Doubtful Benefits (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s another day with a ‘Y’ in its name, so the government must be attacking benefits scroungers again. The routine pieties of the modern political age are to talk about ‘helping people’ out of ‘the benefits trap’ and ‘back into work’ – joining the perennial political duties like cutting red tape and reducing government spending. The reason why these problems never go away is because they are problems caused by the very system which puts the politicians in power, and which they cannot resolve without destroying themselves and their own elevated statuses.

David Blunkett – now returned to the cabinet after resigning last year for abusing his office for personal gain in helping his lover’s nanny get a visa quicker – has been making loud noises about the ‘crackers’ Incapacity Benefit system. It is Blunkett’s role to sound like a bruiser, to talk tough and act tough, seen by many as appealing to Labour’s core constituency – former Tory voters on council estates. He bemoaned the continuing rise of people on incapacity benefits (many driven there by previous efforts to try and cut benefits claimants, helped by staff driven by targets to reduce certain types of benefits).

There are currently 2.7 million people on incapacity benefit in the UK, with something like 29 million people in employment (possibly the highest UK figure ever). According to the BBC, that is four times the number of IB recipients compared to 30 years ago. Of course, many things have changed since then, not least the structure of the benefits system as a whole.

Blunkett, however, still wants to drastically reduce the numbers on incapacity. Revealing his new status as a medical doctor, Blunkett pronounced that getting out to work is a better cure for depression than staying at home watching daytime telly.  This startling revelation must have shocked his fellow healthcare professionals who had been labouring under the impression that depression is a medical ailment of the brain as much as a break is a medical condition of the leg. Perhaps

Blunkett will now advise a brisk walk as a cure for that. Behind the tough rhetoric, though, as ever with the modern Machiavellian Labour Party, is some old-fashioned Old Labour style reforms: plans to make the benefits system ‘a ladder to self-reliance’ and to give assistance with training and finding jobs to people who are on IB. Simplification of the system may actually help people who are supposed to be too ill to work but have to be well enough to run from pillar to post to fill in their 2,000 page benefits claim form signed in triplicate in blood. Or something like that.

This is cut from the same cloth as the New Deal and all their previous schemes to ‘help’ the unemployed back to work by badgering them and managing them into being full-time professional job seekers. Of course, this runs counter to any notion that they can quickly cut costs. This month also saw the National Audit Office reveal that only 5% of people on IB were able to access back to work schemes. To assist more people through such structures will actually increase the cost of managing the benefits, not decrease it, as massive expansion would be required.

This is the central conundrum for governments: caught between a real problem beyond their control, trapped by their own eternal propaganda of cost cutting, they cannot pursue their eternal propaganda of getting people off benefits. Instead, all we have is a Groundhog Day of pronouncements and denouncements as the Ministers try to be seen doing something, usually by trying to portray the people who are dependent on benefits as somehow culpable and at fault for the whole of the costs of the benefits system.

Politicians are struggling to define the typical benefits recipient, to legitimise the idea of welfare so they can attack it and reduce costs and also increase downwards pressures on wages and the labour market. Most people in the UK are probably only two pay cheques away from needing to call on benefits, but rather than portray it as a system to help people and prevent catastrophe it is universally presented as a location of cheats, frauds and scroungers, riddled with layabouts and other undeserving poor types. Benefits and being on benefits is to be despised and feared.

Despite this, though, people are compelled to claim them because of the wages system, because they are too ill to work or because work is not available. The benefits system actually benefits employers who otherwise would face the costs and disruption of having to keep on people whose illness makes them turn up to work irregularly, who would lie in desperation to gets jobs about their illnesses, and push much of the cost currently borne generally through taxes directly onto capitalists who employ many workers.

Herein is the rub of the £3 billion lost from the system by fraud and ‘error’ – much of it will have been small sums given to people which will have made their lives easier. Some of it will have contributed to the real living needs of claimants. The real tragedy is not the fraud or the overspend, but that much of the £109 billion budget is wasted assessing people, categorising people and cheeseparing their entitlements.

There is enough food, clothing and housing to go round. The world today is not short of wealth. In order, though, to maintain labour discipline, to keep the labour market in existence, a massive welfare budget must be expended to deny access to the things people need.

The simple fact is that we live in a society overripe for socialism. The material possibility has been around the corner for years. When we remove the barriers to the access of wealth, we also remove the barriers that make some people unemployable, that make socialising and community a cost that has to be scraped out of local authority and social services budgets. We would remove the binds, the need to support a restrictive welfare system but simultaneously to attack it and try to reduce its budget, by the principle of producing freely together.

Socialists, unlike leftists, do not support the welfare state, do not see it as a way to socialism, but as an inevitable part of capitalism, of administering poverty. The abolition of poverty – not in far-flung imagined foreign fields where poverty is vividly drawn by the masters of propaganda, but on the very streets where we walk and it is painted out by those same illusionists – will mean an end to the welfare ideology. With luck, it will also mean seeing less of David Blunkett’s face revelling in his own ‘stern compassion’.

Pik Smeet

We all need asylum (2001)

From the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eurotunnel’s September announcement that they had appointed a former army general, Sir Roger Wheeler, to help keep out asylum seekers trying to reach Britain through the Channel Tunnel via the company’s French compound at Coquelles seemed most apt just days after Daily Mail headlines screaming about “The Chunnel under siege”, “The storming of the Chunnel” and “Invasion”.

No doubt such militaristic lingo will in future include further metaphors describing how Wheeler is deciding “tactics” for the best “attacks” and “defences” as he “spearheads” a “fight” against the “enemy” until eventual “victory”. This however is not mere warlike figure of speech without material substance, since with miles of razor-wire fencing, security patrols, guard dogs, searchlights and look out towers equipped with infra red and CCTV cameras, the Coquelles terminal resembles a World War 2 prisoner-of-war camp. Not one, though, with prisoners forcibly kept on the inside, but restrained from gaining entry.

But jailbirds is precisely what asylum seekers are—inmates of capitalism’s global choky, convicted of being “bogus” and “illegal” because of non-ownership of money-making assets, and so sentenced to life imprisonment of predominantly suffering, exclusion and exploitation. Not that us natives in “our” country have much more freedom, seeing how Britain’s means of production and distribution most definitely are not ours, leaving us banged up in the selfsame suppressive manipulative clink.

By not owning and controlling raw materials, power stations, factories, transport systems etc, the majority must work and live their lives according to the needs, and dictates to government puppets, of the minority who do. The “middle class” (forced to sell themselves, working class in reality) may imagine they’re better off than others on lower pay, though examining the real cost to their families and health from work pressures, employment insecurity, pollution, environmental destruction and the fundamental instability and competitive dangers of markets and money, reveals their “gains” to be illusory.

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has sought to adopt a conciliatory approach, expressing a desire to see migrants able to obtain work permits to contribute to UK society. Yet if he paid heed to the state of the global economy, with a worldwide recession looking unavoidable, it’s clear that permits to work are idiotically pointless if businesses have sacked millions of employees because a whole heap of capitalist work has suddenly become unprofitable. So while many of those seeking to enter the UK might be well-qualified machine operators, engineers, builders, doctors etc (as they are), if the capitalist economy is going through yet another of its inevitable cyclical crises, there’ll be no employers or money to pay for these much-needed workers.

Such economic crises make migrants unwanted. They put politicians under maximum pressure to keep them out to minimise state expenditure, spending which reduces the nation’s profitability the bigger it gets, and is especially disliked when making profits is then as difficult as it gets. Increased racism and nationalism also become more likely as high unemployment and poverty produce considerable social suffering, provoking the pained to find and lash out at those they think responsible, and politicians in need of scapegoats, chauvinistic bigots and money-mad tabloids all eager to point some out.

Besides, is Blunkett unconcerned that offering work permits tends to result in cherry picking of the most employable and skilled workers from areas of conflict and deprivation? Because only they will have been most able to save up income, or successfully borrow the money necessary to pay for their travel arrangements, resulting in war-torn and poverty-stricken regions being left without people vital for their improvement and essential services.

The answer to people fleeing conflict, deprivation and brutal regimes is to remove the root causes of such nastiness—minority ownership and control of productive resources which generates rivalry for the upper hand, and restricts provision of, and access to, goods and services according to available profits and ability to pay. It is this exclusive possession and control of resources that also divides the world into separate competing countries and blocs, and the need for associated borders to prevent others from attempting to acquire these valuable assets by armed force, subversion or, in the case of migrants during economic downturns, “excess” demand (i.e., too many unemployed and unemployable people burdening state finances). And since these means of production responsible are possessed and run by ruling classes in all countries worldwide, worldwide socialism is the only solution.

Not only does global minority ownership and control of productive assets cause people to flee and seek better lives elsewhere, it also influences where such migrants try to reach. Politicians and media commentators have concentrated on irrelevant criticism of the Red Cross refugee centre in Calais, from which migrants set out to jump on UK-bound trains (amputated limbs and death occurring in the process), and on nauseating nit-picking about asylum seekers not staying in the “first safe country” they reach, accusing them of seeing Britain as a “soft touch”. Apart from the fact that no country is “safe” from capitalism, just as this economic system became global because that was beneficial to capital, so too has there been economic pressure for one global language to facilitate efficiency in the markets. And since America has been, and remains the dominant economic power—along with other significant economies also having English as their principal language—governments and astute parents in other countries with different native tongues have felt impelled to teach children to speak English in order to be able to compete.

Hence, migrants with even a smattering of English, and a desire to work for a bearable living standard or to pay off debts to people-traffickers, choose countries like Britain. Or Australia, where with a national election imminent, the sickening response of John Howard’s government was to pander to apparently widespread racist sentiment and send in armed troops to force a Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, to take its undesirable shipwrecked cargo of over 400 mainly Afghans away from cobber-filled Oz—a country ironically founded by boatloads of undesirables.

On 7 September, a High Court judge annoyed politicians and tabloids by ruling that detaining refugees at Oakington “Reception” Centre in Cambridgeshire for a week or so, while their asylum claims were being decided, amounted to illegal imprisonment under the Human Rights Act. Not that Mr Justice Collins merits praise, since he also stated it was still legal to detain anyone thought likely to abscond to avoid deportation. So, as usual, who and what’s legal or illegal remains dependent upon what’s acceptable or unacceptable to capitalism.

“Illegal” remains a class-based description that politicians, through their two-faced cant and deceit, will continue to attach to asylum seekers entering the UK for “economic reasons” rather than “genuinely fleeing persecution”. Yet just you try to take what you need from a shop without paying, because you’re skint. How long before the police drag you away, and a magistrate probably locks you away, each insisting that you, too, were “illegal”? And which British employees toiling for inadequate incomes in the longest working week in the EU aren’t forced to sell themselves for “economic reasons”, and have never considered such wage slavery to be “persecution” from which they’d also like to escape?

Those travelling long distances through fear or desperation are people no different to ourselves, since under capitalism, we are all asylum seekers. Only those owning substantial capital that generates enough money to pay for whatever needs they may have, without ever having to work, need not seek asylum from capitalism. Multimillionaires and billionaires, thanks to exploitation of the working class majority, able to fly first-class anywhere in the world at a whim are the real migrant “spongers” who need to be kicked out.

Max Hess

Greasy Pole: Learning a Lesson (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was not so long ago when no Labour Party rally was complete without a nostalgic reference to the likes of Keir Hardie and George Lansbury, those dead leaders whose spectres could be called up to prove that Labour was true to its faith. Whatever the Party—or sometimes a Labour government—might do, there was always the memory of people like Hardie and Lansbury to reassure the doubters that their party’s heart was in the right place, and that one day they would bring us all to the Promised Land. This usually provoked a few tears and lots of applause. It sounded good, stifled any awareness of reality with a blind faith.

There were some other Labour leaders who were never mentioned in those circumstances. Among these were Ramsey MacDonald and Philip Snowden, Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government of 1929-31. The reason these men were kept in the background was that, although holding the two most powerful jobs in that government, they had not made any progress towards the Promised Land; they did not inspire any confidence in the staunchness of Labour’s principles. After a short spell of confused impotence in the face of an economic crisis MacDonald had sacked all his ministers and taken back only those who promised to behave themselves in future—which meant join in a government with the Liberals and Tories, who until recently were supposed to be Labour’s sworn enemies.

That crisis sprang from the effects of an international slump on British capitalism, causing unemployment to climb steadily, up towards the three million mark. Due response was to set up Committee on National Expenditure, presided over by George May who (like Peter Davis, who now heads the Blair government’s drive to force welfare claimants into work) was a big noise in the Prudential. When the May Report came out, towards the end of August 1931, it recommended, among other measures, that unemployment benefit should be cut by 20 percent.

Laziness

This attack on the fragile conditions of the poorest workers was not in itself a new idea. Nor was it accompanying justification, that people who are poor and unemployed are like that because they want to be, through laziness or ignorance. It is exactly the kind of propaganda we are being subjected to now, as the Blair government push through their policies of depressing the living standards of the lowest and most vulnerable people. Those who accept these arguments, often on the flimsiest anecdotal “evidence”, have to explain why so many people, all at once, all over the world, become suddenly afflicted by this idleness and stupidity and why this always coincides with economic recessions—and why so many become energetic and sensible as the recession eases.

But for the moment the significant thing is how some elements in the Labour Party reacted to the suggestion that British capitalism’s fortunes should be protected by assaults on the unemployed.The two Labour members on the May Committee issued a dissenting report—which disappeared almost without trace. When the Cabinet met to decide finally to cut unemployment benefit and by how much (ten percent) they were almost equally divided, with ten of them opposing the cut and 11 supporting it. So it was that MacDonald became Prime Minister in a “National” government, supported by Conservatives and Liberals.

It is worth remembering that sorry example of Labour’s futility and cynicism in order to compare it to the conduct of the lot who now occupy the seats of power in the name of introducing a new, more humane and equal society. As the Blair government, through the hapless Harriet Harman, bulldoze through their plans to cut the benefits of single parents and the disabled (with much more to come) there is nothing worth the name of opposition in the Cabinet.

Cigarettes

There was, of course, one brief and feeble coded protest from David Blunkett but that soon died away and in any case, Blunkett was always careful enough to avoid making it a resignation issue. It was almost the same story among Labour MPs, with only the usual veterans of dissent like Livingstone, Skinner and Benn and a few others sticking their heads over the parapet. Among the new MPs, ecstatic at finding themselves in this new important powerful job, there was overwhelming obedience to the whips and the spin doctors.

Typical of this was the passionate advocacy of the cut in single parent benefit from one MP who just after May confessed himself astonished to be in Parliament, let alone with such a large majority and a dizzying swing. When the Parliamentary Labour Party met to discuss the proposed cut this MP distinguished himself—and perhaps booked himself a very minor government job—by ranting that the cut amounted to only the price of a packet of fags a day.

This contribution to the debate—if we can call it that—fulfilled a necessary condition for such arguments; to blame the poor for being that way. It used to be that the poor would not leave a bath unfilled with coal; now it is that single parents make themselves a present of struggling to bring up children on their own and simply can’t be trusted not to smoke their benefit away.

Friends

The odious creep who talked about the price of cigarettes had obviously learned his lesson because he was once a prominent and ardent member of a local council which in the 1980s supplied a lot of copy to the gutter press about their policies as so-called loony lefties. One effect of this was that the local Tory MP bounced back to Westminster with a hugely increased majority—and stayed there until he was defeated last May. Obviously, the point went home; to win votes it is necessary to be willing to say anything, at any time and to be flexible in what you say so that you always pander to every popular prejudice. It is a lesson which the Labour Party at large has absorbed, since those days of MacDonald and Snowden, and in Blair they have found a relentless teacher.

Blair’s support is not confined to the Labour Party. In a letter to the Sunday Times of 28 December last Madsen Pirie who is president of the Adam Smith Institute—which is a longstanding proponent of Thatcherite policies—said:

"Your leader last week supporting welfare reform was most timely . . . Tony Blair has shown commendable resolve by his insistence that the system must be changed . . . so far the signs are encouraging.”

With friends like that does Blair need enemies—especially among those whose lives are an endless grind on the lowest level of poverty—of hunger, sickness, despair?

Ivan

Editorial: May Day in Europe (2004)

Editorial from the May 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

The First of May is the day when the workers’ movement celebrates its internationalism, and affirms the unity of their class across all boundaries. It is striking, then, that this year it also happens to be the day on which the ten ‘Accession States’ become members of the European Union. Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia will all become part of the same continuous political and economic zone, with a population of some 450 million people.

The workers’ movement that initiated Mayday as Labour Day used to look forward to a United States of Europe as its prize. Yet, the venalities of the property system defy the attempts at unity between humans. The enlargement of Europe, and all the rights of movement of Labour it brings managed to bring down a government Minister – Beverley Hughes – because the Tories saw fit to prey on the insecurities of workers in the UK, making out we would be ‘swamped’ by migrants coming to make them unemployed.

That workers are afraid is an effect of the systemic threat of poverty through unemployment capitalism needs in order to function. That the Tories did it is because they saw an opportunity to build electoral support based on that fear reflects the existing culture and institutions built up already in the UK. They did it because British capitalists do not want to invest tax money on welfare for workers who may not produce any profit for them.

It is not, though, just the Tories capitalising on the fact that humans organise around units of property called nation states. Labourites too join in the sport. Arch-apologist for Blairism, Polly Toynbee, in her Guardian column, talks of how a modern ‘social democratic welfare state’ needs to control immigration in order to function. That is, her social democracy requires a nationalised workforce competing on a world market against other national capitals. She is as much against wasting state money as the acolytes of free-market capitalism.

The Home Office, under Blunkett, has begun to inform asylum seekers from the accession states that on May 1st their entitlement to benefits ends, and they must find work or leave the country; this is because they are not at the moment subject to European rules on welfare entitlement for European Union citizens. ID cards are being rushed through to brand the workers as Made in Britain.

The truth is, that the uneven distribution of capital and property within the EU, and the attempts by the defenders of that property to build political alliances and movements based upon national prejudice and fear, remain a stain on whatever will be celebrated this Mayday.

Many workers may well be misled by trade union barons squawking about needing to take action to defend British jobs, of Labour politicians bleating about defending Britain from being swamped by scroungers; but those workers will be no better off for siding with British capital against their fellow workers. As soon as the going gets tough, the capitalists will without hesitation pull up their money and send it elsewhere to make better profits without the slightest regards for the workers who would be swamped by the resulting unemployment.

The truth is that it is not fellow workers who cause poverty and unemployment, but capitalism and its unyielding drive for profits. Their investments are the stage upon which we must try and play our parts. We cannot be free or united so long as they are free to move about the scenery around us.

The task confronting us is to build up a union of the working class, organised to put an end to the property system that divides and oppresses us. In today’s capitalism, organised on a global scale, a united Europe would not be enough; to free ourselves from the depredations of capital we need the World Commonwealth of Humanity.

Greasy Pole: Caning the teachers (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Blunkett is Secretary of State for Education and the author of a crushingly boring autobiography (On A Clear Day). Unless, of course, you like long, trivial stories about his dog upsetting the dignity of some eminent person (“We all enjoyed a good laugh . . .”). Or dollops of self-admiration garnished in mock modesty (“I believe that, at the time, Neil Kinnock thought I had let him down . . . whereas, as he later generously ackowledged . . .”). And the poetry—too embarrassing to repeat in a journal meant for a placid socialist readership. Any teacher who addressed their class as Blunkett does his readers would very soon lose control of the kids.

This is not to say that Blunkett does not sometimes let slip some arousing comment. A recent example was his statement that poverty is not an excuse for a school failing to meet the GCSE pass targets set by the government. “Cynics out there” was how he described anyone who accepts what seem to many people a self-evident fact, namely that “. . . school performance is all about socio-economics and the areas that these schools are located in”. That is another way of saying that only cynics would question whether a school in, say, a run-down part of Hackney should be expected to produce the same level of achievement as Eton or Harrow. It is another way of saying that if a school does fail to meet its targets that must be due to the teachers, who in Hackney are lazy and stodgy while at Eton and Harrow they are industrious and charismatic.

Jack Straw 

We have heard this kind of criticism of workers before. We hear it when companies go broke, or when governments are swamped by an economic crisis. Then we are told that all the problems are due to greedy, short-sighted workers. When the crime statistics are published we are informed that offending is not the blindly despairing act of people who are trapped in the dirt and decay of inner cities or rural slumdom but the behaviour of people who are intrinsically anti-social. When pensioners die of hypothermia they are chided because they have not learned how to keep warm in an unheated home.

Blunkett should have a word with his fellow minister Jack Straw, who was once Labour’s Shadow for Education. In those days Straw did not seem to have any doubts about the cause of struggling schools. At the 1987 Labour conference he told the delegates that ” . . . there is only one culprit responsible for falling standards (in education)—the government which has been in power since 1979″. Two years later he returned to the theme, denouncing “a government that blames teachers for the ills of Thatcherite society” and promising that, far from harrassing them, Labour would “…train teachers better, support them better and, yes, reward teachers better”.

Of course in those days it was safe to make that kind of a speech. Like Straw’s 1987 complaint that “. . . the weakness of the Cabinet’s commitment to public education is shown by the fact that all its ministers have sent their children to private schools” and that as a result of the Tory government’s cuts in spending on education “the morale of the teaching profession has been destroyed”. Well this government’s persistent attacks on teachers have not exactly resuscitated their morale and one reason is that so many Labour leaders, like the Tories before them, have placed their children in private schools.

Results Culture 

For his part, Blunkett has never been been among the wilder animals in the swamps of left-wingery. In July 1987, for example, in an article in the Independent, he claimed that the Thatcher government were stealing Labour policies when they declared war on the “dependency culture”—which did not mean the system which allows the ruling class to live off the exploitation of the workers but the few people whose means were so reduced they relied on state hand outs to survive. The repressive attitudes implied in that article have been all too evident in Blunkett since he was put in charge of the schools, for he has been pre-occupied with the results culture, the obsession with exam results which has millions of neurotic parents scanning the league tables to see how their childrens’ school has done—knowing that head master Blunkett will wreak a terrible revenge if the results are not good enough. There have been other Blunkett policies which have given offence—for example his sturdy championing of the odious Chris Woodhead, the boss of the dreaded OFSTED, when it was revealed that Woodhead’s, er, private life did not live up to the standards his inspectors demand of teachers and pupils.

So it is hardly surprising that Blunkett should feel the need to attack the notion that bad social conditions have an effect on schools just as they do on health, crime, families . . . His evidence for saying that poverty is not an excuse for a failing school is, not surprisingly, supplied by his own Department, who say that schools with low exam results exist in areas other than run down inner cities. So what? The results may be due to a number of factors which are conveniently left unilluminated but Blunkett, in an exercise in logic which would be unacceptable coming from a ten year old pupil, chooses to draw the conclusion which suits his already formed opinion—that teachers are to blame and must be punished, sacked, driven out in revenge.

Watch My Lips . . . 

In any case nobody, least of all the teachers, would argue that the skill and sensitivity with which a subject is taught does not make a difference. The skills of teachers vary, just like the skills of people in other jobs—for example politicians, who can be very clever in the lies they tell and the manner in which they cover up their failures. And then again they can be embarrassingly clumsy. As was Blunkett, when he was on the spot about his policy on schools selection, which is now in such sharp contrast to the statement he made to the Labour Party conference in 1995: “Watch my lips, no selection, either by examination or interview, under a Labour government”. When he was faced with this, Blunkett chose to defend himself with the feeble protest that his 1995 statement was a joke. This may have been more convincing if, as he was receiving the delegates’ rapturous applause, he had said something like “Well wait a second. You know me, always ready for a laugh. That was a joke. When I get into office there will be selection because we’ll be a government which is too scared of the Daily Mail to do otherwise”. This shabby episode brings up the question of what sort of a role model Blunkett is to the teachers he so persistently harasses about their professional standards.

The evidence that conditions outside the schools have a more powerful, eventually decisive, influence is overwhelming. The Guardian of 6 March described a school in Brighton where 45 percent of the pupils conform to the generally accepted measurement of poverty—they have free school meals. Many of them come from families struggling to survive under the stress of long term unemployment, on an estate where life has always been that bit harder. What kind of material do the teachers there have to work with? Unsurprisingly, some of the pupils are on drugs—the police suspect they are working for a drugs syndicate from Scotland. One boy was a male prostitute on the sea-front. A former pupil, 17 years old, was murdered on a rubbish tip next to the school. A pupil was accused of helping in the murder of another pupil’s brother.

The Real World

Of course exceptionally brave, talented teachers might hope to have some effect in that kind of situation. What actually happened , as is to be expected in the real world away from Blunkett’s cruel fantasies, was that the teachers simply collapsed under the strain—like politicians often do, when their failure to control capitalism becomes too obvious. One teacher died, it was thought through a stress related illness; another disappeared. Several developed serious illnesses including two cancers. Others had nervous breakdowns. Because that is how poverty deals with people who are trying to make sense of this society—in their homes, their jobs, their schools. Peter Mortimore, director of London University Institute of Education, put it that “All the work of school improvement professionals shows that schools can make a difference, but they cannot completely overcome the effects of disadvantage.”

And what if we applied the standards which Blunkett imposes on the teachers to people like him—to the political leaders? What if they were to be judged on their failures, their impotence and the deceptions they use to conceal this reality? Should we punish them? Or wouldn’t it be better to close down their organs of power and make them redundant?

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Nothing New Millennium (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

If there was a sense of relief when the twenty-first century finally dawned it must have been partly because we would no longer have to endure those comments about society which unfailingly began with the words: “With the approach of the Millennium”. It seemed that any plans to do anything about the crisis in the NHS, or about making rail travel safer, or reducing pollution, were given an added urgency because we were approaching a new century. By the year 2000 we had to get it right.

This was irritating enough, especially as those making the comments were usually trying to impress us with the historical sweep of their intellects. It might have been hoped, that the first of January would have brought some relief, the nonsense would have stopped and we would be back in what is called normality, when social problems and deficiencies are described in more commonplace terms, without any added significance by the turning of another page in the calendar. But it was not to be. The celebratory fireworks had hardly died away when we were being assailed with comments which began with such words as “Now that we have entered the new Millennium . . .”

Perhaps enough people were deceived by this into thinking that the arbitrary process of passing from one year to another—or in this case one century to another—would really affect how the world is organised so that the new millennium would bring evidence that people were becoming safer, healthier, more optimistic about their future. If so, they were critically deluded. They would have forgotten that we are treated to the same kind of nonsense every December, when the first seconds of a new year are a time to assume that the next twelve months will be better than the last when reality encourages the conclusion that if anything they will be worse.

Harold Wilson 

We have been here before. As the year 1969 drew to a close the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson made several references to the approach of the 1970s, rather in the same style as all those hopes and plans for the 21st century. The Seventies, Wilson assured us, would be better than the previous decade. He was, in fact, in difficulties because by then his government, which had been elected on the promise to oversee the blossoming of a great new age in which technological advance and planning would solve problems like poverty, disease and poor education, had been largely discredited. Such was the disillusion among his supporters that at one stage it was reasonable to speculate on whether the Labour Party was about to disintegrate. Wilson was desperate; by encouraging us to look forward to a new decade of the Seventies he hoped to deter us from inconvenient memories of the Sixties.

Well of course it did not work out as he had hoped. The Labour government staggered from one crisis to the next. Soon after the dawn of the new decade they were ousted from power, then a few years later returned in the wake of Heath’s calamitous three-day week. By then the much vaunted technological revolution had faded into the disreputable history of politicians’ promises. It was replaced by Labour’s assurance that its special relationship with the unions could smooth the way for their policy of forcing down our living standards which, by some mysterious process, would make us all better off. A few of the party’s more deranged supporters believed this but a lot of them did not—particularly those trade unionists who got fed up with the constant struggle to prevent their standards declining and defended themselves with the strikes which were later damned as the Winter of Discontent. This was followed by glorious spring for the Tories, as Thatcher romped into power, consigning the Labour Party and all its blather about a new decade into the wilderness for almost twenty years.

NHS

And what about now, with a New Labour government and its promises of a new society with new values, new priorities, new achievements . . .? Well there is nothing new about the NHS being in crisis, with nurses and doctors worked into the ground and sick people having to wait for months just to be examined so that they can be allowed onto another waiting list. There is nothing new about this deplorable experience existing at the same time as the rapid and effective treatment available to anyone who has the kind of money needed to pay for a team of the best doctors and a stay in the most exclusive hospitals. There is nothing new in the situation recently summarised by Alistair Darling, whose job as Social Services Secretary is supposed to make him responsible for alleviating poverty: “. . . a child can still be born poor, live poor, die poor”. He did not also say that a child in another class will be born rich, live rich, die rich.

What about other ministers? How are they grappling with the problems of the new millennium? Well Home Secretary Jack Straw plans to prove how tough he is on crime by threatening the legal rights of people charged with minor thefts while he protects the welfare of General Pinochet, who is not one of those youths washing your windscreen at traffic lights without you asking for it but a man who, as dictator of Chile, oversaw the murder of thousands of people there. Straw has bent the rules on admissible immigrants to allow Mike Tyson into this country although he should be disqualified by reason of his prison sentences for rape and assault. The reason for Straw’s generosity was clear: Tyson was due to fight here and if anything was allowed to stop that happening a lot of money would be lost, particularly by the fight promoters and the owners of the TV rights, who are such close buddies of Tony Blair.

Sheffield Wednesday

And as Straw was engaged in grabbing the headlines for his battles for his version of a better life for us all in the 21st century he was in competition with Sheffield’s Labour MPs, among them Education Secretary David Blunkett. Since his days as leader of Sheffield City Council Blunkett has undergone something of a change. He is no longer the challenging left-winger but a man who wants to hound out teachers who display any human frailty in overcoming the difficulties of teaching kids whose extreme impoverishment has extended into their conduct in the classroom. Blunkett has begun the new century by showing that his zeal for sacking people will not stop at schools. With the other MPs, he has demanded the head of the manager of Sheffield Wednesday because the team are stuck at the bottom of the Premiership. Blunkett is pitiless to the idea that, after all, some team has to come last and it does not seem to have occurred to him, that campaigning against a football manager is hardly revolutionary activity for an ex-firebrand of the left.

Nothing new about poverty then, nor about avoidable sickness. Nothing new about class-related degrees of access to wealth. Nothing new about capitalism and how it degrades and represses the very people who are useful and productive while it nurtures its parasites. Nothing new about Labour ministers trying to hide their impotence in smoke screens of deceit.

Ivan

Editorial: Blunkett is guilty (2005)

Editorial from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Blunkett is unquestionably guilty. We are not referring to all the inconsequential fuss about the ex-lover, her nanny, a visa and free rail tickets. No. The important position that Blunkett has abused is his own professed core belief in self-help which he has summed up by saying “Old Labour is the idea that you did things to people, New Labour is about enabling people to do things for themselves.”

Despite his experience of working class poverty, suffering and injustice in childhood, the political course he has followed, and is now transforming into government policies with his cabinet colleagues, in no way enables people to “do things for themselves”.

Blunkett has participated in fast-tracking British capitalism towards as much profit as possible, and because of this, New Labour has continued to “do things to people” which the minister declares he deplores. New Labour helps coerce people to work for employers who extract surplus value which is pocketed by parasitical shareholders. It restricts people from accessing goods and services with laws and enforcement, unless they’re capable of paying. It compels children to be conditioned (“educated”) into becoming the next generation of wage and salary slaves for employers to prey on. It assists in forcing upon us pollution, inequality, deprivation, stress, prostitution, drug abuse, gambling, inferior food, warfare, increased levels of cancer, corporate patenting of plant, animal and human genes and inevitable periodic economic downturns. It seeks to comprehensively pry and spy on us. It insists on imposing ID cards (or “entitlement cards” which reveals their true purpose). It makes a human being from one part of the world (the Philippines) who wants to work as a nanny in this part obtain a  permanent residency visa, or face being deported

All this is still done to us, despite Blunkett’s claim to want people free “to do things for themselves”, because his government, like any other, has no option but to put business profits before voters’ needs. As Home Secretary he has fiercely condemned the “scourge of drugs” and traffickers “making multi-million pound profits out of the misery of others”, yet he ignores the scourge of approved capitalists doing exactly the same thing. Bogus Blunkett, who said of his appointment: “As new Home Secretary I will be looking to listen and learn”, certainly won’t be listening to criticism of minority class ownership of the means of production and distribution, nor learning from history that governments don’t control capitalism — it is capitalism that controls governments.

Blunkett’s philosophy of “hand up rather than hand-out” welfarism, self-help, giving everyone an opportunity to succeed, and “participatory democracy” is worthless within capitalism where, at any stage, only a tiny few will prosper and hold sway at the expense of everyone else.

In a recent Observer (6 October) interview, the Home Secretary said “I do look back with a smile that many of the people who were in socialist societies [at Sheffield University during the 60s] ended up as being chief executive of some of our major companies. Like me I suppose”. Yes David, just like you. Corporate chiefs running the business side of British capitalism while you’re administering its political side. Still, when your cut from its profits is around £250,000 per annum with all manner of lucrative perks, grinning must be irresistible for an electoral hoodwinker working hand in glove with the boss class.

Which Way To Organise? (1996)

From the December 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Socialists aim at common ownership and democratic control of the world and its resources and the consequent abolition of class society. We also recognise that until this is achieved we have to organise ourselves for class struggle along the most militant and democratic lines. Mainstream trade unions increasingly fit neither of these descriptions. So is it time for a new beginning?

The leaders of the trade union movement are devoid of a class understanding of society, so lacking ideas of how to get out of their present rut that they see no alternative, indeed no other policy, than supporting the return of a Labour government.

Blair and Blunkett have left no doubts about their attitude to organised labour: the anti-union legislation must be continued. If elected a Labour government will place yet further curbs on strike action, especially in the public sector. Binding arbitration or a system whereby unions will have to re-ballot their members every time an employer makes what it terms as an improved offer will be introduced.

There was also a rumour that if a Labour government was to be faced with an outbreak of strikes in the public sector, this might result in the party balloting its members on the question of ending the link with the unions. This so-called threat, which is more like the best thing the Labour Party would have ever done for the working class, was later denied by senior party officials.

The direction mainstream trade unions are heading is very similar to that of New Labour, with an emphasis on a social partnership between unions and employers. In general the reaction of the union leaders to Blair and Blunkett’s proposals was, to say the least, muted. Official trade unionism is like a toothless tiger that when attacked has no choice but to cower in a corner.

A class issue

The need to engage in collective organisation emerges in a society which is divided into two classes, a minority class who own and control the means of wealth production and distribution and a majority class who have to sell their abilities to work for a wage or salary in order to live. On an individual basis the relationship between employer and employee is one of gross inequality to that to defend themselves against the inevitable encroachments of capital, workers have to organise collectively.

This need has nothing to do with rights, but has everything to do with economic necessity, a vital weapon for workers in the class struggle. Collective organisation and immunities from prosecution in trade disputes were conceded by the state through years of working-class struggle. In recent years these immunities only remain if workers and their organisations abide by a whole set of restraints in organising their disputes with employers.

Unions which were never exactly revolutionary organisations, are now beginning to lack any trace of being class-based organisations. The question must seriously be asked: are unions, who subscribe to the so-called “New Unionism” of the late 1990s, adequate tools for workers to rely on in their struggle with the bosses’ class?

Whether by deliberate design or not, many unions seem to have abandoned sections of the working class who are suffering from the worst aspects of modern capitalism. Many workers are employed on part-time contracts or limited to temporary or casual employment and find the comparatively high subs unions ask difficult to afford.

The unions now seem totally resigned to working within the reactionary industrial relations legislation which has developed, particularly during the last seventeen years. This acceptance makes them less effective organisations for workers in their struggles with employers.

The Liverpool dockers dispute has shown that to pursue a dispute via solidarity, and in this case international solidarity, means acting outside the channels of official unionism. After a weekend of activity in late September, it seems the TGWU threatened to end what little support it was providing to the dockers on the grounds that they had been associating with “anarchists”.

If workers are having to spend as much time fighting the union bureaucracy as they are their employers, then many may start, indeed, surely will start, to think about the need to form or join industrial organisations which are controlled by the membership and not paid officials.

Democratic struggle

What socialists support is sound collective industrial working-class organisation not particular institutions of trade unions. We have always stressed the need for workers to control their own disputes, to democratically decide when to take action, what that action should be and at what stage their dispute has been satisfactorily settled or is no longer worth pursuing.

It is workers themselves and not officials divorced from the workplace who should decide whether to make agreements with employers and what such agreements should be. Collective industrial organisation also needs to reach out beyond the workplace to include community involvement. The need for such organisation was evident in the 1984-5 miners strike and in the current Liverpool dockers dispute. Is this possible in bureaucratic-dominated unions?

Even in the defensive struggle to defend ourselves within the capitalist system, let alone an offensive one to help end it, the business-type unions which dominate in Britain at the moment offer little more than employment insurance and personal services. They are losing, or have already lost, their capacity for workers to use them as organisations of self-defence and are seemingly too bureaucratic to change. For groups of workers who have retained good militant anti-official unionism, it may be possible to build something within their existing organisations. For those who lack this base, alternative forms of industrial collective organisation may need to be built.

Ray Carr

Greasy Pole: All good clean fun? (2005)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Michael Howard will have been delighted that David Blunkett’s entangled difficulties pushed the Boris Johnson affair off the front pages. Sacking Johnson for denying his relationship with Petronella Wyatt enabled Howard to appear as a fearless guardian of moral standards. It would be churlish to entertain the idea that acting with such speed had something to do with Johnson being spoken of as the next Tory leader. Then there is the “morality” of why Howard appointed Johnson in the first place and what this says about the whole process of what is called politics.

The Tories have plenty to worry about right now, including the fact that few of their leaders are “recognisable”.  It is assumed that workers are more likely to abuse the power of their vote by casting it for people they feel familiar with, regardless of what that person represents. A canny politician understands this and, on the assumption that there is no such thing as bad publicity, relentlessly courts media attention. John Prescott, for example, is one of the most recognisable of politicians, especially since he appeared on the nation’s TV screens chinning a bystander who threw an egg at him at a meeting in the 2001 election. But the Tories?  Who recognises Prescott’s counterpart Michael Ancram? What London cabby boasts about having that John Redwood in the back the other day? Who queues to catch a glimpse of Oliver Letwin?

Henley

Even before he made it onto the opposition Front Bench, Boris Johnson was not one of the featureless, unrecognised Tories. Overweight, bumbling, rumpled, dishevelled and speaking with the plummiest of accents, he was ideally suited to play the victim on Have I Got News For You. The merciless verbal mauling he got on his first appearance on that show ensured him a place in the catalogue of eccentrics who do such an effective job of blanketing the realities of capitalism and its politics from the people who could, if they wished, put an end to the system. Johnson moved smoothly into the Tory candidature for the constituency of Henley on Thames, after Michael Heseltine had left the Commons.

Henley suited Johnson very well and he suited Henley, an excruciatingly posh, smartly ancient town on a beautiful stretch of the Thames. Howard, surrounded by tedious, but grippingly ambitious, shadows, may have seen Johnson and his effortless talent for attracting publicity as a vote-fertile gift. In all the circumstances, it was understandable that Howard should overlook some of Johnson’s little lapses, like being asked by a fellow Old Etonian, the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy, for the name of a journalist Guppy wanted to have beaten up in revenge for exposing his offences (typically, Johnson couldn’t put his hands on the information) and being sacked from a job on The Times for making up a quotation.

Petronella Wyatt is the daughter of the late Lord Wyatt, who as Woodrow Wyatt was a Labour MP during the 1950s and 60s. Wyatt always made it clear that he had no truck with all that nonsense about designing socialism for Britain, or allowing the workers by hand or brain to have access to the wealth they produced. He was notable for very little other than opposing the renationalisation of steel and carrying on a McCarthy-type campaign against Communists in the trades unions. In 1987 Thatcher made him a life peer – by which time he was thoroughly under her spell.

Petronella was a child of Wyatt’s fourth marriage and he was said to dote on her, to the extent of pulling many an influential string to get her to Oxford and then, in spite of her being notably unqualified, into media jobs. There were many rumours about her job as deputy editor of the Spectator relying on the closeness between her and Johnson the editor, and of Johnson’s readiness to buy the silence of anyone who got to know of their relationship with gifts of space in the magazine.

Buffoonery

So in terms of her background and personality Petronella Wyatt seems to have been an ideal match for a man whose buffoonery is relentless to the point of tedium. Perhaps that was why there was such an upsurge of support for Johnson, which more or less advised Michael Howard that such a lovely couple should be left untroubled and that if he thought he had done the Tories a good turn by the sacking he was very much mistaken.  According to the Guardian of 15 November a recent poll put Johnson as the third best known Tory, after Howard and William Hague. David Mellor (as if anyone pays any heed to anything he says) described him as “one of the few MPs with genuine charisma and a favourable public profile”. The Independent of 15 November raved that he “created a buzz around political life, making at least his portion of it attractive, youthful and entertaining . . . someone with a rare ability to bring politics alive”. And Norman Tebbit burbled that Johnson “added a lot of colour and fun and I suspect it’s that which has caused his downfall”. (Of course the last thing anyone  associated Tebbit with when he was in the government would be “colour” or “fun” and the fact that he bestirs himself to use such words is a measure of the hysteria stimulated by Johnson’s sacking).

All of this was based on the assumption that introducing “fun” or “entertainment” into politics has to be a good thing. It avoids the question of what politics is, why political parties exist and what they do. To begin with, politics is peculiar to capitalism; it is all about the exercise of power over society, about the establishment, the rule and the running of states and units of them. Political parties are the expression of class interests and any differences between parties such as Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat only express varying views about the details of how capitalism should be organised, with a basic agreement that it must be in the interests of the capitalist class. With a classless society, without states, without government, there will be no politics and no political parties in the current sense.

Capitalism

Meanwhile, while capitalism exists, we have politics and it is no cause for fun. For example it was a political decision to start the war in Iraq, in which countless thousands have died (a recent article in the medical magazine the Lancet put the number at 100,000; Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said it was “only” about 16,000, which to any politician makes it all right). It is through political decisions that capitalism’s burdens of poverty, which means its burdens of mental and physical ill health, its social ailments, its human alienation, are administered. Poverty is a matter of class; according to a recent report by the Office for National Statistics the share of national wealth of the poorest 50 percent of the British population declined from seven percent in 1996, just before Labour came to power, to five percent in 2002.  During the same period the portion of the national wealth owned by the top one percent increased from 20 percent to 23 percent. A survey in late 2003 found that the death rate of the poorest people are four times that of the richest. One informed opinion is that the biggest killer is social stress, with all that entails. Being poor means a greater chance of suffering a host of problems – like being ill, of being arrested for an offence, of a child being excluded from school.

Capitalism’s waste and destruction continue, whatever government exercises its political power in office. None of it is amusing and none of it is a subject of fun for politicians who think to demonstrate what they regard as their superiority by never having anything useful, or indeed relevant, to say.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Slags and Swamps (2014)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

To get on in what they see as their exclusive world a politician should popularise a word or phrase by which they can be readily identified and remembered – even if it turns out to work against them. Like Tony Blair and ‘education, education, education…’ Or David Cameron and ‘We are all in this together’… And Theresa May, when she was in opposition and usually relying on her flowery shoes to promote herself, telling the Tory conference that they had earned themselves the title of ‘The Nasty Party’ (although recently her Minister of State Lib Dem Norman Baker resigned because he had found that working for her was ‘like walking through mud’ – which may turn out to be his exclusive phrase). And with that same preoccupation with mud there has been the persistently striving Defence Secretary Michael Fallon uttering a warning about the British people being ‘swamped’ by an influx of immigrants which makes them feel that they are ‘. . . under siege with large numbers of migrant workers and people claiming benefits’.

Blunkett

These comments, just when Nigel Farage is grinning so boozily and hopefully on the side-lines, did not appeal to David Cameron. Naturally he had to step up to defend Fallon, if only because he had so recently promoted him: ‘It is right for politicians to raise concerns about immigration but we should always choose our language carefully’ he advised the Commons. Less heartening for Fallon would have been the support from one of Labour’s most spectacular ministerial failures: ‘I believe both Michael Fallon and I were right to speak out on the issue’ offered ex-Home Secretary David Blunkett in the Daily Mail, also suggesting that all UK citizens should be expected to be able to speak English and restricted to benefits based on what they have ‘contributed’ to the country. Whatever changes Blunkett has been through since he was relieved of the stress of ministerial life have not included any development of insight or socially therapeutic thinking.

Rottweiler

In spite of the risks that another speech from him may have stimulated more responses like Blunkett’s, Fallon did his best to apologise, confessing to Radio Five listeners that ‘I misspoke yesterday, I used words I wouldn’t normally have used’. He did not expand on his use of ‘normally’, which might have raised the matter of his reputation, which helped so much towards his promotion as ‘The Thinking Man’s Rottweiler’. And he made no comment on his use of the word ‘swamp’ with its connotations of a cruelly prolonged, widely destructive and epidemical disaster. Was it related to his background as an ardent ‘No Turning Back’ devotee of the Iron Lady (who herself in1978 gave voice to her thoughts about ‘…people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’)? Years later, as Thatcher was being ousted from Number Ten, Fallon called on her to try to convince her that ‘all was not lost’. At first he was turned away, told that she was too busy but when she knew he had called she had him brought back to make his obeisances. On the anniversary of that day, which is stubbornly celebrated by some of the areas laid waste by the harsher poverty under Thatcher governments, Fallon demonstrates his unchanging devotion to her memory by wearing a black tie.

Defence

Fallon was first elected in 1983, he lost that seat in 1992 but came back, for Sevenoaks in Kent, in 1997. He was soon embarked on a ministerial career, probably in recognition of his talents as a ‘fire-fighter’ to douse any smouldering rebels on the Tory benches. His big chance has been his promotion to his present job as Minister of Defence, after only two years in Business and Enterprise. In his time he has held a series of directorships one of which was in brokers Tullett Prebon, a major donor to the Tory Party and involved in the FSA investigation into what in the City is bashfully called malpractice such as the notorious LIBOR interest fixing operation. Another interest of Fallon has been Quality Care Homes whose comforting title overlays its reputation for paying its workers less than the proposed minimum wage and its low assessment on some matters by the Care Quality Commission.

Slag

For a couple of years leading up to Thatcher’s resignation Fallon was a Tory Whip, so that experienced Members had to learn how to handle him while aware that, as one of them put it, ‘…If he said that everything is going swimmingly’ he was actually saying ‘It’s a fucking disaster’. One example of what was on that Honourable Member’s mind was an incident soon after the Tory victory in 2010, when Cameron was strutting his stuff as the leader of a ‘female friendly’ government. It involved one Bryony Gordon, a journalist who had worked for the Daily Telegraph and whose material and style was represented by the title of one of her major autobiographical works The Wrong Knickers; A Decade Of Chaos. She was at a leaving party in a ‘grotty bar’ in Westminster when Fallon, who had been drinking at another party, arrived and told her that she was a ‘slag’. The uproar, inflamed by Gordon, was not appeased by Fallon’s minders assuring everyone that he had used the word ‘slattern’ – a distinction too fine to be of any help to the floundering minister. In another incident a couple of years later Fallon arrived at a Christmas party thrown by a wealthy Tory MP. He was an uninvited guest and had already been drinking. He quickly clamped himself to a young woman noticeable in a dramatic party dress. Again it was necessary for him to be extracted by a minder, anxious because the woman was employed by the Russian energy industry while Fallon was the Minister of State for Energy.

As they approach their final general election the Cameron government will intensify their campaign to re-write history by convincing us that they are in progress to cure the blundering chaos of the Labour government. This, they will argue, is due to their insightful policies and sublime personalities. Included in this will be Michael Fallon, now revealing himself in a ministry where his earliest predecessor Liam Fox slipped from a strong contender as a future leader into obscurity. The politics of capitalism will always be scattered with miserable, exposed failures.

Ivan

Instruction, instruction, instruction (1998)

From the August 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why has education become the centre of Labour reformist politics? The Labour government believes that in a free-trade world dominated by vast multinational corporations a well-skilled economy has a better chance of attracting investment and business. It is adapting the education system to this end.

The Labour Party swept to power last year on the back of the tedious and mindless repetition of simple meaningless slogans, designed to appeal to all and sundry as the obvious thing to do. Behaving in the way of all leaders and treating the people with obvious contempt. The Blair hammered home his point “Education, Education, Education”, even to the extent of going to Russia and inflicting it on the workers there. The question arises, however, what exactly does this pointless piece of redundant sloganising really mean? Even The Blair does not know, calling forth committees to advise him on what the “Third Way” really is. Perhaps he needs some instruction from socialists to let him know what he’s up to.

The history of education is a long and tortuous one, of different classes struggling to define the "goods” of society’s intellectual wealth and who should have access to them. The problem was twofold, what to teach people (within the parameters of training for social roles, inculcation of specific cultural values, and regulating and controlling behaviour) and how to teach them (the practical implementation of these values). A singular example of this can be seen in the late 19th century when vocational skills were added to the curriculum of some schools for working types. Our masters chose to call that “instruction” rather than “education”, so as to exclude from the hallowed halls of education anything so dirty as the practical ability to work.

The wanna-be masters in the Labour Party conspicuously fail to address the first point, what to teach, going around talking about education as a simple matter of deciding how to best teach children an obvious and unquestioned curriculum, without looking too closely into it. The rhetoric of the Labour government is about how to “allocate resources” more effectively, to achieve more efficiency, to improve standards” of teaching. In short, all their bluster is about how they are going to teach, and not what they are going to teach. Content stays quietly on the side lines.

Central state control

To achieve this efficiency”, the Labour government has begun to implement what has been called a “central planning” system for education. Their Education Bill contained a host of Henry VIII clauses (parts of a bill that give direct discretionary executive authority to a Minister), giving the Secretary of State an enormous degree of control over the education system, and more than any predecessor, in what had previously been mostly a system of co-operation between central government and local educators. OFSTED (inherited from the Tory years, like most of the Labour plans— the government is the government is the government) continues to terrorise its way through schools, its panoptic gaze set to frighten the teachers into “improving’ their “standards”, a terror backed up by “naming and shaming” and the whole rhetoric of “failing schools” and “incompetent teachers”.

School league tables are meant to indicate how well a school is “performing”, but in fact help to instil “market discipline” as schools compete for pupils (and therefore funding: this factor is also strongly felt in the further education sector where cutbacks, bullying management and a mad scramble for pupils is wracking those who work there). The encouraged relationship of parents to schools is that of the marketplace. with parents as consumers, entering into a contract with the school that is itself (if it opts out) a self-run business. Here, quietly, the values of the market have been adopted, but Labour would just call it being “pragmatic”, and attack any opposition as ideologues or dogmatists.

Alongside this come the “Education Action Zones”, locally based cooperation between businesses and Local Education Authorities and the schools themselves. This produced the response of Don’t Let Labour Privatise Our Schools” from the Trotskyists of the “Marxist Party”, as usual for such types, missing the point entirely. EAZs are not about private companies trying to make a profit from schools; indeed, these will try and pass their participation off as largess. EAZs will provide more funding, to supposedly help kick-start schools in deprived areas, and improve their “standards” of teaching.They will be allowed to change the length of terms (in Middlesbrough, for example, it is proposed to change from a three to a four term system, and thus lose the long, and “socially disruptive”, summer holiday, in favour of a more spread-out system). Schools will get extra staff, be freed from national pay agreements (so that they can apply “flexible” salaries and conditions) and the national curriculum (so that they can concentrate on Literacy and Numeracy skills—the three Rs by a different name).

The EAZs represent a way for our masters to assert a more direct control, by-passing any awkward elected and potentially Bolshy local authorities, not for their own immediate profit, but so that the education system remains secure and run well by their standards and interests.

The content of the lessons is also of interest. Blunkett has already allowed all schools to cut time set aside for History, Geography and Art in their class rooms, in favour of a literacy hour. Added to the provisions for EAZs, this could mean that humanities and other more “ephemeral” subjects suffer, turning schools into places that simply churn out literate and useful workers, but who aren’t trained to think for themselves. Given that the action zones will occur in poor areas, this policy will reproduce a division in social role: the children of professional and better-paid workers will have access to a cultural and intellectual store that will be denied to poorer children, thus maintaining and reproducing a certain division of labour for the marketplace.

Naturally, the inculcation of social values will not be ignored, Labour ministers are discussing “Lessons in Citizenship” to replace the blatantly failing religious elements of the system. It doesn’t take much insight to see that the aim of such lessons will be to get people to accept the status quo and not to criticise the system (having undergone such lessons myself at school, as well as the whole Catholic rigmarole, I can testify to this). Here again, Labour’s rhetoric assumes an unchallenged system of ideas that merely need implementation.

Market driven

To achieve their marketplace system, Labour have had to retain, and in some cases implement themselves, ways of measuring the schools—teachers assessed, children tested regularly—all of them under tremendous pressure to achieve good results and pass the benchmark. This sort of thing has been tried before, the revised Standard Code for Education of 1862 for the Three Rs tests. Of course the obvious happened, and teachers simply began to coach the children to pass the exam, without bothering about them being able to think for themselves or understand the principles involved.

The whole process is openly driven by the employers’ need for a transparent benchmark of skill. The “continuing education” or training that the Labourites trumpet amounts to being able to engage in National Vocational Qualifications, which is a boring, unfulfilling, and at times patronising experience, which does not help the people undergoing it, and serves only to frustrate and punish those on the welfare forced to do such courses.

The marketplace drive for correctly skilled workers can be discerned in Labour’s approach to higher education, with tuition fees and the end of the grant.The Tories throughout their term of office “oversubscribed” to the higher education system, wanting to placate their “middle class” (salaried working class) constituency by assuring them that their children could go on to get a degree, but they tried to do this without increasing the funding for the system significantly (and by the dodge of simply renaming Polytechnics Universities).Whilst this was electorally necessary for the Tories, it produced a system that was turning out more workers of a particular sort than the market could bear, It also produced concerns over the loss of an “academic elite”, and a general lowering of standards. Such concerns came, of course, from the employers.The Labour Party had to do something to save the system, and their choice was tuition fees.

Today I read in New Statesman some idiot claiming to be a socialist and saying that it was the proper socialist thing to do to introduce tuition fees and stop subsidising middle class children going to university. This is typical of the hypocritical way in which New Labour is dealing with this issue, behind a smokescreen of deceit. Their tuition fees are meant to reduce intake, to streamline it, so that it fits better with the market’s needs (makes one so glad to be a desired commodity). Last October, when the Bill was launched, the mouthpiece of New Labour, the ever-wheedling and lick-spittle Guardian, announced how businesses were considering offering “golden handshakes” to graduates with the skills they need, by paying off their debts for them, thus guaranteeing that unless you have money, you can only get a degree if your qualifications fit market requirements. As with schools, universities must reflect the needs of the division of labour within capitalist society.

This is yet another example, if one be needed, of the way in which the marketplace frustrates rather than promotes self-improvement for the vast majority of people. The market is incompatible with any equitable sharing of society’s wealth of knowledge and culture. As it stands, what is called education merely reflects the society in which it exists, divisive, demanding, pressurising, merely an alienating system, a vast factory, for turning out workers tuned to our masters’ requirements.

Pik Smeet

Greasy Pole: So that's it then (1997)

The Greasy Pole Column from the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

After the long campaign, the speeches, the manifestos and the voting we are under a new government. All over the country millions of people emerged from the polling stations on 1 May convinced that they had done something significant-like exercising their democratic rights, like deciding on how Britain will be run for the next few years, like choosing between two different policies about the best way of making us happier, freer, more prosperous . . .

Then it was back to business—business as usual, which was not surprising because all those eager, self-satisfied voters were actually taking part in a political charade, contributing to their own repression and exploitation. After the election nothing, except in the most trivial and insignificant way. will change. The problems which the big parties claimed to have solutions for, set out in their election programmes, will go on and on. If they are pressed, the politicians will explain their failure to keep their promises by reference to events outside their control—the perfidy of foreign governments, the obstinate greed of British workers, even perhaps some natural disaster.

Consider, for example, John Major's startling discovery that there are people in Britain who are underprivileged and who don't seem to be getting their share of all that wonderful prosperity which the Tory government swamped us in. This was a rerun of his "Brixton boy" theme—the honest lad from a simple background who understands, and agonises over, the plight of the more impoverished in society. It was all very well Major showing his sympathy in this way but this does not answer the point about what the Conservative Party has been doing since they came in in 1979, on the assurance that they could pretty well wipe out such problems. It doesn't tell us anything about what happened to Major’s talk, when he became Prime Minister over six years ago, about managing a kinder society, a country at ease with itself.

Dinosaurs
In 1979 the Tories told us that it only needed a few adjustments to society—like making the unions impotent, like privatising the railways, the mines and the rest, like denying state subsidies to ailing industries—to establish the kind of briskly efficient capitalism which would benefit us all. They had no reservations about this then: why should they have them now? And how much longer should we wait for them to get things right?

These questions can be answered partly by considering how the Labour Party have also made some discoveries. Not so long ago life for a Labour supporter was a lot simpler. On the one hand there was the Tory Party and the damage being done to the working class while they were in power. On the other hand there was the Labour Party; obviously their job was to undo the damage by following policies different from those of the Tories.

It was, as we say, simple except the Labour Party too made some discoveries and foremost among them was that the safest way to bid for power was to become as much like the Conservatives as possible. Of course this might upset a few stubborn dinosaurs in the party but they must either understand the necessity for the discoveries or join some other mob like Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party. If the dinosaurs got too restless and could not be extinguished there was always the option of the party making what is politely called a fudge.

One who once seemed to be a dinosaur is David Blunkett who, in the days when he roamed in Labour's primeval swamps, became famous as the leader of Sheffield City council who cut the local bus fares. In those days he was a hero of Labour's left—a man who was staunch in his principles—so there was rejoicing in the City of Steel when he got into parliament and moved steadily upwards through the ranks of shadow ministers.

Declarations
He seemed to be ideally suited, in left-wing Labour terms, for the part of Shadow Education Secretary because he left school without so much as an ‘O’ level and worked as a clerk at the Gas Board until, he took evening and day release classes and then went to university to study politics. So when he declared, to Labour's 1995 conference, his stolid faith in non-selective schooling he brought the house down:

   ". . .  watch my lips. No selection either by examination or interview under a Labour government."

But alas poor Blunkett, who had to discover that such dramatic declarations might not go down so well with voters in some key constituencies as with a bunch of disconnected Labour activists. Labour's manifesto put a different, more seductive line, saying they “ . . . will never force the abolition of good schools" (even if "good" means selective?) and that any changes in the admission policies of grammar schools (which are selective) will be decided by local parents.

If Labour—and Conservative—activists were embarrassed by this sort of thing how did they survive, with the knowledge that their parties were so close in their policies that at times the wording was almost identical like:

• We will raise spending on the NHS in real terms every year (Labour).
• We will, year by year, increase the real resources committed to the NHS (Tory).
• We must crack down on dishonesty in the benefit system (Labour).
• We will crack down on benefit cheats (Tory).

Labour suggested "parental responsibility orders" for the parents of young offenders: the Tories promised a "parental control order" to do roughly the same thing. Labour's "long-term objective” is "high and stable levels of employment": the Tories’ "priority is to create jobs”. Finally, Labour thinks "the British people are a great people” and the Tories say "Britain is admired the world over”.

Well they would say that wouldn’t they? They are hardly likely to conclude, looking at the sickness, the alienation, the homeless, the crime which characterises capitalism in this country, that the British people are anything but great and universally admired.They wouldn't say that because they rely on those same people to vote for them, ignoring all the evidence about their impotence covered by their cynical chicanery and ask again and again for the same again.

And that's what we have got.

Business as usual.

Ivan