyline, but it is to be congratulated on its approach. For the more the working class see their differences — of colour, gender and sexuality — eclipsed by their common bonds rather than highlighted through division, the easier it will be to achieve a society where stereotyping is remembered primarily as a feature of daft old films and peculiar Australian soap operas.

Dave Perrin

Cut and thrust (2026)

Book Review from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tory Cuts. By David Connolly. Self-published. 2026.

This has been advertised in the classified section of Private Eye and is clearly aimed at the sub-section of society that is actively critical about the way UK society and its economy operate. It is at times amusing and frustrating, the latter mainly because of the large number of editing errors and the rather scattergun approach to structure – there is an underpinning narrative thread, but it really does test the patience of the reader as it often meanders off on tangents. At root, it needed a much finer editorial hand.

The over-arching theme is that the approach to economic management favoured by the Conservative Party in recent decades (and to some extent Labour) is a form of neo-liberalism that has only served to damage the UK economy, engender class division and infect the UK public sphere. Connolly’s solution seems to be Social Democratic Party-style economic interventionism allied with aspects of social conservatism. In some ways it is a ‘back to the future’ scenario as all this has been tried before and the social democratic economies of Europe (Scandinavia in particular) that he lauds have now been beset by similar issues. Indeed, pretty much all of them have seen falls in their growth rates like the UK and their halcyon days seem well and truly over, with resulting social discontent which hasn’t been seen in decades and a concomitant rise of the populist right.

It should be added that there is some very selective use of statistics in this book and some of them could be questioned too (including the over-stated claim that workers in the UK are losing 10 percent of our wages for every 10 years of neo-liberalism). But it is entertaining in parts and brings out the class divide at the heart of society well enough.

The solution to the problems Connolly identifies lies not in a return to a mythical social democratic past though – a past, after all, that was perceived as being so glorious the working class elected Thatcher and her successors in gratitude. Furthermore, much of what Connolly blames on neo-liberalism and monetarist economics – such as the decline in UK manufacturing – is really much more a product of the shift in world capitalism away from many of the traditional metropolitan centres of capital in Western Europe to China, India and the Far East instead, where labour costs are lower. For instance, while it is true that the proportion of UK jobs in manufacturing fell from around 25 percent of the workforce in 1980 to about 8 percent now, in Germany it fell from around 40 percent to about 19 percent, France from 25 percent to under 12 percent and Spain from about 20 percent to 10 percent. There has been a big fall in the neo-liberal US economy too, of course, though actually less than any of these European countries, many of whom use the same type of broadly social democratic approach he favours.

Ultimately, the underlying cause of the issues Connolly is rightly concerned about is not the actions of Tory governments and those who wish to copy them like Blair and Starmer – it is the way society is organised. Class division, economic instability and an uneven, antagonistic system of income distribution are at the very heart of all market economies, irrespective of political colours. Top-down, class-divided, based on entitlement and exclusion, with untold riches for a tiny minority and salary slavery for everybody else – that’s the capitalist way and it will need a lot more than a modification of personnel at the top to make it history.

DAP

A touch of Blaired vision (1994)

TV Review from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Watching last month’s Labour Party Conference on BBC was a heady experience. The splendour of the Winter Gardens ballroom. Blackpool, the green-blue space-age set, the forward looking slogan “New Labour, New Britain" boldly outlined for all to see. the pinstripe suits, the floral ties and the presence of that nice young man Mr Blair, all combined to give the effect that was intended by the media men and spin doctors — Labour is back, but this time with a difference. Today it is a Labour Party that you could take home to meet your mother without the worry of it doing anything to embarrass you. This time round father can safely talk to it about how the plants in the greenhouse are coming along. Gone are the bad old days when it wore a donkey-jacket and was the political party from hell spitting on the pavement and farting in public. Labour is back, they say. and it has brought a bunch of chrysanths round and a box of Terry's Old Gold.

Not that Labour hasn’t tried to impress before. In 1992 it tried to sneak its way in the backdoor with claims that it had presents for granny and the young children, but father said he didn't trust it being in same room as his wallet. And father should know — he bitterly remembers being mugged by Labour back in the 1970s. It may all have happened on a dark night but he vividly recalls the bushy eyebrows. Father is not fooled by the new image and won't have Labour in the house again, let alone near his precious greenhouse.

But mother and the kids are not so sure. After all, Labour looks so attractive these days, and says some awfully nice things. It really is a charmer. And it's so boring having the same people round time and again — the bloke from number ten is always popping in with tales of woe. Nobody likes him and even the woman who did the catering for him doesn’t want to see him any more. The chap in the hush puppies from number eleven is no better and father suspects him of siphoning petrol out of the car. Compared to them, Labour seems like a breath of fresh air, but you can never tell can you?

Telling it like it isn’t

Labour is now busy convincing everyone that it is a bad egg that has reformed. Its conference was, in reality, not a conference at all, but an extended Party Political Broadcast aimed at Mr and Mrs Viewer with this end in mind. Its only discernible message was "you have nothing to fear from us — we are on your side”. Capitalists and workers, bosses and unions. Labour loves you all. Co-ordinated by the image-men for the benefit of TV, it was a stream of tepid speeches and meaningless assertions designed to connect with the hopes and, to some extent, prejudices of its potential voting fodder, generally workers whose views are moulded by the self-same media and advertising gurus.

And how the politicians tried to please. TV loves the soundbite, and there were plenty of them to be going on with "Tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime", “traditional values in a modern setting", “a strong economy and a just society" rang out like a mantra, and all to demonstrate that Labour has a new user-friendly identity. Pity the poor TV interviewers, bombarded by a stream of verbal diarrhoea for five days. Sheena MacDonald, the anchor presenter, gritted her teeth every time she was forced to interview one of the front-bench robots, while on other occasions, such as when she had to interview John Prescott, she had to visibly stifle laughter at what are now vainglorious attempts at sobriety.

Tony Blair = I’m Tory Plan B

The Chief Robot’s speech was the ultimate triumph of form over content. Expertly delivered with the help of idiot boards, it was 62 minutes of a vision of a capitalist utopia that has never existed and which, with all certainty, will never exist. He even had the cheek to call it socialism, claiming that socialism was based on the understanding that “the individual does best in a strong and decent community of people with principles and standards. and common aims and values". How many in capitalist politics are going to disagree with that? Answer that question and you are well on the way to understanding what Blair and "new Labour" are all about.

But despite the hours of prolonged tedium, the TV coverage of the Conference did provide a few minutes of welcome relief just before Blair's speech. It is then that the Labour Party “Merit Awards" are handed out to long-serving Party members. The first up was an 86-year-old gent who had worked to help the strikers in the General Strike of 1926. To the palpable embarrassment of those around him, he delivered a speech which denounced the market economy and the world capitalist system and then singled out the drug religion as one of the greatest evils in modern society. Quite what he had been doing in the Labour Party for seventy years wasn’t clear, but it certainly took the cheesy grin off Blair’s face. If only Sheena MacDonald had done us all a favour and interviewed the old guy afterwards she would have found herself confronted by a critical intelligence for the first time all week. 

Dave Perrin

Oh, What a lovely chicken (1994)

Book Review from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ha Bloody Ha — Comedians Talking 
by William Cook. (Fourth Estate 1994. £8.99)

This book is largely a transcript of interviews with thirty or so of Britain’s top "alternative" stand-up comedians and is a welcome insight into the lives of these highly unusual workers. Stand-up comedy is one of the most stressful and cut-throat of professions and few do it successfully. Jack Dee claims that stand-up is the natural profession for those with a personality defect, and by that reckoning capitalism should produce plenty willing to risk humiliation in front of a live audience. Indeed, this book suggests that the numbers seeking success in this arena appears to be on the increase — perhaps that’s telling us something.

Several "political" comedians feature, including Jeremy Hardy who has regularly done spots for the SWP and Mark Thomas, a vociferous lefty who has appeared on TV with Jonathan Ross and who is a former member of the Socialist League. But the best insights often come from those who less ostensibly have an axe to grind. Lee Evans, manic impressionist, comic and working-class-lad-made-good, who does no overtly political material, is a fine example of this, commenting on his most memorable gig:

"I did a big ball at Trinity College at Cambridge University. It was seventy pounds a ticket and I was performing to them. They had it all set up for me, and they treated me like a lord. I couldn’t believe it. It was very classy. They had spotlights across the river, they were punting, the girls looked beautiful in their ball gowns, and the guys were very smart — and they were eating shit-hot food. I nearly cried. As I was walking out, with my bag over my shoulder, I thought 'Fucking hell, man! This is it! This is brilliant! This is how it should be for everybody.”

Compared to Lee Evans's wide-eyed innocence there is a certain self-righteousness about overtly "political" comedians that can be grating — as anyone who has ever seen Ben Elton will testify — and the trend in recent years has moved away from them. The best alternative comics are invariably those whose comments on capitalist society and its manifold absurdities go deeper than taking the piss out of Thatcher's mad glare or Major tucking his shirt into his underpants, which has only ever been one step up from making fun of teacher — and is where most comedians, it has to be said, appear to have started without ever having moved on much.

"Alternative" comedy, by definition, aims to take an alternative approach to comedy to that taken by the mainstream, which has long been a repository for scapegoaters of all kinds. It has not been an unqualified advance, however, and when the racism and sexism of the mainstream is not replaced by schoolboy classroom posturing, it is often replaced by tokenism and inverse snobbery instead. One of the best lines on this comes from Eddie Izzard: "Being white, male and middle-class is useless if you're a comedian — so thank God I’m a transvestite."

Budding socialist comedians — or indeed performers of any kind — would do well to read this book, personality disorders permitting. The chapter on heckling is to be particularly recommended and for whimsical leaps of logic. Harry Hill’s favourite put-down still can’t be beaten: "You may heckle me now, but I'm safe in the knowledge that when I get home, I've got a lovely chicken in the oven." Nice one, Harry. 

Dave Perrin

Obituary: Ric Best (2026)

Obituary from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kenneth Alaric Best, who has died after a short illness, joined the Party in 1972 and soon after became a self-described hooligan in Bolton branch, after which he was a founder member of Lancaster branch. His merciless wit as a speaker, honed at a time when adversarial debate was considered a martial art, often left opponents feeling like they’d been machine-gunned. A smart and iconoclastic thinker, he ranged restlessly into all areas of socialist theory. People who spent time with him needed to stay on their toes, because he had little patience for those who couldn’t keep up.

But he also knew how to put the ‘social’ into socialist, with ganja-fuelled parties at his house after every public meeting, which is undoubtedly the reason why Lancaster meetings were so well-attended in the 1980s and 90s. He was an entertaining raconteur with a natural comic timing, and could make even young children laugh. He had a never-ending store of very funny and often salacious stories, sometimes at the expense of other Party members.

Bolton-bred, he spent his formative years in the fire brigade, then later became a computer engineer who embodied the Silicon Valley philosophy of ‘move fast and break things’, running several successful computer businesses. These commitments sadly caused him to drift away from Party involvement in his later years.

Our sympathies go to his wife Kay and children Jo, Jamie and Bill.

PJS

DAP adds:

Ric Best was the first Party member I ever met – it was early 1987 and a meeting in The Liverpool Pub in the business district of the city where what was to become Merseyside Branch gathered. Ric was studying for his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering at the University as a mature student, and I was a young politics undergraduate. We were different but got on, as we both liked debating. Ric told me he had joined the SPGB as the Party case was the best means he’d ever come across for winning arguments. I can testify that this is something he pursued with great vigour as many other students at the University at the time still vividly remember (as would our political opponents).

Ric was also a great advocate of democratic participation and all it implied. He claimed many times that the best weapon the Party had in its armoury was that it was scrupulously democratic and could – and should – attract people on that basis, being the most democratic political organisation in existence.

There is little doubt Ric was one of the Party’s great ‘characters’ – an overused word perhaps, but rarely more appropriate, and those who knew him will miss him and the energy he somehow imparted wherever he went.

SPGB Meetings (1993)

Party News from the November 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letter: Put baldly (1993)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

With regard to Dave Perrin’s letter in the September Socialist Standard, at the risk of engaging in pedantry I am bothered by the use of the phrase “the Socialist Party therefore encourages workers to struggle where necessary to establish political democracy under capitalism". Even allowing for the caveats in the preceding comments which make clear our purpose in utilizing this democratic facility (severely flawed though it be from a socialist point of view), to urge workers to put an end to capitalism, it seems to me that the phrase "encourages workers" put baldly this way would indicate that the Socialist Party has this as a definite plank in its policy whereas, of course, as David Perrin himself points out, we are concerned with capitalist political democracy only as a means that can be used to end capitalist society and this must be our clear caveat always.

M. Judd,

Keston, Kent

Reply:

Our policy on this question was reaffirmed at our 1990 Annual Conference: "that the Socialist Party of Great Britain wholeheartedly supports the efforts of workers everywhere to secure democratic rights against the powers of suppression. Whilst we avoid any association with parties or political groups seeking to administer capitalism we emphasise that freedom of movement and expression, the freedom to organise in trade unions, to organise politically and to participate in elections, are of great importance to all workers and are vital to the success of the socialist movement" - Editors.

SPGB Meetings (1993)

Party News from the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Alternative Reich? (2025)

Book Review from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Alt Reich. By Nafeez Ahmed. Byline Books 2024. £12.99

This is a book about the challenge to conventional liberal bourgeois democracy posed by a network of far-right populists, ‘nativists’ and neo-nazis that appear to be in the ascendancy in many parts of the world, including the United States. They locate society’s problems not in the inability of the market economy to provide for people’s physical and psychological needs, but in the inability of the established systems of political democracy to deliver ’change’ to those who appear disgruntled with it.

Ahmed is a good researcher and he traces the way in which a relatively small number of multi-billionaires have set up or founded think tanks and pressure groups that have spread these far-right viewpoints over decades: most notably organisations like the Henry Jackson Society and the Heritage Foundation. Their reach has been deep and profound – into the heart of the media, and politically into the Trump administration, the Boris Johnson and Truss governments, and others in Western Europe and beyond.

The phenomenon is undoubtedly real and it is chronicled in detail here, but like others out to make a distinctive point, he can sometimes overstate his case. In the Conclusion, he seems to recognise this himself, saying:

‘The fascism of the Alt Reich is … a contradictory amalgamation of shifting white supremacism, extreme nativism and anti-globalist nationalist corporatism, which inherently pines for deregulated private capital to be backed by an authoritarian state reliant on unitary military power merged with techno-corporate autocracy. This is hardly a coherent worldview; rather it is an evolving mishmash of contradictory and competing worldviews’ (p.379).

Indeed, and this can be seen by the way in which some of its major players (like Trump and Musk) can fall out so easily, or why Reform UK has become a by-word for political resignation in more ways than one.

That the market fails to deliver on people’s expectations of it (and seems to have been doing so increasingly over the last 20 or so years) is at the root of why this rather incoherent set of viewpoints has gained such traction . . . the popular narrative is that all governments fail to deliver and they’re fundamentally all the same. As Mark Twain said, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes and so it’s almost a minor variation of the old anarchist slogan about the futility of elections, in that whoever you vote for the government always gets back in.

And allied to all this there are worrying undercurrents – the blaming of immigrants as a source of society’s problems in a way not seen since the 1970s, an unshakeable belief in capitalism as a system but not its obvious and inevitable consequences, and a leader-loving authoritarianism that underpins a not-so-sneaking admiration for dictatorial abominations like Putin, Orban and Modi.

So Ahmed’s book is worth reading for these reasons alone. It’s just worth bearing in mind that the fascism of which he writes is not really the fascism of the 1920s and 30s, and while the ‘Alt Reich’ book title is a clever one it is, in this respect, not entirely accurate. Another caveat is that it seems odd that a book of this nature (around 400 pages) does not have an index. Perhaps it’s just the sort of left-field, unconventional, liberal approach the alt-reich themselves would decry. But without having an obsession with tradition and procedure, it might just, actually, have been rather useful . . .

DAP

The Unkindest Cut of All (1996)

From the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is rather amusing for Socialists to listen to the various apologists of capitalism try to justify their support for welfare cuts on the grounds that it is either “immoral” for the state to impose high taxes (the source of state expenditure), or that it is in the interests of the “nation” that welfare payments are kept to a minimum

That the double-speak beloved by newspapers and economists is a key clement in the ideological battle waged by the ruling class against the workers should be evident enough to anyone with a notion at all of class and class struggle. It is hoped by the bosses that the drip-drip-drip of this Chinese water torture will unbalance even the most rational of minds. Sometimes the newspapers and economists join together in a combined offensive on a particular topic of concern to their paymasters—the capitalist class. Recently the object of their ire has been welfare expenditure.

Robert Skidelsky, biographer of Keynes, and ennobled for his services to bourgeois economics, wrote on this theme in the Sunday Times on 11 February. His key argument was summed up in the headline of the piece — “Cuts To Benefit the Nation”. Coming in the wake of Peter Lilley’s announcement of planned changes and cutbacks for the social security budget, Skidelsky aimed to demonstrate why welfare cutbacks and other reductions in state expenditure would benefit “the nation”. By this he did not, of course, mean everyone. In fact, he probably meant only a small number of people at all would directly benefit, though he did not specifically say this. But who could the beneficiaries be?

Nation or Class?

The “nation”—primarily the productive resources of a state like Britain— is not owned in common or on anything like an equitable basis. Britain, like every other country, is a state divided on class lines between those who own and control the means of living and those who do not. For instance, recent statistics from Social Trends, an official government publication, show that one out of every 20 adults has a stake in the means of living equal to the other 19 put together. The top five percent of the population own 53 percent of all financial assets. It is the capitalist class—those who do not need to work for a living—who by-and-large own “the nation”, setting their wage slaves to work to put more wealth in the form of profits back in to the capitalists’ hands.

Although lackeys like Skidelsky present it as such, cutbacks in welfare expenditure and the like are not designed to benefit wage and salary earners. Workers receive an amount sufficient to keep them and their families in a fit condition, with skilled or highly educated workers usually receiving more than the unskilled. Their wages, properly speaking, are a real amount intended for this purpose not a hypothetical sum, and so the burden of taxation (which finances welfare payments) ultimately falls on the capitalist class. Workers may pay some taxes, but the burden specifically falls on the surplus value accruing to the capitalists and not on the wages and salaries of the workers, hence the interest of the capitalists and their representatives in keeping taxation as low as possible. High taxation eats into profits and reduces the amount available for accumulation as new capital.

The state currently takes about 42.5 percent of Gross National Product in Britain, about a third of which is taken up by social security expenditure, currently a colossal £92 billion. This means a large amount of tax taken out of profits, and the proportion has been moving up in most advanced countries for decades, with the state stepping in to cushion the fall from market failures and being further burdened by demographic change.

State expenditure acting as a drag on profits and capital accumulation is the real bottom line for the capitalists, but Skidelsky has a more lofty way to justify the competitive money-grubbing of the capitalists:

". . . the main argument for slimming down the state is moral: it is wrong that governments should take 40 percent and more of our earnings and decide to spend it as they see fit".

Skidelsky goes on to declare himself in favour of cutbacks in state health and education services, on the ground that this can only benefit “our earnings”, but it is a strange kind of morality which has to go to these lengths to defend the wealth of the privileged and justify taking a few more crumbs back oft' the poor. But then when has the morality of capitalism ever been concerned with anything more than the sanctity of profit?

Britain already has some of the lowest benefit levels in the western world so savings made from the unemployed or single mothers will be minimal, though this in itself will not stop the government from trying to stop people claiming benefit or cutting back on payments, as recently with Unemployment Benefit. This is part of the reason why an even greater line of attack has been waged on pensions, with employees being encouraged to take out private schemes to supplement the state pension. Since the 1980 decision to link state pensions with prices rather than earnings the basic state pension has fallen from 22 percent of average male earnings to 15 percent and no government of capitalism in Britain is likely to be able to offer pensioners anything better. The number of those living beyond 75 is expected to double from 4 to 8 million over the next fifty years and this demographic change alone will put further pressure on government expenditure, particularly the social security budget.

Hard Labour

The apologists for capitalism—whether Lord Skidelsky or, for that matter, Tony Blair—see little wrong with attacking the poor when capitalist profit dictates it, and no one should be fooled that attacks on welfare are merely the preserve of the right-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus. The pressures on them from the competitive market economy are the same. The last Labour government from 1974-9 had an equally bad record with inflation eating away at benefits and savings, together with real cuts in wages and salaries. As with the Conservatives, unemployment also rose and along with it job insecurity.

Given his infatuation with private pension schemes and the welfare arrangements beloved in the Far East, Blair and his cohorts offer nothing really new from what the Tories offer now. All that has changed in the world of welfare reform has been some of the language used justify further attacks on a beleaguered working class— the “drip, drip, drip”, this time with an allegedly moral dimension. Skidelsky has in fact put the argument of those who wish to attack benefit levels most succinctly— how despicable of the poor to drain the capitalists of profit! What he—and they— conveniently overlook, though, is that the workers made the profits for the owning class in the first place.

Lord Skidelsky is actually chairman of the Social Market Foundation. A more bizarre title for an organisation could not be found, for given the class nature of capitalism and the attacks it unleashes on the poor, what could be more anti-social than the market? But then such is the double-speak of our times.

Dave Perrin

Socialist Party Summer School (1996)

Party News from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Back to the USSR? (1996)

TV Review from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite attempts by both the Tory Party and the BBC hierarchy to stifle its investigative reporting. Panorama has lost none of its cutting edge. On Monday 10 June, Jane Corbin filed an excellent documentary report on the situation in Russia and the resurgence in support for the Russian Communist Party. By the time you read this the outcome of the Russian presidential elections will of course be known— what is almost certain is that if Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov doesn’t beat that arch “democrat" Boris Yeltsin, he will nonetheless have come close to doing so.

The Communist Party, banned after the 1991 attempted coup but since legalised again, is now a real political force to be reckoned with. Its programme of state control, agricultural "collectivisation" and Russian nationalism has attracted millions of Russian workers disheartened by the failures associated with the move towards a more private enterprise-based capitalist economy. The reason for their dismay at conditions in modern Russia is obvious. Over six million Russians are officially unemployed. industrial production has plummeted, real wages have fallen catastrophically for most and the shelves are emptier in many shops than they were in the worst days of the old regime. In addition. Russia is now plagued by crime, gangsterism, prostitution, drug abuse and spreading epidemics. The Russian working class, and what remains of the peasantry, have clearly sunk into the pit and Panorama demonstrated that few apart from the rich capitalists and aspiring petty-bourgeoisie have benefited from the move towards the free market.

In view of this it is hardly surprising that millions long for a return to the "old days" of state subsidies, guaranteed minimum wages and state repression of criminal elements. The yearnings of these workers are often accompanied by nationalism and anti-semitism, together with an indulgence in conspiracy theories about international banking cartels, the United Nations and the role of the CIA in domestic Russian affairs. Gennady Zyuganov himself displays virtually all of these tendencies and. as such, can be said to be a man truly in touch with his core supporters. He is an unrepentant Stalinist among unrepentant Stalinists whose main priority is the reformation of the USSR and the re-establishment of "socialism"—in reality the re-awakening of almost full-blooded state capitalism and the extension of the Russian empire.

State capitalist class

Zyuganov represents more than just the discontented mass of Russian workers though—in fact he only represents them subjectively, in terms of their objective interests he doesn't represent them at all. What he represents instead is the old state capitalist class built up under Communist rule with its power base in the bureaucracy and military. Part of this social strata took the opportunity, on the disintegration of the old regime, to use its privileged position to turn itself into a private-enterprise bourgeoisie, but as this wasn't possible for them all. the others want to return to the old nomenklatura system of state privilege. These will be the real beneficiaries of any return to state capitalism under the dictatorial rule of the Communist Party.

The dreams of old Stalinists notwithstanding, state capitalism offered the working class nothing but poverty and repression under the old system and a return to it will not improve their situation one bit. Indeed, many of the problems of the Russian economy were first kindled during the days of the USSR, the system itself being so inefficient that it virtually collapsed under the weight of planned over-staffing, an unsustainable armaments programme and a declining rate of profit caused in large part by state subsidy of inefficient units of production. That the free market has not been able to solve Russia's problems comes as no surprise to us—it was something we warned Russian workers of at the time. But it is pleasing all the same for Panorama to have acknowledged this basic fact where others would have attempted to deny it with the smoke-screen of the return of private enterprise and the success of McDonalds.

Jane Corbin's report showed us some of the 25,000 who sleep homeless each night on the streets of Moscow and queue up every morning at the soup kitchens run by the Starvation Army. It highlighted the plight of those workers who have seen their incomes reduced to one fiftieth of the level they once were and who now only avoid starvation through eating potatoes grown on allotments. It revealed the barren shop shelves—barren that is of commodities most Russian workers would be unable to afford anyway.

Can it be any wonder that the benefits of the free market—so loudly trumpeted by the Western bourgeoisie—are imperceptible to the average Russian? Of course not, but there can be no solution in the old dreams either. State capitalism was the system which failed so pitifully before and there is no reason for believing it will, succeed now under Zyuganov or anybody else. That the Communists do not offer real communism or socialism at all is the great tragedy for the Russian working class—for it is more apparent than ever that only production for use and free access to wealth can put an end to the poverty, insecurity and decadence which are expressions of capitalism everywhere, not least of all in Russia today.

Dave Perrin

Members Only (2025)

Book Review from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Behind Closed Doors. By Seth Alexander Thevoz. Robinson. Paperback Edition 2024. £12.99

This is subtitled ‘The Secret Life of London Private Members’ Clubs’ and is an entertaining and well-written account of this phenomenon, from the early beginnings of private clubs in the very late seventeenth century until the present day. Thevoz has previously been librarian of one of the biggest old clubs and also writes for Private Eye, so for the purposes of this book he usefully has an eye for both social connection and gossip.

These somewhat exclusive clubs have been largely centred historically around St James’s and Piccadilly in London, though have spread their tentacles not just to some other upmarket areas of London over the years but internationally as well – including in the heydays of the British Empire, to India, South Africa and so on. Thevoz has included interesting chapters too on women’s clubs, clubs and race and also the rise of working men’s clubs (which were in some ways designed to mimic some of the features of their older and more ruling-class forebears).

Many clubs developed political affiliations – most notably the Carlton Club with the Tory Party and the National Liberal and Reform clubs with the Liberals. For much of the post-war period many of these clubs were in decline though alongside the empire, with crumbling grand buildings and ageing memberships, and literally scores shut before there was a renaissance from the 1980s onwards.

There were two reasons for the uptick – one was the expansion of ‘new money’ and the arriviste estate agents and hedge fund managers who thrived from Thatcher onwards and who saw joining traditional London members’ clubs as a way to aid their networking and also as a sign of acceptance (even if the more longer-term and elderly members didn’t always welcome the presence of these brash interlopers). The other reason was that slowly from the 1960s – starting with Peter Cook’s famous Establishment club – the club model came to be followed by rather different groups of people, typically as a way of circumventing strict licensing laws for alcohol. Arguably the most infamous was the Colony Room Club in Soho but over time others emerged aimed at newer social elites that found the old-fashioned fustiness of White’s or Boodle’s unattractive – and who gravitated towards successful celebrity hangouts instead like the Groucho Club.

Since the turn of the century, in particular, there has been a proliferation of new clubs charging significant membership fees and often aimed at particular types of business professionals, though their presence has sometimes been surprisingly transient. Just before and then since Covid some newer ones have now shut including fashionable clubs like Milk and Honey and the Hospital Club (aimed at those working in the creative industries), clubs which appeared to enter the colour supplements and come into fashion – and then go out of it – with quite some speed.

Others have thrived as businesses and have established multiple locations both in London and internationally – the most well-known being Soho House. Some still thrive on exclusivity, new money and ruling class connections – the most obvious in recent years being 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair, which is where, Thevoz argues, key Brexit plots were hatched and deals were done rather than in the venerable old clubs of Pall Mall.

It seems that the older clubs no longer have quite the appeal they once did for the ruling elite. That they may not be so good for a politician’s image, in particular, is summed up by two events in recent years. One was the infamous Chris Pincher groping incidents at the Carlton Club that led to the departure from office of PM Boris Johnson. Then soon after, and lesser-known, was ambitious current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch turning up at the Carlton Club for a grand dinner only to be driven off when she saw all the press outside as she was mindful of the likely negative association of her being pictured there.

Perhaps these days with Britain’s ruling elites it’s a case of not so much ‘seen but not heard’ as ‘heard but not seen’?

DAP

Gerry-built (2025)

Book Review from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Party is Always Right. By Aidan Beatty. Pluto Press. 2024.

This is sub-titled the ‘Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism’ though in truth most of it has been told before. The interesting addition is the number of interviews that have helped to add colour and richness to a grim story of political failure and an even grimmer tale of internal strife and abuse.

Alongside Ted Grant of the Militant Tendency and Tony Cliff of the Socialist Workers Party, Gerry Healy was one of the three gurus of the British Trotskyist movement. While all three led organisations that had authoritarian tendencies, Healy’s outfit was by far the worst. Called the Socialist Labour League until it changed its name to the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in 1973, it became a byword for cult-like sectarianism and was infused with a rancid, hierarchical political culture which was framed and dominated by the leader himself. Healy was a tyrannical bully who often directed and oversaw violence against his political opponents (both inside and outside the party) and who was an expert manipulator. Indeed, that was arguably his main ‘talent’ such as it was and what kept him at the top of the organisation for so long.

Unlike Grant or Cliff, Healy was no theoretician with a knowledge of Marx, even though he liked to paint himself as such. Most of his attempts at establishing this sort of reputation for himself only served to expose his limitations, which were considerable. He was obsessed with Marxist dialectics, but his forays into this were generally just nonsense (Beatty quotes a few examples in case anyone was in any doubt).

Healy also seemed to possess relatively little knowledge of Marxist economics. He was the perennial catastrophist, constantly predicting that capitalism was in its final death agony and that the revolution was imminent. He was effectively saying the same thing in the 1970s and 80s as he had been in the 1950s. Yet the collapse never came.

Some argue that he had a certain charisma, which is why he was able to keep his hold on the party for so long. It was certainly enough to woo a number of high-profile celebrities into the orbit of the organisation, starting with the actor Corin Redgrave and then his more famous sister Vanessa, but including many others from Frances De La Tour to former Spurs football player Chris Hughton.

But this charisma – if that is what it was – was ultimately to prove the downfall of both Healy and the WRP. In 1985, Healy’s secretary Aileen Jennings wrote to the Political Committee of the WRP alleging that Healy was a serial manipulator and sexual abuser of women, naming 26 female victims, mainly party members. This eventually led to a predictable slew of lurid tabloid headlines and was a proverbial ‘hand grenade’ against its supreme leader from which the WRP never recovered. It split into myriad warring factions over the following years.

Healy himself then founded the Marxist Party with loyalists Vanessa and Corin Redgrave but died aged 76 in 1989 and this party – never more than about 50 or so – dwindled away to nothing. The surviving WRP led by Sheila Torrance is also now tiny (estimated at around 120 members at most) though still stands General Election candidates, as periodically does another small surviving faction, now called the Socialist Equality Party and linked to a US organisation of the same name led by David North (a Healy protégé).

At its peak the WRP may have had 3,000 members but when the split happened the party’s finances became one of the biggest bones of contention as it emerged that many of its assets were not actually registered in the name of the party itself, but through other byzantine and opaque structures – allegedly for security reasons. There was a Head Office (with no signage) on Clapham High Street in a building now occupied by Caffé Nero, eight apartments around the corner in Clapham Old Town (Healy himself lived in one of them), a ‘College of Marxist Education’ in rural Derbyshire, and a state-of-the-art printing works in Runcorn that had enabled the WRP to produce the first colour daily newspaper in Britain, News Line. There were also several ‘Youth Training Centres’ it had set up, at one stage several bookshops, and also fleets of vehicles including Healy’s BMW.

The party’s finances were actually another Achilles Heel, as it over-extended itself in a way that couldn’t be sustained through membership income and paper sales alone, however hard the leadership pushed the members and gave them impossible targets to meet. Hence Healy’s well-known soliciting of money from Iraq and – in particular – Colonel Gaddafi’s Libyan regime (which also gave the WRP printing works considerable contracts, including for mass copies of the Green Book). Beatty is sceptical of some of the wilder claims that have been made about links with Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and the PLO as well, but there is little doubt that money came from both Iraq and Libya and was not unconnected with the virulently pro-Arab nationalist tone of much WRP literature.

This then leads us on to another theme – the paranoia and secrecy at the heart of the organisation. Healy was obsessed with the security services, spies and moles, and saw them everywhere. Anyone who crossed him was lucky to be called a ‘subjectivist idealist’ or similar, the alternative was that they were really a spy. Anecdotes about speakers at WRP meetings being asked to speak with their backs to the window (in case MI5 listening devices could pick up sensitive vibrations from the glass) were not entirely unfounded. In fact, the British state did show an interest in the WRP (especially in the 70s and 80s) though this was more because of its links to industrial disruption in the early 70s and then later links to foreign governments and their money, than any assessment of them being a credible domestic revolutionary threat.

Beatty says that the standard description of the WRP as a cult has something going for it, but is, of itself, inadequate because its internal practices were directly a product of its elitist political outlook:

‘Dismissing the WRP as a cult means ignoring the connection between the WRP’s authoritarian culture and the party’s Leninist structure. The WRP can and should be understood also as an extreme manifestation of Leninist vanguardism and its anti-democratic praxis’ (p. xvii).

We could not have put it better ourselves.

Dave Perrin

Such good chaps (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Good Chaps. By Simon Kuper. Profile Books. 2024. £9.99

This is effectively the sequel to Kuper’s excellent Chums, reviewed in the September 2022 Socialist Standard. The focus this time is the idea that English gentlemen (and it’s usually men) have always been trusted to follow the rules and ‘play the game’, this being an intrinsic tenet of a public school and Oxbridge upbringing. Kuper catalogues how in recent years this seems to have gone very badly awry.

In the 1960s and 70s, these types started to get rather pushed out of politics and the upper echelons of the civil service and other professions, though far from disappearing entirely. Under David Cameron (Eton and Oxford) they started to reassert their natural right to govern again, but with a twist – this being that the gentlemen’s code they had abided by in earlier eras had largely been eroded by the type of ruthless competition that capitalism promotes, and the narcissism and inflated egos that go with it. It found ultimate expression, of course, in the tawdry and shambolic government of Boris Johnson (Eton and Oxford).

Of particular interest to Kuper is the financial base to this political superstructure – exemplified by the buccaneer capitalists that massaged Johnson’s ego so thoroughly and who have sought influence through the connections to which they can buy access. Many of these have been arriviste Mayfair hedge-fund managers and private equity tycoons – the same types of people behind the likes of Reform UK and GB News (often people bizarrely casting themselves as ‘outsiders’ to the traditional City of London and media establishments). And of even more interest still, many in these circles have been Russian oligarchs. As ever, Kuper sums up this type of development beautifully:

‘The moment Russians became British citizens, they were allowed to give to political parties. From about 2012 through 2022, they were the foreign nationality that topped the list of British political donations. Naturally, they gave to the ruling party rather than the powerless Opposition.

The Tories were delighted. It was as if extraterrestrials had stepped out of a spaceship on Parliament Square and inexplicably begun handing them money. The Russian you met over whiskies in 5 Hertford Street was charming. Of course he wasn’t working for the Kremlin! Don’t go all Le Carré on me. And if you did make the effort to perform the most basic due diligence on where his money came from, well that might get in the way of taking it’ (p.94).

Kuper details many instances of Russian donations and influence to the Tory Party. To cite just one example, these include Lubov Chernukhin, whose husband became – at the tender age of 32 – deputy finance minister under Putin and later chair of the Russian state development bank. By 2023, she had donated £2.4 million to the Tories and was a member of the Party’s secretive ‘Advisory Board’ which was restricted to mega-donors who were entitled to monthly meetings with the Prime Minister and Chancellor. This is just one of several instances of this type and in case you are wondering, the embarrassing connections with the father-and-son press magnates the Lebedevs are also described in all their glory.

As the Tories fell from grace in the last couple of years (and some of the Russian connections became embarrassing after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine) the money started to dry up. There’s an interesting chapter on how Labour started to hoover up significant donations before the General Election instead, including from David Sainsbury, Dale Vince and Gary Lubner (of the family that own Autoglass and who reportedly gave £5 million alone). Kuper says Labour’s donors tend to have more of an obvious ideological affinity with them (rather than being people who will simply cosy up to whoever is in power) though it will be fascinating to see whose interests ‘the government of service’ will effectively serve – even if rather more indirectly. We think we can guess.

Dave Perrin

Universities Challenged (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Government White Paper on Higher Education (HE) entitled ‘Students At the Heart of the System’ has created controversy since its publication in the summer. As the new academic year begins, we take a look at its likely impact.

The White Paper is to form the basis for a new Higher Education Bill in 2012, after the current consultation period ends in a few weeks time. In truth it is the latest in a rather long line of papers and reports setting out a future for HE in the UK since the 1960s. In particular, it follows in the footsteps of the Robbins Report of 1963, the Dearing Report in 1997 and then – most recently of all – the Browne Report of 2010 commissioned by the Labour Government.

During this time, HE in the UK has seen developments that have been similar to those affecting university sectors in many other parts of the world. In particular, there has been a massive expansion in student numbers  – impelled by, among other factors, the conversion of former polytechnics and colleges of HE into what are sometimes termed the ‘post-1992 universities’ and the increased government funding that then allowed them to rapidly expand. There has also been a significant expansion in vocational HE beyond traditional areas of engagement like teaching, law and the ministry. This has been reflected in the growth of what some have considered to be more esoteric subjects like sports management and herbal medicine, and particularly in the development of Business Schools, which only grew to be of any significance in the UK in the 1980s but which are now commonly one of the biggest discipline areas in universities of all kinds.

Unsustainable

The previous Labour government famously set a target of 50 percent of school leavers going on to study at university and while this has never been reached, decent enough progress was nevertheless made, prompting some to complain of a ‘dumbing down’ of entry standards. In 1955 less than 5 per cent of school leavers went on to study in HE, a proportion that had risen to 12 per cent by 1980, to 19 per cent in 1990 and then to over 35 per cent for most of the years in the last decade.

This growth, like many things in the market economy, has happened for a reason. As capitalism has developed and its operations have become more sophisticated, the working class of wage and salary earners who operationally run capitalism from top to bottom have needed to have a different and often more developed set of skills than was required, say, a hundred years ago. While the economy of course still needs production workers, miners and other manual and physically skilled staff, capitalism has developed a vast administrative apparatus around buying and selling, the service economy and the state sector which is needed to ensure that this all runs smoothly.

Figures from the Office of National Statistics have shown that the percentage of workers in the UK employed in manufacturing and construction fell from around a third in 1983 to just under 20 per cent in recent years, confirming a long-term trend. At the same time there has been a significant growth in the service sector, in particular. This has necessitated government encouragement for more young people to seek out the type of education and skills supposedly provided by a university education. The problem has been that in doing this, the government has created a huge amount of additional expenditure to be funded out of general taxation, and as we have seen on a range of fronts in recent times, state expenditure tends to have its limits – especially as the burden of taxation has ultimately to fall on the profit-generating sectors of the economy (i.e. the private sector).

As more and more students have entered HE the cost of their tuition as well as contributions towards their living costs have become too burdensome for the state. This has over the last two decades led to periodic attacks on what many students of earlier generations took for granted. These attacks have included the removal of the right for students unemployed during the holiday periods to claim benefits for this, through to the full-scale assaults on the student grant system and the highly controversial introduction of tuition fees (with students loans to pay for them) mooted under John Major’s Tory government but carried out by Labour under Blair.

In this respect, the Government White Paper is but the latest in a long line of initiatives with a common thread and a common purpose.

Main features

There are several aspects to what is proposed currently and little if any of it is genuinely new. Indeed, what is most striking about it is how it usually develops existing approaches or applies other approaches already implemented by government in other fields. The main features of the proposals in this respect are these.

• Increase debt and reduce (or disguise) the burden on taxation. This is a continuation of what occurred under Blair and Brown when tuition fees and student loans were introduced.  The approach this time is more radical (if radical be the right word) as tuition fees will rise hugely from £3,375 to between £6,000 and 9,000 a year, depending on institution. This is to make up for the fact that in England at least (Wales and Scotland will stick to variations on their existing systems for now), the funding that government gives to support student tuition is to be removed almost completely. This will happen to all subjects except those already in receipt of higher levels of subsidy from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) because of their elevated cost levels e.g. science subjects, medicine and engineering. To achieve this change, a modification of the student loan system is to be introduced whereby those earning over £21,000 after graduation will begin to pay back their loan through the taxation system with interest charged at RPI plus 3 per cent. In many respects, this is becoming ever more like a disguised graduate tax, with the advantage for the government that those leaving the country after they graduate will still have to pay it back. Like most taxes – whether disguised or not – it  will eventually mean that wages will have to rise, other things being equal, so that people can pay it, in this way cutting into employer’s profits in an indirect and more subtle way.  Furthermore, the attitude of government to the huge (and about to become even bigger) student loan book is also revealing, as they estimate that the amount borrowers will be liable to repay will have risen to £70 billion by 2016-7. Few seemed to have noticed that the government has just asked Rothschilds to develop a plan for ‘how to monetise the loan book’ including ‘selling [the loans] outright to financial investors, or selling loans to one or more regulated companies set up to manage the loans’ (White Paper, p.24). Clearly the recent financial crisis and its causes has been forgotten already.
• Outsource/privatise where possible, introducing ‘competition’. Until recently, the only private-sector university in Britain was the University of Buckingham, though now BPP University College of Professional Studies (owned by the Apollo private equity group) has acquired taught degree awarding powers and others are lining themselves up to be granted university status. This is in part an attempt to provide competition so that existing universities don’t all charge fees at the higher end of the permitted range (as most are proposing to do at present) while being a philosophical nod in the direction of ‘free markets’. The main problem here is that fears about the quality of academic provision declining in these circumstances have some substance. The proliferation of so-called ‘degree mills’ in countries like the US and Canada has long been an issue (where students can effectively buy a degree) and the largest private university in the world by most counts, Phoenix University, Arizona, has seen its applications plummet in the last two years because it has been subject to legal action by no less than 10 Attorney-Generals in different states over its ‘deceptive practices’. Coincidentally, and perhaps unfortunately, it is also owned by the Apollo private equity group.
• Increase links between the universities and the private sector, binding the two ever closer together. Again, this has been happening for years and it is standard practice for universities to check when they are validating new courses that they meet the needs of relevant employers. However, the government is concerned by the recent decline in ‘sandwich years’ for students with business and in internships, and wants to see these encouraged. It also wants to see the links between research and private business developed and commercial opportunities exploited to the full. Interestingly, postgraduate courses already receive little by way of HEFCE funding and have had higher fees to make up the difference as it has long been assumed that much postgraduate study is sponsored by employers (something the government would like to see extended to undergraduate study too, wherever possible).
• Target state support rather than universalise it. Student grants to help with living costs will be targeted at the poorest families only and the old education maintenance allowance for 16-19 year olds studying before they get to university is to be abolished on the grounds of cost. Similarly, HEFCE funding is only likely to remain for those high-cost courses that students couldn’t otherwise pay for themselves out of their loans, and which employers would be reluctant to sponsor as this wouldn’t be appropriate or they would be too expensive, such as medicine, veterinary science, etc.
• Set up a complex regulatory framework to oversee it all. The Browne Report had recommended uniting HEFCE, the Quality Assurance Agency for HE (the university academic quality watchdog) and two other related bodies into the one organisation dealing with the oversight of HE. This will not happen now, and the complexity of the proposals, the loans, the targeting and the new entrants to university status means that the regulators will clearly have their work cut out.

The devil is in the detail

The details of much of this could change and probably will, but the general trajectory is clear: a business-led HE sector; an expansion of vocational courses; students in debt for most of their lives, wedded to wage-slavery just to pay off their loans (and that before any consideration of mortgages and likely personal debt). As there are over 120 universities currently in the UK it is likely that some will go bust (and the government has explicitly stated that it will not ‘underwrite’ the finances of the existing HE providers), especially given the likely falling away of full-time student numbers consequent on higher fees. And the drive for ‘efficiency’ in the HE sector will be pushed ever harder, with the government setting up the Diamond Review into how universities can be run more efficiently (if this doesn’t entail recommending that universities ‘outsource’ much of their central services like Finance and Human Resources it will be a surprise).

The most obvious and predictable effect of these changes is likely to be a move away from full-time HE by 18-21 year olds, reversing the decades-old trend for more school-leavers to go to university. The precise extent of this is likely to depend on the buoyancy or otherwise of the job market, with those who can often choosing employment and relevant training over university and a lifetime of debt. It is also not difficult to predict a rise in the coming years of students studying part-time and flexibly alongside their employment, in many cases linking one to the other through programmes of negotiated work-based learning, for instance (another one of the growth areas in HE in recent times) where people receive academic reward for their personal learning in and through the workplace.

A sane society

It is clear that many potential students have already been put off university for life. But of course, as the old saying goes, it doesn’t have to be like this. Education should be available for those needing it and people shouldn’t expect to have to commit themselves to a lifetime of drudgery to pay for it either. Indeed, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with studying a subject like history or art simply because you are interested in it, but this has become more difficult in recent years and will now be more difficult still as pressures from business and through the job market dictate that students have to study what will make them employable.

Nevertheless, one of the more interesting developments in the last ten years or so has been the whittling away of some of the old snobbishness and elitism that has existed in universities across the country. An unintended consequence of the rise in vocationally-oriented courses has been that some have discovered that what is often called the ‘knowledge capital’ of society exists mainly outside the Ivory Towers. To many professors this is a frightening concept that challenges their very legitimacy as ‘the experts’. But experiential learning – that is learning by doing, typically in the workplace – has started to come into its own, along with reflection on how people work and learn together this way. The deliberate division between learning passively in a seminar room or lecture theatre and learning through doing has sometimes been necessary but when reinforced systematically as has been the case in HE until recently it became a strangely lopsided way for an education system to operate – the ‘University of Life’ is indeed a valuable and important place and universities were in denial about it for quite some time. Stripped of the functionalism required by employers and the market, this could be a useful educational development.

We can certainly add to this that a co-operative society of the future would seek to ensure that a university education would be genuinely meaningful – not just for the participants but for society as a whole, being finally freed from the narrow constraints of the market and money, loans and liabilities. Situated within a society of common ownership and with common purposes for the dissemination of wealth and happiness it could indeed, finally, be part of a rounded University of Life.

Dave Perrin

Broken Britain (2024)

Book Review from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

How They Broke Britain. By James O’Brien. Penguin. 2023. £10.99

This is an entertaining and well-written book from the host of Britain’s most popular radio talk-show. It has been floating around the top of the best-seller lists for the last few months and it is easy to see why. It taps effortlessly into the view that Britain has been hopelessly misgoverned for years and it focuses – with a chapter for each – on a number of the leading players, from media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre and Andrew Neil through, inevitably, to the likes of Johnson, Truss and Sunak. Dominic Cummings also gets his own chapter.

As with all books of this type, there is a tendency to overstate the role politicians in particular play with regard to the state of the economy, though where the book is most successful is the focus it places on the ideological ties and networks that have underpinned and sustained the dominant political assumptions of our time. These are the view that ‘trickle-down’ economics has some merit, that the EU was both a singular barrier to UK economic growth and also to genuine democratic sovereignty, that the poor are poor because they are essentially feckless and that immigration is the major issue of our times that should be (pre-)occupying political minds everywhere. As the General Election demonstrated, they are dominant views that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour has done little to challenge.

O’Brien is strongest when he writes in detail of the revolving door that exists between the right-wing think-tanks generating this stuff, the right-wing media and the recently departed Tory government. Many people will not have heard too much about the plethora of secretive ‘policy institutes’ and similar that exist in and around Tufton Street in Westminster, but they will have seen their representatives pop up with unerring regularity on news and current affairs programmes for years, opining in the manner of independent ‘experts’ – the Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute for Economic Affairs, Civitas, the Adam Smith Institute, Policy Exchange and the bizarre Taxpayers’ Alliance. These are the people who fomented and nurtured the likes of Liz Truss and O’Brien isn’t in a forgiving mood towards them.

The think-tank/media/political nexus that has dominated UK discourse for years and which has more recently formed ever more bizarre offshoots like the increasingly unhinged GB News, is indeed laid bare. It is good stuff and worth buying for this alone.

Less intuitively, there is also a chapter on Jeremy Corbyn, largely on the grounds that he failed to provide effective opposition to this nexus. Much of what O’Brien says here has resonance too, though occasionally he is a little unfair perhaps:

‘There used to be two ways for non-Conservative politicians to negotiate the UK’s hideously right-wing media: either you appeased them in the hope of avoiding their nastiest attacks or you took the fight straight to them and relied on sympathetic or impartial outlets to get your message out there. Corbyn and his closest advisers invented a third: completely fail to engage; alienate and demonise almost all journalists; claim constant victimhood; and offer up pathetic excuses when confronted with evidence of your own poor judgement’ (p.268).

Arguably, this is more Corbyn of 2019 General Election vintage, as earlier one of the more successful aspects of his period leading Labour was the way his supporters built up alternative media in opposition to the mainstream (even though he lost in 2017 too, it was narrow and this is something that helped him win over 6 percent more of the vote than Starmer did in his recent landslide, amounting to almost 12.9 million votes compared to Starmer’s 9.7 million). Indeed, while socialists have little to learn from the Corbyn experience generally, this aspect is interesting and O’Brien arguably seems to rather overlook the influence of alternative media like The Canary – which became the UK’s third most popular politics news website – and related social media.

This is a minor caveat though, and there can be little doubt that much of what O’Brien has written is a tour de force, exposing and cataloguing a network of pro-capitalist, right-wing goons who have just received an unexpectedly large – to most of them at least – kick in the ballots.

Dave Perrin

Passing the parcel (1995)

TV Review from the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Election nights are almost exciting, and Local Elections ‘95 on BBC 1 last month proved to be no exception. There was David Dimbleby with a twinkle in his eye and a Mars bar in his pocket. Peter Kellner looking studiously professorial next to a bank of computers. Anthony King thumbing through his mental book of historical precedents and the ubiquitous Peter Snow arms flailing like a whirling dervish in conversation with Magnus Pike. "Just a bit of fun” is Snow’s catchphrase. and of course it all is just that, at least for him.

For the politicians it is different—election night is akin to a life-or-death prognosis. John Selwyn Gummer had seldom looked glummer as the news trickled in of the most humiliating Conservative defeat in local elections on record. Frank Dobson chortled like a Father Christmas on Prozac and the Liberal Democrats' spokesman was there as well, popping up like Chad over a wall occasionally in the hope that nobody would forget he was there too. But it was Labour's night, and if all Frank Dobson's Christmases had come at once. John Prescott beamed as if his political marriage to Tony Blair had just been consummated in spectacular style. He opened a bottle of champagne at Labour Party headquarters and thrust the spray orgasmically at the cameras, adjectives tumbling over one another just as the Moet tumbled out of the bottle.

It was indeed touching that the working class could have had such an effect on their fellow human beings. Touching, though not altogether surprising, as it is the workers who put the politicians in their exalted position to start with.

If local election night demonstrated anything it was that the Labour Party . . . pardon me. New Labour, is on a roll of gigantic proportions and that the Tories are digging themselves further into a hole and not out of it. Labour, on this performance seems set to win a General Election and they will be aware at this time like at no other that dangerous talk costs political lives. During the election campaign itself they showed themselves cognisant of this fact, fighting the battle on presentation, managerial abilities, sharp suits and white teeth. "Policies" has become the most dangerous word in their vocabulary. When tackled about this by Dimbleby. Frank Dobson shrugged his shoulders and gave a "what can we do" look. Local government, he said, is hamstrung by government subsidies and capping, and so even if Labour wanted to spend more on education or local services, it couldn't.

At this point John Gummer intervened to claim that you could not blame the Conservative government for the belt-tightening consequences of the world recession and that in any case things were getting steadily better under the foresighted stewardship of John Major. But then came the pièce de résistance—Sir Teddy Taylor. Tory rebel, beamed in via satellite or some such device to tell the panel that they were all wrong as the real problem was Europe. "I know I'm being a bore . . ." he said, and of course he was right. And right about something else too. He went on to say that just as it didn't matter which of the parties controlled the councils, neither did it matter much which party controlled Westminster, as they were all prisoners of the system, the headquarters of which he identified as being somewhere in Belgium. Now he might have been misplaced about the importance of the last bit. but his substantive point, of course, has a lot going for it.

Travel with Teddy

Travel round Britain and can you tell where a Conservative council ends and a Labour one begins? Travel around Europe or any other part of the world and try doing the same with governments. It is very difficult indeed, and Sir Teddy has obviously noticed. Given all this, quite what his function is as a politician must be in some doubt, his obsession with Brussels notwithstanding. If he thinks politicians are as impotent as this (and they generally are) then it cannot be long before he packs it all in forever and takes to the stage.

But have some sympathy for him. Sir Teddy showed that he had grasped, in his own hamfisted way, a fundamental truth of capitalist politics, even if he lacks the full explanation for it. And this is that, in reality, election nights at present are momentary interludes in a mind-numbingly tedious and pointless exercise. They are the time when the two rival but otherwise identical brands of cola release their sales figures, when two bluebottles climb up a wall to see who can reach the ceiling first. Pointless, though at the same time mesmerising if your life is empty enough. And if the phrase "get a life" should be directed anywhere, the BBC studios on election nights are as good a place as any to aim. 

Dave Perrin